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Media bias is a term used to describe a real or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media, in the selection of which events will be reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" usually refers to a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed, although its causes are both practical and theoretical.

Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative (Newton 1989). Since it is impossible to report everything, some bias is inevitable. Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries. Market forces that can result in a biased presentation include the ownership of the news source, the selection of staff, the preferences of an intended audience, or pressure from advertisers. Political affiliations arise from ideological positions of media owners and journalists. The space or air time available for reports, as well as deadlines needed to be met, can lead to incomplete and apparently biased stories.

Types of bias

  • Corporate bias, including advertising, coverage of political campaigns in such a way as to favor corporate interests, and the reporting of issues to favor the interests of the owners of the news media.

  • Class bias, including bias favoring one social class and bias ignoring social or class divisions.

  • Political bias, including bias in favor of or against a particular political party, candidate, or policy.

  • Religious bias, including bias in which one religious viewpoint is given preference over others.

  • Sensationalism, which is bias in favor of the exceptional over the ordinary. This includes the practice whereby exceptional news may be overemphasized, distorted or fabricated to boost commercial ratings; entertainment news is often subjected to sensationalism.

  • Exaggerated influence of minority views: Like sensationalism, this is a tendency to emphasize the new and the different over the status quo or existing consensus. This may be done in an attempt to be "fair", or to find something worth reporting.

Studies and theories of media bias

Media bias is studied at schools of journalism, university departments (including Media studies, Cultural studies and Peace studies) and by many independent watchdog groups from various parts of the political spectrum. In the United States, many of these studies focus on issues of a conservative/liberal balance in the media. Other focuses include international differences in reporting, as well as bias in reporting of particular issues such as economic class or environmental interests.

A major problem in studies is experimentor bias. Studies of US Media Bias studies show that A) Liberal experimentors tend to get results that say the media has a conservative bias, B) conservative experimentors get results indicating a liberal bias, and C) experimentors that do not identify themselves as either liberal or conservative do not detect any bias. This issue may arise from a tendency to accept a reporter's statement that matches one's own bias, even if no evidence is presented to support it. In contrast, statements that disagree with a personal bias tend to be remembered as distinctly biased, especially if evidence is not submitted. //www.fair.org/index.php?page=2447 //mediamatters.org/items/200505110005 The Glasgow Media Group carried out the Bad News Studies, a series of detailed analyses of television broadcasts (and later newspaper coverage) in the United Kingdom. (Eldridge, 2000). Published between 1976 and 1985, the Bad News Studies used content analysis, interviews and covert participant observation to conclude that news was biased against trade unions, blaming them for breaking wage negotiating guidelines and causing high inflation.

Martin Harrison's TV News: Whose Bias? (1985) criticised the methodology of the Glasgow Media Group, arguing that the GMG identified bias selectively, via their own preconceptions about what phrases qualify as biased descriptions. For example, the GMG sees the word "idle" to describe striking workers as pejorative, despite the word being used by strikers themselves. (Street 2001, p. 31).

Herman and Chomsky (1988) proposed a propaganda model hypothesizing systematic biases of U.S. media from structural economic causes. They hypothesize media ownership by corporations, funding from advertising, the use of official sources, efforts to discredit independent media ("flak"), and anti-communist ideology as the filters that bias news in favour of U.S. corporate interests.

There is also a growing economics literature on mass media bias, both on the theoretical and the empirical side. On the theoretical side the focus is on understanding to what extent the political positioning of mass media outlets is mainly driven by demand or supply factors.

According to Dan Sutter of the University of Oklahoma, a systematic liberal bias in the U.S. media could depend on the fact that owners and/or journalists typically lean to the left *.

Along the same lines, David Baron of Stanford GSB presents a game-theoretic model of mass media behaviour in which, given that the pool of journalists systematically leans towards the left or the right, mass media outlets maximise their profits by providing content that is biased in the same direction (*, the paper is now published on the Journal of Public Economics). They can do so, because it is cheaper to hire journalists that write stories which are consistent with their political position. Of course, this ignores the generally known and accepted principles of supply and demand which should cause media to attain a neutral balance because consumers would of course gravitate towards the media they agreed with, increasing profits of a more balanced media far more than the slight increase in costs to hire nuetral journalists.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer of Harvard University construct a behavioural model (*, now published on the American Economic Review), which is built around the assumption that readers and viewers hold beliefs that they would like to see confirmed by news providers. When news customers share common beliefs, profit-maximizing media outlets find it optimal to select and/or frame stories in order to pander to those beliefs. On the other hand, when beliefs are heterogenous, news providers differentiate their offer and segment the market, by providing news stories that are slanted towards the two extreme positions in the spectrum of beliefs.

Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of Chicago GSB present another demand-driven theory of mass media bias (*, published on the Journal of Political Economy). If readers and viewers have a priori views on the current state of affairs and are uncertain about the quality of the information about it being provided by media outlets, then the latter have an incentive to slant stories towards their customers' prior beliefs, in order to build and keep a reputation for high-quality journalism. The reason for this is that rational agents would tend to believe that pieces of information that go against their prior beliefs in fact originate from low-quality news providers.

The economics empirical literature on mass media bias mainly focuses on the United States.

Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyze the political orientation of endorsements by U.S. newspapers (see * for the working paper version; the paper is forthcoming on the Quarterly Journal of Political Science). They find an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, and in particular an incumbent one. There are also some changes in the average ideological slant of endorsements: while in the 40s and in the 50s there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, this advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades, to the extent that in the 90s the authors find a slight Democrats' lead in the average endorsement choice.

Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia (*, the paper is now published on the Quarterly Journal of Economics) use think tank quotes, in order to estimate the relative position of mass media outlets in the political spectrum. The idea is to trace out which think tanks are quoted by various mass media outlets within news stories, and to match these think tanks with the political position of members of the U.S. Congress who quote them in a non-negative way. Using this procedure, Groseclose and Milyo obtain the stark result that all sampled news providers -except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times- are located to the left of the average Congress member, i.e. there are signs of a liberal bias in the US news media. However, the news media also show a remarkable degree of centrism, just because all outlets but one are located –from an ideological point of view- between the average Democrat and average Republican in Congress.

John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute study the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 U.S. newspapers from 1991 to 2004, and from 1985 to 2004 for a subsample comprising the top 10 newspapers and the Associated Press (link to the abstract: *). For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyze how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines. The idea is to check whether newspapers display some kind of partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent President. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are between 9.6 and 14.7 percent fewer positive stories when the incumbent President is a Republican.

Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks at the editorial choices of the New York Times from 1946 to 1997 (link to the abstract: *). He finds that the Times displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. This is the case, because during presidential campaigns the Times systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare, but only when the incumbent president is a Republican. These topics are classified as Democratic ones, because Gallup polls show that on average U.S. citizens think that Democratic candidates would be better at handling problems related to them. According to Puglisi, in the post-1960 period the Times displays a more symmetric type of watchdog behaviour, just because during presidential campaigns it also gives more coverage to the typically Republican issue of Defense when the incumbent President is a Democrat, and less so when the incumbent is a Republican.

Efforts to correct bias

One technique used to avoid bias is the "point/counterpoint" or "round table," an adversarial format in which representatives of opposing views comment on an issue. This approach theoretically allows diverse views to appear in the media. However, the person organizing the report still has the responsibility to choose people who really represent the breadth of opinion, to ask them non-prejudicial questions, and to edit or arbitrate their comments fairly. When done carelessly, a point/counterpoint can be as unfair as a simple biased report, by suggesting that the "losing" side lost on its merits.

The Skeptics Society has accused reporters of misusing the point/counterpoint format by giving more time to superstitions than to their scientific rebuttals.

Using this format can also lead to accusations that the reporter has created a misleading appearance that viewpoints have equal validity (sometimes called "false balance"*). This may happen when a taboo exists around one of the viewpoints, or when one of the representatives habitually makes claims that are easily shown to be inaccurate.

One such allegation of misleading balance came from Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. He stated in an internal e-mail message that reporters should not "artificially hold href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/George W. Bush">George W. Bush and John Kerry 'equally' accountable" to the public interest, and that complaints from Bush supporters were an attempt to "get away with ... renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry." When the Drudge Report published this message*, many Bush supporters viewed it as "smoking gun" evidence that Halperin was using ABC to propagandize against Bush to Kerry's benefit, by interfering with reporters' attempts to avoid bias.

Another technique used to avoid bias is disclosure of affiliations that may be considered a possible conflict of interest. This is especially apparent when a news organization is reporting a story with some relevancy to the news organization itself or to its ownership individuals or conglomerate. Often times this disclosure is mandated by the laws or regulations pertaining to stocks and securities. Commentators on news stories involving stocks are often required to disclose any ownership interest in those corporations or in its competitors.

In rare cases, a news organization may dismiss or reassign staff members who appear biased. This approach was used in the Killian documents affair and after Peter Arnett's interview with the Iraqi press.

Finally, some countries have laws enforcing balance in state-owned media. Since 1991, the CBC and Radio Canada, its francophone counterpart, are governed by the Broadcasting Act. This act states, amongst other things:

the programming provided by the Canadian broadcasting system should (i) be varied and comprehensive, providing a balance of information, enlightenment and entertainment for men, women and children of all ages, interests and tastes, (...) (iv) provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern

Efforts to further existing bias

In 1993, Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox News channel in an effort to fight what he perceived to be a liberal bias in American news media. While a noble idea in theory, in practice most analysts have dismissed Fox's claim to be "fair and balanced"; for example, in 2004 the Pew Center found that 73% of Fox's programming included commentary and/or personal opinions from the host, three times as high as that of CNN and MSNBC. As Fox has several hosts with strong conservative-leaning Republican ties - Tony Snow, former host of Fox News Sunday, was recently appointed press secretary for the Bush administration, and John Gibson has published a book entitled The War on Christmas about how liberals are allegedly turning the holiday into a secular event - Fox regularly comes under fire for its heavy conservative slant. Sean Hannity is also known for equating conservatism with patriotism, as in his book, Let Freedom Ring.

Blogs and media bias

Weblogs, or blogs, have become over the past few years a formidable screening tool against inaccuracies published by the big medias. Astute readers will look at the blogger's collective rant to discover the multiple facets of a news item, many not mentioned in the original article. Paradoxically, it is the overt and clearly stated bias of blogs that makes them look more honest, and therefore attractive, to readers. As their readership increases, the big media channels cannot ignore their influence and are forced to adapt. With incidents like the "rathergate" affair, blogs have already started changing the face of the big networks. However, even though blogs keep a check on the mainstream media, relying on them as a primary news source is questionable since most have a strong liberal or conservative bias.

A short list of blogs specializing in exposing apparent media bias is given below.

History of bias in the mass media

Political bias has been a feature of the mass media since its birth with the invention of the printing press. The expense of early printing equipment restricted media production to a limited number of people. Historians have found that publishers often served the interests of large or powerful social groups.

John Milton's pamphlet Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, published in 1644, was one of the first publications advocating freedom of the press.

In the nineteenth century, journalists began to recognize the concept of unbiased reporting as an integral part of journalistic ethics. This coincided with the rise of journalism as a powerful social force. Even today, though, the most conscientiously objective journalists cannot avoid accusations of bias.

Like newspapers, the broadcast media (radio and television) have been used as a mechanism for propaganda from their earliest days, a tendency made more pronounced by the initial ownership of broadcast spectrum by national governments. Although a process of media deregulation has placed the majority of the western broadcast media in private hands, there still exists a strong government presence, or even monopoly, in the broadcast media of many countries across the globe. At the same time, the concentration of media in private hands, and frequently amongst a comparatively small number of individuals, has also lead to accusations of media bias.

There are many examples of accusations of bias being used as a political tool, sometimes resulting in government censorship.

In the United States, in 1798, congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which prohibited newspapers from publishing “false, scandalous, or malicious writing” against the government, including any public opposition to any law or presidential act. This act was in effect until 1801.

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln accused newspapers in the border states of bias in favor of the Southern cause, and ordered many newspapers closed.

Chancellor Adolf Hitler of Germany, in the years leading up to World War II, accused newspapers of Marxist bias, an accusation echoed by pro-German media in England and the United States.

Politicians who favored the United States entering World War II on the German side asserted that the international media were controlled by Jews, and that reports of German mistreatment of Jews were biased and without foundation. Hollywood was said to be a hotbed of Jewish bias, and films such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator were offered as proof.

In the 1980s, the government of South Africa accused newspapers of liberal bias and instituted government censorship. In 1989, the newspaper New Nation was closed by the government for three months for publishing anti-apartheid propaganda. Other newspapers were not closed, but were extensively censored. Some published the censored sections blacked out, to demonstrate the extent of government censorship.

In America during the Civil Rights movement, Southern politicians often accused the media of being biased against Southern Whites. Film and television media were accused of bias in favor of mixing of the races, and many television programs with racially mixed casts, such as I Spy and Star Trek, were not aired on Southern stations.

During the war between the United States and North Vietnam, Vice President Spiro Agnew accused newspapers of anti-American bias, and in a famous speech delivered in San Diego in 1970, called anti-war protesters “The nattering nabobs of negativism.”

It is very common for members of political movements to express the belief that media coverage is biased against their ideology, even on opposing sides in a conflict; for example, it is a common belief that Western media coverage is consistently biased against Israel, glossing over Palestinian crimes, but similarly it is also an equally common belief among supporters of the Palestinians that Western media coverage is consistently biased against the Palestinians, glossing over Israeli crimes.

Not all accusations of bias are political. Science writer Martin Gardner has accused the entertainment media of anti-science bias. He claimed that television programs such as The X-Files promote superstition. Carl Sagan made a similar claim about The Flintstones.

Role of language in media bias

Mass media, despite its ability to project worldwide, is limited in its cross-ethnic compatibility by one simple attribute -- language. Ethnicity, being largely developed by a divergence in geography, language, culture, genes and similarly, point of view, has the potential to be countered by a common source of information. Therefore, language, in the absence of translation, comprises a barrier to a worldwide community of debate and opinion, although it is also true that media within any given society may be split along class, political or regional lines. Furthermore, if the language is translated, the translator has room to shift a bias by choosing weighed words for translation.

Language may also be seen as a political factor in mass media, particularly in instances where a society is characterized by a large number of languages spoken by its populace. The choice of language of mass media may represent a bias towards the group most likely to speak that language, and can limit the public participation by those who do not speak the language. On the other hand, there have also been attempts to use a common-language mass media to reach out to a large, geographically dispersed population, such as in the use of Arabic language by news channel Al Jazeera.

Many media theorists concerned with language and media bias point towards the media of the United States, a large country where English is spoken by the vast majority of the population. Some theorists argue that the common language is not homogenizing; and that there still remain strong differences expressed within the mass media. This viewpoint asserts that moderate views are bolstered by drawing influences from the extremes of the political spectrum. In the United States, the national news therefore contributes to a sense of cohesion within the society, proceeding from a similarly informed population. According to this model, most views within society are freely expressed, and the mass media is accountable to the people and tends to reflect the spectrum of opinion.

Language may also be a more subtle form of bias. Use of a word with positive or negative connotations rather than a more neutral synonym can form in the audience's mind a biased picture. The best example of this bias is the use (or avoidance) of the word "terrorist". Most mainstream media will not use this word, opting instead for less accusatory synonyms. For example, a 2005 memo to the staff of the CBC states:

Rather than calling assailants "terrorists," we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we're sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun.
In a widely criticized episode, initial online BBC reports of the 7 July 2005 London bombings identified the perpetrators as terrorists, in contradiction to the BBC's internal policy. But by the next day, Tom Gross and many others noted that the online articles had been edited, replacing "terrorists" by "bombers".

Another example of language bias would be using the phrase "freedom fighters" instead of "insurgents." The former phrase creates an image of a noble struggle, while the latter is more neutral.

National and ethnic viewpoint

Many news organizations reflect or are perceived to reflect in some way the viewpoint of the geographic, ethnic, and national population that they primarily serve. Media within countries is sometimes seen as being sycophantic or unquestioning about the country's government.

Western media is often criticized in the rest of the world (including eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) as being pro-Western with regard to a variety of political, cultural and economic issues. Al Jazeera has been frequently criticized in the West about its coverage of Arab world issues.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wider Arab-Israeli issues are a particularly controversial area, and nearly all coverage of any kind generates accusation of bias from one or both sides. This topic is covered in a separate article.

Media Bias and Religion

Media bias towards religion is most obvious in countries where the media is controlled by the state, which is in turn dominated by a particular religion. In these instances, bias against other faiths can be explicit and virulent.

But even in countries with freedom of religion and a free press, the dominant religion exerts some amount of influence on the media. In nations where Christianity is the majority faith, reporters tend to focus on the activities of the Christian community, to the exclusion of other faiths. But the opposite may also occur, with media self-consciously avoiding reporting on any religious matters at all in order to avoid the appearance of favoring one faith over another, or presenting religious faith and phenomenon in a negative light.

This type of bias is often seen with reporting on new religious movements. It is often the case that the only view the public gets of a new religious movement, controversial group or purported cult is a negative and sensationalized report by the media. For example, most new or minority religious movements only receive media coverage when something sensational occurs, e.g. the mass suicide of a cult or illegal activities of a leader in the religious movement.

According to the Encyclopedia of Social Work (19th edition), the news media play an influential role in the general public's perception of cults. As reported in several studies, the media have depicted cults as problematic, controversial, and threatening from the beginning, tending to favor sensationalistic stories over balanced public debates (Beckford, 1985; Richardson, Best, & Bromley, 1991; Victor, 1993). It furthers the analysis that media reports on cults rely heavily on police officials and cult "experts" who portray cult activity as dangerous and destructive, and when divergent views are presented, they are often overshadowed by horrific stories of ritualistic torture, sexual abuse, mind control, etc. Furthermore, unfounded allegations, when proved untrue, receive little or no media attention.Robins, Susan P., Encyclopedia of Social Work, 19th Edition, National Association of Social Workers. Washington, DC. 1997 Update

Other influences

The apparent bias of media is not always specifically political in nature. The news media tend to appeal to a specific audience, which means that stories that affect a large number of people on a global scale often receive less coverage in some markets than local stories, such as a public school shootings, a celebrity wedding, a plane crash, or similarly glamorous or shocking stories. For example, the deaths of millions of people in an ethnic conflict in Africa might be afforded scant mention in American media, while the shooting of five people in a high school is analyzed in depth. The reason for this type of bias is a function of what the public wants to watch and/or what producers and publishers believe the public wants to watch.

Bias has also been claimed in instances referred to as conflict of interest, whereby the owners of media outlets have vested interests in other commercial enterprises or political parties. In such cases in the United States, the media outlet is required to disclose the conflict of interest.

Accusations that a source is biased, if accepted, may cause media consumers to distrust certain kinds of statements, and place added confidence on others. For example, if readers believe that a particular newspaper is conservatively biased, they may feel that a pro-liberal article in that paper must be true. Conversely, they may assume that a pro-conservative article in that paper is suspect. Because of the possibility of influencing the public in this way, accusations about which media outlets are biased, and how, have become a very common occurrence.

See also

Bibliography

References

External links

Blogs and Websites about media bias

Other

Criticism of journalism | Propaganda | Bias

Tendenziöse Berichterstattung | Sesgo mediático | הטיות פוליטיות בתקשורת

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Media bias".

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