EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: Four Forms of Media Bias

Understanding media bias is essential for a healthy media diet

Here at MinistryWatch, we constantly consume all kinds of media. We are constantly looking for stories, and we are constantly looking at how other media outlets handle the stories we cover. We ask: How can we add value to a story? Is this a story that fits our mission? Should we even cover this story at all?

Answering these questions is not always easy, but asking them and struggling with the answers have made me a better journalist and a better reader and viewer of other people’s work. In the process of asking these questions (and others, which I will highlight below), I have developed some thoughts about media bias that have been helpful to me and might be helpful to you, too. I have identified four forms of media bias – along with questions to help you avoid being seduced by them.

Framing

Look through the lens of a microscope or telescope, and you will immediately discover that you can see certain things more clearly. But you will also discover that the greater the power of the instrument, the more is left out.  What is inside the field of view, or the frame, is magnified, but the greater the magnification, the more is lost to your view.

All stories exist within a certain frame. We rarely, or never, get the “whole story” from a single news article or broadcast. What the journalist puts in a story or leaves out of a story can have a profound impact on the story. Even if all the facts in a story are accurate, stories with a limited frame can still be false.

• Therefore, always ask: What is left out of this story?

 

Limited or Altered Perspective

A journalist can also bias a story by intentionally or unintentionally limiting the number voices and perspectives in a story. Even if both sides of a controversy are equally represented, one side might have an articulate spokesperson, and the other side…well, not so much. I call this practice “nut picking.” It’s the practice of finding a “nut” to represent the point of view you want to undermine. Journalists rarely do this intentionally. That would be unethical. But journalists often have limited contacts, and they tend to call the the person with the biggest platform, the biggest mouth. Those people are also often the most shrill, the least reasonable, representatives of a point of view

• Therefore, always ask: Is there another way of looking at this issue, this person, or this situation?

Appropriation of Language or Images.

My friend John Stonestreet often says that in post-modern America, many of us use the same vocabulary, but we have different dictionaries. Words like “love” and “freedom” and “marriage” are used in ways that would have been unintelligible or incoherent as recently as a decade ago.

Take, for example, the expression made popular by the gay rights movement: “Love Is Love.” It is not hard to demonstrate that this expression is false. My love for my wife is different from my love for the Atlanta Braves or vanilla ice cream. Not all loves are the same. That’s one of the reasons C.S. Lewis wrote his famous book The Four Loves.

But too often we accept such expressions as “Love Is Love” uncritically, without examining the words themselves or their underlying assumptions. In so doing, we come to accept as true things that are verifiably false.

• Therefore, always ask: “What do you mean by that?”

Choice of Medium/Appropriateness of Medium

One of the most common mistakes Christians when it comes to media is to believe it can do what it can’t. We have come to believe that what happens on social media is as important and impactful as what happens around our dinner tables and in our pulpits. It is not.

Media expert Neil Postman (whose book Amusing Ourselves To Death is a classic) used the example of smoke signals to make the point that all media have inherent capabilities and limitations. He wrote that smoke signals might indicate my presence, or even my willingness to communicate. But smoke signals are simply not adequate for discussions of poetry, philosophy, theology, or a host of other topics. Using the wrong medium damages or distorts a message. Fellow media ecologist Marshall McLuhan famously said that when you change the medium, you necessarily change the message.

Postman wrote that sometimes the problem is not that the medium is too primitive, but that it is too advanced. Images on television move so fast that we are not able to judge whether the images are giving us a true or complete story. But because “seeing is believing,” we tend to accept what we are being fed. This posture puts far too much control in the hands of others.

• Therefore, always ask: Is this situation as simple (or as complex) as this story wants me to believe?

The World Needs Journalists

I’m a big believer in the power of journalism. Far too many of our government, religious, and civic institutions have the ability or willingness to police themselves. Journalism can play that vital role. But who holds journalists accountable? Often, it’s their readers and viewers. We must become discerning consumers of journalism and other media output.

If we do not develop this kind of media savvy, we will get the government, the church, the society, and the world we deserve.