Media bias


Media bias occurs when journalists and news producers show bias in how they report and cover news. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of 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.
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. Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries, for example China, North Korea, Syria and Myanmar. Politics and media bias may interact with each other; the media has the ability to influence politicians, and politicians may have the power to influence the media. This can change the distribution of power in society. Market forces may also cause bias. Examples include bias introduced by the ownership of media, including a concentration of media ownership, the subjective selection of staff, or the perceived preferences of an intended audience.
Assessing possible bias is one aspect of media literacy, which is studied at schools of journalism, university departments. Other focuses beyond political bias include international differences in reporting, as well as bias in reporting of particular issues such as economic class or environmental interests. Academic findings around bias can also differ significantly from public discourse and understanding of the term.

Types

In the 2017 Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, S. Robert Lichter described how in academic circles, media bias is more of a hypothesis to explain various patterns in news coverage than any fully-elaborated theory, and that a variety of potentially overlapping types of bias have been proposed that remain widely debated.
Various proposed hypotheses of media bias have included:
  • Advertising bias, when stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers.
  • Anti-science bias, when stories promote superstition or other non-scientific ideas.
  • Big news bias: when the distribution of events is asymmetric, it can lead to bias if the news focus on large events. For example, when progress is characterized by many incremental improvements with few yet larger setbacks, the news may focus on the latter and draw a negative image of the world.
  • Concision bias, a tendency to report views that can be summarized succinctly, crowding out more unconventional views that take time to explain.
  • Content bias, differential treatment of the parties in political conflicts, where biased news presents only one side of the conflict.
  • Corporate bias, when stories are selected or slanted to please corporate owners of media.
  • Coverage bias when media choose to report only negative news about one party or ideology
  • Decision-making bias, means that the motivation, frame of mind, or beliefs of the journalists will have an impact on their writing. It is generally pejorative.
  • Demand-driven bias.
  • Demographic bias, where factors such as gender, race, and social and economic status influence reporting and can be a factor in different coverage of various demographic groups.
  • Distortion bias, when the fact or reality is distorted or fabricated in the news.
  • Episodic framing of television, for example, can lead people to ascribe blame to individuals instead of society, in contrast to thematic framing that leads people to look more at societal causes.
  • False balance and false equivalence occur when an issue is presented as having equally-compelling reasons on both sides, despite disproportionate amounts of evidence favoring one.
  • False timeliness, implying that an event is a new event, and thus deriving notability, without addressing past events of the same kind.
  • Gatekeeping bias, when stories are selected or deselected, sometimes on ideological grounds. It is sometimes also referred to as agenda bias, when the focus is on political actors and whether they are covered based on their preferred policy issues.
  • Mainstream bias, a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone. This type of bias can result in the homogenization of information, diminishing diversity in media content and negatively impacting both media consumption and the overall user experience.
  • Negativity bias, a tendency to show negative events and portray politics as less of a debate on policy and more of a zero-sum struggle for power. Excessive criticism or negativity can lead to cynicism and disengagement from politics.
  • Normalcy bias, a bias to represent the abnormal as ordinary
  • Partisan bias, a tendency to report to serve particular political party leaning.
  • Sensationalism, bias in favor of the exceptional over the ordinary, giving the impression that rare events, such as airplane crashes, are more common than common events, such as automobile crashes. "Hierarchy of death" and "missing white woman syndrome" are examples of this phenomenon.
  • Speculative content, when stories focus not on what has occurred, but primarily on what might occur, using words like "could", "might", or "what if", without labeling the article as analysis or opinion.
  • Statement bias, when media coverage is slanted towards or against particular actors or issues.
  • Structural bias, when an actor or issue receives more or less favorable coverage as a result of newsworthiness and media routines, not as the result of ideological decisions.
  • Supply-driven bias
  • Tuchman's Law suggests how people overestimate the risk from dangers that are disproportionately discussed in media.
  • Ventriloquism, when experts or witnesses are quoted in a way that intentionally voices the author's own opinion.
An ongoing and unpublished research project named "The Media Bias Taxonomy" is attempting to assess the various definitions and meanings of media bias. While still ongoing, it attempts to summarize the domain as the distinct subcategories linguistic bias, text-level context bias, reporting-level context bias, cognitive biases, and related concepts like framing effects, hate speech, sentiment analysis, and group biases. The authors emphasize the complex nature of detecting and mitigating bias across different media content and contexts.

History

's 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing was one of the first publications advocating freedom of the press.
In the 19th 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, the most conscientiously objective journalists cannot avoid accusations of bias.
Like newspapers, the broadcast media 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 ownership in private hands, and frequently amongst a comparatively small number of individuals, has also led 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.
  • Antisemitic politicians who favored the United States entering World War II on the Nazi 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 accused of Jewish bias, and films such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator were offered as alleged proof.
  • In the US during the labor union movement and the civil rights movement, newspapers supporting liberal social reform were accused by conservative newspapers of communist bias. 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."
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. In contrast, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funded by businesses, accuses the media of being biased in favor of science and against business interests, and of credulously reporting science that shows that greenhouse gasses cause global warming.

Structural (non-ideological) biases

While most accusations of bias tend to revolve around ideological disagreements, other forms of bias are cast as structural in nature. There is little agreement on how they operate or originate but some involve economics, government policies, norms, and the individual creating the news. Some examples, according to Cline include commercial bias, temporal bias, visual bias, bad news bias, narrative bias, status quo bias, fairness bias, expediency bias, class bias and glory bias.
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. This literature was surveyed by Andrea Prat of Columbia University and David Stromberg of Stockholm University in 2013.