One reporter's notebook
Are news media biased?
Somehow or other the question of media bias just keeps coming around: Are media biased?
The answer from the academic community is, believe it or not, no and yes and sort of and kind of.
A recent article in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media suggests that despite public perceptions to the contrary, there have been no consistent selection of stories or ideological stances in media over time.
Washington State University professor Tien-Tsung Lee writes:
"It is possible to identify liberal or pro-Democratic treatments in the news. Finding incidents supporting the opposite is not difficult either. However, systematic research has found no consistent partisan or ideological favoritism in news content despite frequent complaints of biases."
Professor Lee argues that people believe media are biased in large part because most people talk about how biased they are.
One of the most significant arguments about media bias was made by Dartmouth researcher Jim Kupyers, who has argued that media consistently frame controversial issues such as homosexuality and AIDS in a more liberal direction. His critique is a powerful one.
Yet, just as powerfully, Paul Waldman and Kathleen Hall Jamieson make a compelling case that media framed the stories of 9-11 and the election of George W. Bush in a way that helped conservatives and Bush. One reviewer suggested that in each case the news media left important questions unanswered during the Bush rise to power, critically influencing the outcome of national events.
Others have criticized the press for a bias not so much in a liberal/conservative direction but in a direction that favors institutional voices -- people in government or large corporations -- rather than outsiders. This sort of approach reinforces power structures rather than allowing for more diverse voices.
Oddly, all of those arguments might well be right.
In the end, the point about media bias is that it is open to interpretation. What is media? What is bias? How do you define these things in your research and your writing? What methods do you use to study the bias?
Is the press, as Spiro Agnew seemed to imply, an "effete corps of impudent snobs?" Or are the media a collection of people only in the pockets of big business and American hegemony, as suggested by many on the political left?
For me, I think the discussion is important to have. It means people believe the press can be important in political dialogue and truthful. You don't hear tirades about how biased those plumbers are.
Still, to pretend the media should be unbiased is itself a question that comes from a political point of view. It is an ideological argument to suggest that media should be unbiased. This ideology was laid out around the turn of the 20th century through the 1920s. It is a product of the progressive movement -- from the establishment of journalism schools to Walter Lippmann's classic work, Public Opinion. We learn from these ideals that media should be outside the mainstream -- objective commentators, experts, if you will.
To me, then, to say the press should be unbiased is a liberal argument. Lippmann wrote Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, after all and the progressive movement laid out the undergirdings of much of modern liberalism.
Hence, a media that sets out to be objective is, by definition, liberally biased. You see how much more comfortable Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity seem with making arguments rather than just reporting as many journalists do? I suspect that this is, in part, the ideology that helps that.
So, to me, the argument of press bias, such as it is, is really the wrong question. The better question for today is, perhaps, should they really try not to be biased anyway?
Of course, my views should not be construed to represent anything other than my own views. They are NOT necessarily the views of my department, my university or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring institution of my university.