Reporter bias

Reporters and the
stories they tell

Reporters are trained to keep their opinions to themselves, but they still must make choices about the questions they ask and the people they interview.
And once they have gathered facts, they must decide how to arrange them into a story. Facts alone don’t help us – we need context to understand how the facts relate to one another and to judge which facts are more important than others.

We get that context through storytelling. Storytelling also makes information easier for us to absorb. The problem is that stories can be told different ways and each may emphasis a different set of facts. There is no way to tell a story that puts facts in context without adopting a point of view.

Researchers Patti M. Valkenburg, Holli A. Semetko and Claes H. DeVreese writing in the journal Communication Research in 1999, identified four basic ways a story can be told:

• By emphasizing conflict between parties or individuals.
• By focusing on an individual as an example or by emphasizing emotions.
• By attributing responsibility, crediting or blaming certain political institutions or individuals.
• By focusing on the economic consequences for the audience.

A story on federal funding of college loans could focus on the battle between Democrats and Republicans over legislation or on how passage or defeat of the bill will affect individual students. Both approaches are valid, but each would emphasize a different set of facts.

As news consumers, we deal with reporter bias by understanding the standards and ethics of journalism and determining whether the reporter has lived up to his or her professional responsibilities. If not, we should look for other sources of information.

If the reporter has succeeded in meeting the obligation, then it’s up to us to use the Four Questions that help us get to the facts we need to make our own decisions about what is important.

Not every story will perfectly match our needs, but if reporters adhere to the standards and ethics of their profession, we’ll still get the information we need regardless of the choices they must make to bring us the news.