Media bias is more unconscious than designed

If you're ignorant of certain perspectives your subtext will probably reflect surprise about them

A diet including lots of fresh vegetables is good for you. This is uncontroversial enough to stand as an assumed truth.

It would be surprising if some experts came along suggesting it wasn't.

So, if someone published a meta-analysis or a new paper that cast doubt on that norm it would be reported on the basis that something understood is being challenged.

You might then get a story that begins 'research appears to challenge the benefits of a diet including fresh vegetables'.

The salient phrase denoting the assumed truth here is 'the benefits'. If it wasn't an assumed truth the phrase would be 'the belief'.

'The benefits' signify that something has graduated from being claimed benefits or widely believed benefits.

You know the benefits of eating fresh vegetables? Well, here's someone saying that the benefits aren't real.

Stories like this point out up top that a quality of something which is assumed at present is suddenly in question.

That's the 'hook'. It's how you're trained to write, as a reporter. You want to spark the reader's curiosity and the way to do that is often to suggest that something out of the ordinary has happened.

News is partly defined as unexpected things, which is why the sun coming up this morning, or the government not resigning, or a large meteorite not destroying a town didn't make the news.

You will see this kind of unspoken assumption of status quo just about every time you look at news stories because it's partly how they work, structurally.

Blink and you might miss it (which makes it pernicious)

In 2016 Scientific American reported on a paper analysing levels of interpersonal trust in racially diverse areas with this intro:

'In 2007 the Harvard professor Robert Putnam published a paper that appeared to challenge the benefits of living in a racially diverse society.'

This intro only really works if it's a surprise that racial diversity may not be beneficial to a community.

It's written by someone who thinks that the benefits of racial diversity are understood (because its status is de facto truth).

I don't care to argue about whether racial diversity is good or not, because I don't know enough about it. You have conservative blogs (which this isn't) to consult for evidence and arguments that racial diversity is not  a net good. The salient point is that many ordinary and seemingly OK people don't agree that it is.

[We get into some apparent obfuscation and sophistry displayed in the rest of the article behind the paywall. The stuff where motivated reasoning kicks in and isn’t challenged. Can't pay, won't pay? It teases out how the article explains that you have to skirt around certain inconvenient data to reach a preferred conclusion about diversity]

These are the unconscious drivers of media bias.

People on the right are driven mad by legacy and corporate media bias of this kind and often believe that journalists are conspiring en masse every day to hide The Truth and produce 'fake news'.

It would actually be better if this were the case because you could surface evidence demonstrating a mass media plot to subvert reality and make a reasoned case for why you can't trust journalists.

But this kind of 'micro bias' (I'll call it) is probably just unconscious.

Important also to note that it isn't just views held by the cultural Right which are casually discounted by micro bias. I first noticed an obviously unconscious kind of bias in the BBC against the more radical Left Labour that emerged for a while to threaten the political status quo in the late teenies. Back then I called it #everydaybias and wrote about it in a Medium post 'BBC News: a story of #everydaybias'.

[Yes, back then I was still offering the standard issue leftishist liberal pablum with which I became intellectually and morally disenchanted, in case you actually read that link. I'm still cringing after reading it again six years later]

The journalists who display the kind of unconscious bias in question are not actively or awarely promoting anything. Their personal priors are just leaking out in their copy.

People on the right see it as a plot, but it's at least as much about ignorance, incuriosity and laziness in a certain class of media professional as it is about consciously promoting an agenda when it leaks out in news reporting (rather than opinion pieces, which people on the right too often lump in with ALL journalism).

Because many of the people who are driven most mad by this are among the least intellectually sophisticated they are stuck with saying that the media is lying all the time, when in fact the most professional and properly resourced media very rarely (if ever) lies. Richard Hanania's case for this persuades me.

Why the Media is Honest and Good

My broader frame on media bias works too, for understanding the significance of bias in general more clearly.

Sometimes, blink and you might miss the facts in an opinion-led news story

A recent story on France24 was headlined Race and racism take centre stage as Kamala Harris eyes White House prize.

Pitched as a news story (rather than a thinkpiece) it begins

"The racist onslaught began just hours after President Joe Biden withdrew from the White House race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in a Sunday shocker announcement"

It is clear that the reporter believes that race and racism are major issues in the US presidential election and is probably reporting in good faith on this, because it feels wrong to them that some people have questioned Kamala Harris's credentials to be the most powerful elected person on earth.

That there are people who don't think that being a black woman is relevant and therefore push back on the leftishly popular belief that her black womanness is important.

The belief that her identity really is important is assumed in this piece of news reporting, which reads like the kind of press handout that I'd produce if I worked for the Harris campaign.

It is skated past as fact that 'DEI' is a 'dog whistle' and "an acronym often deployed by conservatives to dismiss equality and inclusion initiatives" as if these are natural and obviously established goods, rather than approaches to finding the best quality candidates for roles that are contested in good faith by many people. Such as ordinary liberals who think merit is all that matters, many of whom also happen to be conservative liberals.

The reporter doubtless believes that they are explaining facts, rather than mounting a partisan argument. It has perhaps not occurred to them to reflect the concerns about Harris's credentials that exist on her own side.

So we are told that racism and misogyny are primary drivers in assessments of Harris's candidacy in such an emphatic way that it erases the boundary between reporting and opining.

For that reporter the identity characteristics of a POTUS candidate are obviously important.

A case can be made that identity does matter, with opinion pieces, podcast discussions and talk shows being the place to mount it. But this is positioned on France24 as a news story about facts on the ground in an election campaign.

Treated as a news story, rather than allowing the reporter's personal stance to colour the whole piece, it would have been written to say that Harris and her supporters have chosen to put 'race and racism centre stage' and that her opponents are pushing back on that. That is the story here.

It's an important distinction to maintain, for news to retain credibility as a recounting of facts. Failing to maintain that distinction represents a quality issue that drives me nuts as a distant observer, let alone the people who actively don't trust or like Kamala Harris and who will be casting a vote in November.

What about my priors here? How are they colouring this critique?

As it happens, I'll get a certain fuzzy feel in sympathy with women in general if Harris does make it to the White House because it seems ridiculous to me (a British subject, having had several women as Prime Minister at this point as an entirely normal political phenomenon) that the US has so far managed never to elect anyone with a vagina. But her genes, chromosomes and other identity characteristics are nonetheless arguably irrelevant to the domestic and foreign issues at hand in the US.

So I'll be pleased if there's a woman in the White House, of whatever heritage, because it seems overdue. But I'd prefer a lot less chatter about her black womanness, from all sides, because another of my priors is that identity is low down the list of most interesting and important qualities in a person.

The France24 editorial team clearly sees it differently. But even now I doubt very much that they sit around in their news meetings discussing how to promote Harris. In their minds I imagine they are simply telling it like it is. It's just their worldview.

This is the media approach to news that you get - ironically - through lack of diversity.

Back to that story in Scientific American. It seems to represent a similar problem, but more bothersome because of its status as 'scientific' journalism.

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