Which way do you lean?

Many ethical journalists try to eliminate bias from their stories. But how possible is that and can you end up deceiving yourself and your readers?

At News Decoder, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s journalism tip, News Decoder’s Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner explores the concept of bias in journalism.

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On November 26 dozens of articles written by News Decoder students will go to a panel of three judges as part of our twice-yearly storytelling competition. One of the criteria they will use to decide on the winners is this: Did the student report the story objectively, without bias? It is one of five criteria (another being total subjectivity on the part of each judge — sometimes a story is just a really great story).

Here is the question: How does one define bias? You’d think I’d be able to answer this question easily, since I’ve written whole articles on objectivity, which is commonly thought of as the absence of bias. Webster’s Dictionary defines bias as an inclination of temperament or outlook, or an instance of such prejudice.

Basically, you are for something or against something. A problem with trying to eliminate bias is often we don’t recognize when we lean more one way or another. If something is true it is true, right? How can truth be biased? But how many ridiculous arguments revolve around competing definitions of truth?

News Decoder correspondent Enock Wanderema is an experienced journalist but he’s currently studying behavioral science. Two things he’s been thinking about are what is known as availability bias and confirmation bias.

Availability bias is our tendency to rely on what we can remember. If we can remember it, it seems more important or more true. That leads to us raising importance stuff that recently happened since we remember it more easily.

With confirmation bias, we tend to search for, interpret and remember information that confirms what we already believe and we overlook anything that contradicts those beliefs.

“This happens automatically because constantly questioning everything we believe would be cognitively exhausting,” he wrote. “It means we can become trapped in false beliefs even when contradictory evidence accumulates and this matters enormously in contexts that are complex, novel, abstract or ideologically loaded; exactly the kinds of situations modern life presents constantly, but which were rare in ancestral environments.”

Bias in journalism

This becomes more problematic when we talk about journalists. “Journalists are the primary gatekeepers of information about complex issues people cannot directly experience but journalists are humans with the same biases,” Wanderema said.

These biases come into play with the stories reporters or news organizations choose to cover or not cover. They inadvertently rely on what they remember and are familiar with when deciding if something is important enough to cover and deciding the events and people to ignore.

This can lead to whole populations of people made invisible and important events ignored. If something has been happening and no one has covered it, how important can it be?

News Decoder Correspondent Paul Sochaczewski struggles with the idea of bias not only with news stories but in writing non-fiction biographies of people long dead. “All journalism has bias,” he wrote. “Point of view, word choice, selection of details, who to quote and accuracy of that quote and so on.”

In a 300-page book you can’t tell someone’s whole life story, but in summing up the life it is the biographer who decides what events are important and which ones paint the most accurate portrait of a person. It is the biographer who decides what to leave out.

A picture of reality

In some ways bias in storytelling is like the decisions a photographer makes in taking a photo. How many photos taken of me made me look awful? And yet there were a few that made me look better than I generally do. It had to do with the lighting available at the time and the photographer’s desire to make me look good.

The photographer isn’t making anything up but by adjusting where I stand, what’s around me, how my hair falls — and having the sun on my face the right way, she can change my look from an old hag who just woke up in a terrible mood to a beautiful person in the prime of her life.

News Decoder Correspondent Barry Moody says that you show bias when you lean towards one side or the other, either in the way you present the information or in giving more space to one side of an argument. Instead, you should present the facts and let your readers decide whether they have an opinion. “But don’t allow your own, either consciously or subconsciously to intrude,” he said.

Kirby Moss, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University Humboldt in California sees bias as the inability or lack of awareness to critique your own perspective.

That goes back to the notion of objectivity being the absence of bias. It is difficult to eliminate our own bias if we don’t recognize it in the first place.

Wanderema said that our biases are often mental shortcuts that allow us to process the too much information we are constantly bombarded with, most of it from media rather than from direct experience. We pay attention to some things but not others. We are skeptical of some facts but easily accept others.

“The result is a complex feedback loop where journalists’ biases shape coverage, coverage triggers audience biases, audience preferences reinforce journalistic practices and the entire system systematically distorts public understanding of reality,” Wanderema said. “Not through deliberate deception, but through the predictable operation of cognitive shortcuts that evolved to help humans navigate immediate physical environments.”

Personally, in addressing the thorny problem of bias, I rely on what I have long decided should be the first rule of journalism: honesty. When reporting, I try to lay out facts as I’ve discovered them, after making a genuine effort to explore different perspectives and sides. But as Moss explained, it is important that I explore my own perspective so that I can then fess up to readers my own biases and conclusions. This lets them know where I stand so that they can accept or reject the conclusions I’ve made.

In trying to eliminate our biases, we end up deceiving not just our readers, but ourselves.

Questions to consider:

1. What is confirmation bias?

2. In what ways can personal bias affect what stories you choose to tell?

3. In what ways do you think that you are biased?