Part One: All the news that fits your bias

The New York Times masthead proudly proclaims “All the news that’s fit to print.” Some call it the newspaper of record, the official version of what’s happening, and to some extent that’s true. Some call it the home of “fake news.” I dislike the later term, only because it seems to have become shorthand for “news I don’t like.” Several friends have asked me my views about media bias. The Onion captures it well:

As I’ve said many times, everyone has bias. Bias is simply the accumulated opinion of your experiences. It’s what makes you, you. Media personalities like to claim they are unbiased, but of course they aren’t. A day does not pass that I could not find three examples of biased coverage in the news sections of the major media sources.

What does media bias look like? Much of it is subtle, shaded by determining what is news and what is deemed not news. One example:

Two marches happened in Washington DC in January: the Women’s March (January 18th) and the Annual March for Life (January 24th). Both gathered “tens of thousands” but local traffic reports confirmed the second was somewhat larger. The Times had one news report on the March for Life, one on the Women’s March. Under normal circumstances, neither of these events may be news. In this case, the President spoke at the March for Life, the first to do so (and a major change). One march had a precedent-shattering speech, which several Times opinion writers commented on; absolutely nothing of news importance happened at the other march. This even but unequal coverage represents an improvement: almost every year since 1974, generally, the only coverage the March for Life gets is arguments over the crowd size.

Earth-shattering? Hardly. I chose this example because it’s one I have been following for decades with consistent results. The media usually covers larger marches, but somehow neglects this one even when the total surpassed half a million marchers. In this case, the media determines that the views of one side aren’t newsworthy–or as newsworthy–as the other side: bias. A worse type of bias is only telling one side of a story. Try these on:

• On Saturday, March 14th, ABC’s Weekend News led with a story of chaos at US airports, as Americans fled back to the States on the eve of the President’s just announced travel ban from Europe. I was deeply interested, as I had a pending flight stateside. They repeated the story, with the same videos and images, on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Now it’s not unusual for networks to rerun stories from the weekend, as their viewership on those days is different and much lower. And the chaos was certainly newsworthy on Saturday. Except, it wasn’t newsworthy on Tuesday, or Monday, or even Sunday. Because the ICE and CBP personnel at the airports adjusted and eliminated the lines . . . before Sunday morning! In this case, the Times led its Sunday edition thusly “After a night of chaos at some of the nation’s busiest airports on Saturday, officials scrambled on Sunday, with some apparent success, to reduce lines . . .” ABC went days and days and never reported that things were fixed. How come?
• No doubt you heard about the April 15th coronavirus outbreak at the meat packing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. When the national media caught the scent, they descended on the story with a vengeance: The Times cited it as the #1 coronavirus hot spot in the nation, and lamented the poor immigrants (some war refugees) who were about to lose their lives or jobs. Other media called out Smithfield Foods for endangering its workers, and ridiculed South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for resisting stay at home orders for her state. This much of the story was well covered. There was palpable glee by some that the rubes were finally getting their just desserts. What happened? Over eight hundred employees were infected, most asymptomatic. Two died. The county reported under two thousand cases and eleven deaths linked to the plant. Sioux Falls hospitals weren’t stressed. The President declared the industry vital and the employees are cautiously getting back to work with new policies. You can only find local news coverage of this part of the story.

Another bias is how much attention the media pays to a subject and why. As in:

Are you embarrassed by the President’s hawking of various treatments or cures for the coronavirus? #Metoo. Even with all the disclaimers he makes, he shouldn’t be highlighting anything that hasn’t come out of a reliable, properly conducted and peer-reviewed study. Get this! Have you heard about the positive effects of Remdesivir? The problems with Hydroxychloroquine? Clinical use of HIV/AIDs drugs? #Metoo! And all these results were initially covered extensively in national media despite being preliminary: not final, not peer-reviewed. Even the President’s ludacris observation about UV light and disinfectant: how many of you saw that press conference live (I did)? How many of you saw the clip during the entire week when the media continuously covered it? Now riddle me this: if the point is it’s dangerous for the President to say such things (because people might do something stupid), who has given more people the opportunity to do something stupid? In this case, the need to ridicule the President (however deserved) outweighed the life-and-death calculation the media claimed as the reason for the coverage.

And of course there is sensationalism:

As the US and nearly every other country on the planet begins to reopen, we’re starting to see stories like this: why we are heading into trouble reopening. This was a Times opinion piece, but it got picked up by various news sites and networks. Look at the key chart:

The point is clear: the decline in CoVid19 cases is illusory, driven by a decline in several major metropolitan areas. Now look at this chart:

During the same time period (March-May) the US went from almost no tests to over eight million tests total. And what happens, the more you test? The number of confirmed cases goes . . . up. The original opinion made no reference to it, but that’s ok, an opinion piece is trying to convince you. It’s like a lawyer’s summary, not a judge’s ruling. But then several news media outlets reprinted the chart, and made no mention of the testing issue. I did see one article where an expert commented that ‘tests had greatly increased, but that wasn’t the reason for the increase in confirmed cases.’ Now I’m willing to follow experts, but I would an explanation based on some multivariate analysis, a little less “because I said so.”

Sensationalism bias is sometimes called “if it bleeds it leads,” meaning bad news gets the headline. Some might see several of these examples as simple sensationalism. But when was the last time eleven deaths over the course of a week in South Dakota elicited front page NYT and major television network coverage? Heck, a tornado killing twice that in an hour would merit 30 seconds or a weather section article.

I have little problem with bias or partisanship in editorial or opinion pieces, (except when they then get cited by the straight news side). Television networks have news and entertainment departments, and people who get them confused have nobody but themselves to blame (if you get news from Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity, good luck!). No, of course I don’t think Fox News is unbiased, either. Fox was explicitly created to provide a different bias.

Some media do better at times: look at the NYT lead on the airport chaos story: solid work! PBS NewsHour generally only displays the “what we cover” bias, so kudos to them, too. All that said, if you don’t think the media is biased, if you’re not taking all your media reporting with a big bag of salt, you’re too gullible! The key is to access multiple media sources and to know and account for their biases . . . not to believe they’re unbiased.

Coming next, an extra-special bonus: something I stumbled across while researching media bias! Stay tuned!