Title: Understanding bias - American Press Institute
Headings: Understanding bias
Understanding bias
Content: Understanding bias - American Press Institute
Understanding bias
For a time, “bias” was the term of choice to describe anything people hated about journalism, whether the power and influence of corporate news organizations to the choices reporters made in writing individual stories. In 2001, in fact, a book about media unfairness entitled “Bias” was number one on the New York Times bestseller list. In recent years the public seems to have adopted a more nuanced view of bias. Perhaps this is because many critics have found their voice online – where studies confirm that half the blogs contain just the author’s opinion – or that one-sidedness has become a successful business model, as Fox News Channel and MSNBC have demonstrated. Journalists, nevertheless, often feel compelled to try to prove that they are “unbiased.” But what if they took a different approach? What if journalists acknowledged that bias does exist, that it is built into the choices they make when deciding what to leave in and what to leave out? That bias is embedded in the culture and language of the society on which the journalist reports? And that “news judgment” does reflect the journalist’s background as well as the news organization’s mission and business model? What if the journalist said, in other words, that bias may not always be a bad thing?