Bias in the news
Bias in the process
Whether we get our news from newspapers, television, radio, the Internet or any other source, it usually comes to us in the form of a story.
But to tell a story, we have to put the facts in some context and that can’t be done without diverting our attention from other ways of understanding those facts.
Context is important because it helps us put the facts in perspective, but it’s important for us to realize that facts presented in one context can have an entirely different meaning when explained in a different way.
We’ll demonstrate this using a real world example from Orange Beach, Alabama. The facts are that a developer wants to build a hotel and convention center in the city and is asking for a tax abatement to assist with the project.
Explained this plainly, the facts aren’t very interesting or very informative. Few people would buy a newspaper or watch a television news broadcast if the news were laid out in such a barren fashion.
Mobile Press-Register In a unanimous vote, the City Council tonight approved the basic terms of a multimillion-dollar tax abatement package that developer K.C. Chiang said will enable him and his partners to build a 500-room Gulf-front hotel and convention center. Better than a handshake, but far from a guarantee, the 12-page letter of intent spells out the tax concessions that Orange Beach is willing to offer, as well as what it expects of the developers in return. City leaders said Tuesday's vote essentially allows Chiang to tell his lenders that Orange Beach is "serious" about doing business and green-lights lawyers for both sides to start drafting a voluminous development agreement between the parties. WKRG Business could be better at the Dippin' Dots ice cream shop in Orange Beach. "We're still trying to recover from Hurricane Ivan," says owner Carmie Carr. Carr says a new luxury resort that could be built across the street would be a gold mine of economic activity. "That's really exciting because that could increase sales year-round for us here. Most of us either go to skeleton hours and totally shut down in the winter months, but if we have a convention center that's bringing in business, that's great for us." A local developer wants to build a nine-acre, four-state hotel and convention center near Gulf State Park. The $170 million beachfront complex would have a bowling alley, dinner theatre, two hotels and a state-of-the-art conference center. City leaders say the Winfield would rival the Beau Rivage as the Gulf Coast's premier properties and would create more than a thousand new jobs. |
To the right are two stories. One was produced by the local newspaper and the other by a local television station. While the stories are about the same topic, the reporters took much different approaches.
The Mobile Press-Register gives us a fairly straight-forward view of the project, but it emphasizes the tax abatement, an issue that could interest taxpayers. We get a few more facts such as the size of the hotel, but it doesn’t provide much more information, at least in the portion of the story we’re presenting here. But the reporter is doing us a favor by adding context, telling us that the deal is tentative and that the reader should be alert for future developments.
The next version comes from a local television station. The facts look much different in this report. Now we have to wonder if this new project is really a boost for local businesses and might be a great opportunity for the area with lots of new jobs.
But what about that tax abatement? We don’t see anything about that in the television report.
In both cases, the reporters have done their jobs, even though each one seems to see the project differently. The newspaper reporter told the story in a fairly straight-forward way while the television reporter focused on how the project might affect nearby business owners.
Stories about people are more easily told on television than strictly fact-based news. That's because video is a necessary part of telling a story and facts don't make very good pictures. Telling the story through people allows viewers to meet new people, see how they live and visualize how the story may affect individuals.
This is not to say that print reporting is superior to the work done by television, radio or Internet journalists. It's not, but it does illustrate one of the main points of news consumerism – most of the bias in the news results from the process of gathering and presenting the news.
People don't want to read lists of facts, nor do they want to watch someone looking into a camera reading information to them. We want our news, but we want to be entertained as well. We also want journalists' help in understanding the importance of the facts they have gathered.
That desire for understanding and changes in the competitive landscape of the media business have led us to new information providers: bloggers or personalities who comment on news that has been reported elsewhere. These individuals aren't acting as journalists, but they are part of the process of how we meet our information needs.
But as long as we know how to separate fact from context, it doesn’t matter whether the bias is a result of the process of a journalist telling a story or blantant opinion-mongering by someone intent on influencing our opinion, we can pull out the core information we need and make our own decisions about what facts are important. [Read more]