Disclaimer: The content in this document has been taken from various sources from the internet by the students. This was a part of their assignment during the class.
Neutrality and Bias in
Media
As a society, we consume a lot of different
media. The global consumer spends over 7.5 hours a day with media on average.
We rely on it as a news source and as cultural entertainment. We tend to assume
that whatsoever we are consuming is factually correct and is unbiased. However,
this assumption isn’t accurate, as media bias is rampant across all of the
three main media channels: broadcasting, publishing, and most definitely the
internet.
WHAT IS BIAS?
The descriptive accounts of the media industry
(Mencken 1975, Goldberg 2002), as well as journalism textbooks (Jamieson
and Campbell 2002), recognize that media outlets do not just report plain
facts but sometimes biased facts as well.
Psychology Today defines bias as “a tendency, inclination, or prejudice toward or against
something or someone,” a “cognitive shortcut.” We all have this inclination to
favor a particular side of the story. One may do it consciously or
subconsciously.
BIAS IN JOURNALISM
In journalism, bias means presenting
information that supports or aggravates only one point of view. It includes
manipulating information so that the intended point comes across to the
audience. The direction in which one
leans can be influenced by factors such as their background, culture, and
personal experiences.
For journalists, bias plays a role in nearly
every aspect of story coverage, whether we acknowledge it or not. Bias
influences the stories journalists choose to cover; the sources they choose to interview
or include - or exclude; the words chosen to tell a story; the chosen visuals;
the time and space allotted; and the placement of the story on the page, on the
website, or in the newscast.
Being journalistic, in part, means
acknowledging and working against our own unique biases. If one only talks to
official sources about stories impacting people in the community, then they
have allowed unconscious bias to lead to a blind spot in reporting. They need to
do the work of seeking out community members and organizations so that their
voices are also heard. If reporters only talk to people who agree with them
about a certain issue, or who have a similar background to them, then they are
surely missing important other perspectives and stories.
In most countries, media bias is thought to
either lean to the left or right, meaning it either favors liberal or
conservative politics. In some countries, media bias can go so far as to
completely reflect the ideals of the governing body, for example, in North Korea.
In cases such as this, media bias essentially becomes propaganda.
TYPES OF BIAS
1. Spin: This is a type of media bias
where the journalist strays away from objective fact and instead puts a certain
spin on a story that dramatizes it out of context.
2. Bias by omission: If a media outlet
chooses not to write certain stories, or they leave out relevant information or
perspectives on purpose, this is bias by omission.
3. Unsubstantiated Claims: This is when
the journalist makes claims without using data or evidence to prove their
point; this can often be seen in article headlines.
4. Opinions presented as fact. This is
when journalists suggest that subjective statements are factual, or present
their opinions, assumptions or beliefs as objective.
5. Sensationalism. A tactic often used
by tabloid journalists, sensationalism is when information is presented in a
shocking or over-dramatic way to lure in readers. Also known as click-bait.
6. Slant. When journalists only tell
part of a story and try to play up one particular angle, this is known as the
slant.
7. Ad hominem. This is when journalists
make a personal attack against an individual rather than addressing their
position in the argument or issue at hand.
8. Mind reading. Sometimes, journalists
will write assumptions about what members of the public or individuals are
thinking, and these assumptions are often wrong.
9. Flawed logic. This is when
journalists arrive at conclusions that are not justified by any of their
previous points or any evidence, in an attempt to misrepresent the facts.
10. Bias by placement. Media outlets
can reveal biases through which stories they deem most important. Which is the
front-page story and which is only a small paragraph at the back?
11. Omission of source attribution. Where
a journalist sources their story is very important, so if they omit their
sources, they might not be presenting reliable information.
The above information has
been sourced from All Sides, a media outlet.
NEUTRALITY
Neutrality means reporting all sides of an
issue without favoring any one of them. It can be easiest to attain with
domestic stories when all sides share common values, and the controversy is not
about the final goal but how to achieve it.
NEUTRALITY BIAS
Neutrality bias is the idea that some
journalists or news outlets are so concerned with appearing neutral that they
forget about objectivity. Objectivity is not neutrality. Neutrality bias means
giving all sides equal time, and presenting all sides with equal praise and/or
criticism, even when there is a side that is objectively more based on
reality/facts, etc. It can also mean not correcting factual untruths or errors
on the grounds of allowing everyone to express their opinion.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN ISSUES
WITH MEDIA BIAS?
There are some important reasons why media
bias is a problem. It’s pretty much inevitable to a certain extent, especially
when it’s unconscious, but this doesn’t mean we should completely ignore the
issues it causes. Following are the important issues which need to be
contemplated upon :
1. It can lead to
censorship
If a media outlet consistently chooses to emit
stories that it doesn’t align with, this can be a form of censorship. As a
result, consumers of that media outlet could be getting a distorted view of
certain issues.
2. It can be politically
motivated
The way in which political coverage in the
media is often in collusion with government communication professionals and
political parties. This means that depending on which newspaper we read, we'll
be getting a different version of events.
3. Extreme forms can
mutate into propaganda
If a media outlet is extremely biased in
favor of the governing body, the news that they present may not only be
inaccurate but might brainwash consumers into blindly accepting government
decisions.
If this extreme bias occurs in government
materials or in the single primary media outlet delivering information, this
could be considered propaganda.
4. It can cause divisions
in society
Because left-wing media and right-wing media
discuss the same issues in different ways, people can become divided on what to
do or feel about them. More generally, biased reporting can be an unfair
representation of people or groups in society, which can lead to negative
stereotypes and poor treatment.
HOW TO RECOGNISE MEDIA
BIAS (for the readers)
There are several ways by which we can
recognize media bias. FAIR, the national media watch group in the US, suggests
that there are numerous questions we should ask ourselves when consuming media
in order to find biases. Following are the detailed questions :
·
Who are the sources? Where
is the journalist getting their sources from? Are all sources corporate and
government-based, or are any progressive, public interest, minority or female
voices being referenced?
·
Is there a lack of
diversity? Looking at a particular media outlet, how diverse is their workforce
compared to the communities they serve? Do they have producers, editors and
managers of different races, genders and sexualities? To be fairly representative,
they should have diverse people in leadership positions.
·
From whose point of view
is the media reported? Perspective is everything. Often, political coverage
focuses on how certain issues affect politicians or corporations. In order to
be fair, media outlets must present the point of view of those most affected by
an issue.
·
Are there double
standards? Check for double standards by finding a parallel example by the same
media company or citing similar stories that were covered in a different way.
For example, are similar stories about men and women written in the same way?
· Is there a total lack of context? Stories without context can often
paint a false picture of society or certain groups within it. For example,
crime may be going up in a certain area because poverty is increasing, but this
connection might not be explained.
ELIMINATING BIAS (for Journalists)
1. Taking the time to figure out what our
biases are and acknowledging them.
2. Talking with colleagues who have different
perspectives to test whether we have a blind spot in a given story
3. Diversifying the pool of sources in
multiple ways, including gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, ability,
political leaning, religion, sexuality, socio-economic status, and region.
4. Reading, watching, and listening to news
from credible sources who come at stories from different perspectives.
FACTORS THAT AFFECT BIAS
1. Paid news- Paid news or paid content are those articles in newspapers, magazines
and the electronic media, which indicate favorable conditions for the
institution that has paid for it. The news is much like an advertisement but
without the ad tag.
A serious hurdle to healthy journalism in the
country today is that the media houses are owned by big political leaders and
business men who use them to gains political mileage and money. Some turn their
apparatus into propaganda machines. The
electronic media can be more dangerous when it chooses to go biased. We have
observed with indignation that some news channels broadcasting in regional
languages in Assam are blatantly biased .
For example, in the run up to the coming April
11 Parliamentary Elections in Assam,
some news channels have been adopting an angle of coverage which is diagonally
opposite of some others owned by rival political party leaders to the utter
confusion of viewers who are not adept in reading between the lines.
2. Economic background- News about the economy is highly biased; it paints a picture of the
economy that much more closely tracks the gains of the very rich than it does
the welfare of the average masses.
Using machine-learning, they collect all
stories from these newspapers that concern the overall performance of the
economy. Crucially, they remove any articles that appeared in the business
section, because these often focus on the stock market and corporate earnings
that make their coverage explicitly class-biased. The authors then measure the
tone of the economic news and test whether it accurately reflects the growth of
different income classes.
First, the content of economic news becomes
overwhelmingly positive when incomes of the rich grow—but it is uncorrelated
with the changes in welfare of the lesser-off, when accounting for the fortunes
of the rich. Put more simply, when the news says “economy is doing great,” it
means the rich are getting richer.
Second, these biases arise from the structural
drivers of the economy, in which the fruits of economic growth are
predominantly captured by the rich. As the economy grows with stock market and
corporate earnings, news about the economy becomes stunningly positive even
though wealth stays concentrated at the top; “inequality” receives conspicuously
little attention. In short, when the economy is treated as an undifferentiated
whole, it fails to account for the disparities in the welfares of the people.
Third, these biases do not appear to be driven
by partisan bias in media content or journalistic preference for the interests
of the rich.
The tendency to privilege aggregate economic
indicators—like growth—is widespread across media outlets, regardless of their
ideological orientation or ownership structures.
3. Caste- The thousands of print media houses
and hundreds of television houses will always have something new to give its
readers and viewers. But how does the media actually see the atrocities against
Dalits? What is the space, in terms of percentage, given to violence on Dalits
in a day, a week, a month and a year by the media houses? Crimes against Dalits
see a rise of 10-20% every year. In a just society, the media’s space to
violence against Dalits should have correspondingly increased too. But has it
happened? We all know it has not.
Case
study - The alleged gangrape of a 19-year-old Dalit girl by four Thakur men in
Hathras, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, has forced the media to
acknowledge the caste dynamics and the role caste plays in our society. Some
media houses continue to maintain that the perpetrators of the crime, and the
people supporting them, are ‘upper castes’ – a blanket term used to not offend
any community. Other media houses have rightly identified the caste location of
the perpetrators and their supporters. This change in the media’s perspective,
which usually refrains from calling out a community, also comes from the fact
that the state is governed by a Chief Minister who belongs to the same Thakur
caste.
In
any instance of crime, it’s important that perpetrators should be focused on
mainly, instead of the victim from the marginalized community. The mainstream
media is not for the poor, not for the oppressed. It has carved its kingdom out
of loyalty to the powers, to bureaucracy, to domination. It is neither for
minorities nor for women and children. Most certainly not for the Dalits. Over
95% of owners of the mainstream media including print and television come from
dominant caste backgrounds. About 70-80% of the topmost positions are occupied
by dominant caste men. Dalits don’t even constitute 1% when it comes to
deciding power in the country’s media. When the diversity of media is
butchered, how can Dalits and the oppressed expect any justice or even space
from them?
4. Religion- Metropolitan areas with high rates of congregational
membership and areas with high levels of religious homogeneity tend to have
lower homicide and suicide rates than other metropolitan areas. States with
more religious populations tend to have fewer homicides and fewer suicides.
Religious attendance is associated with direct decreases in both minor and
major forms of crime and deviance, to an extent unrivalled by government
welfare programs. There is a 57 percent decrease in likelihood to deal drugs
and a 39 percent decrease in likelihood to commit a crime among the young,
black inner city population if they attend religious services regularly. In
general, available empirical evidence suggests an inverse relationship between
religion and crime. According to over 40 years of empirical research
summarizing the relationship between religion and crime, findings indicate that
religion decreases propensities for criminal behavior. Still, though this
relationship seems viable, other research has shown that religion has little
effect on criminal offending, instead suggesting that the religion-crime
relationship is spurious. the relationship between religion and crime within
criminological and sociological scholarship remains conversational, given
divergent conceptions of religion and how religion is often conceptualized. As
documented, the measure one uses to determine a person’s level of religiousness
is an important factor in determining the relationship between religion and
criminal behavior. Religion and journalism might seem incompatible. The
religion beat tests the limits of a reporter’s neutrality perhaps more than any
other. Journalists everywhere strive to put their own political and
philosophical commitments aside when they’re on the job. Religious commitments
are one of the most powerful identity markers around.
In
the following two decades, hundreds of local and international reporters have
been targeted by violence in the name of religious faith. The attacks have had
a chilling effect on the coverage of religion and the many issues and conflicts
that surround it. Many editors think twice before sending reporters to regions
where religious extremists could abduct or kill them. In countries riven by
religious sectarianism, some journalists do not dig too deeply. Even in more
peaceful countries, the mainstream media are wary of the potential for
violence, offense, or the trespassing of blasphemy laws.
5. Gender- The lack of objective news coverage when it comes to crime news against
gender minorities, reinforces the societal perception about them. Alongside
this, media portrayal of women is a reflection of patriarchal norms. An example
for this would be how the media represented Nupur Talwar, the mother of Arushi
Talwar. Nupur was demonized by the media, questioned for her expressionless
face, contrary to the role of a weeping mother that the Indian media approves.
Women
are more subjected to the scrutiny of their sexuality than men as they are
portrayed as 'bad mothers' more than men as 'bad fathers.'
Research
showed this practice even when children are not involved in the crime, female
victim or offender is described as 'mum of two' implying that she transgressed the
law of nature and social norms.
It
is very rare to find headlines of rape cases against transgenders, and apart
from the dominance of cis gendered norms, the absence of law in this situation
further reduces the media representation that trans people receive.
Victims
are often type casted based on the reactions they elicit. A blind eye is turned
over a lot many cases pertaining to people who don't identify according to the
binary gender identity. There is little to no coverage on crimes against gender
non-conforming and non binary individuals.
6. Race- Media crime coverage fuels racial perceptions of crime.
“If
it bleeds, it leads,” goes the saying about local news coverage. But not all
spilt blood gets equal attention. Researchers have shown that crime reporting
exaggerates crime rates and exhibits both quantitative and qualitative racial
biases. This includes a tendency, as described below, to exaggerate rates of
black offending and white victimization and to depict black suspects in a less
favorable light than whites. Although there is a broad range of media coverage
about crime, with some venues and reporters cautious not to promote biased
public perceptions, less mindful coverage abounds on television and in
print.
Because
of the media’s gravitation toward notable crimes and ensuing policy debates,
upticks in news media coverage of crime often have little to do with
broader white crime trends. Drug-related deaths of major figures spurred
crisis coverage about drugs in the 1980s, while prominent violent deaths led to
an upsurge of violent crime news in the 1990s, even while violent crimes began
to decline. Although audiences do not passively receive information, consuming
higher levels of television news and nonfictional crime programming is
associated with greater fear of crime among some.
Media
crime coverage not only increases the salience of crime, it also distorts the
public’s sense of who commits crime and triggers biased reactions. By
over-representing whites as victims of crimes perpetrated by people of color,
crime news delivers a double blow to white audiences’ potential for empathetic
understanding of racial minorities. This focus at once exaggerates black crime
while downplaying black victimization. Homicide, for example, is overwhelmingly
an intra-racial crime involving men. But media accounts often portray a
world overrepresented by black, male offenders and white, female victims. One
study of how Columbus, Ohio’s major newspaper reported on the city’s murders –
which were predominantly committed by and against black men – examined whether
unusual or typical cases were considered newsworthy. The researcher found that
journalists gravitated to unusual cases when selecting victims (white women)
and to typical cases when selecting perpetrators (black men). Yet reporters did
not choose to cover the most infrequent murders, of blacks by whites or of
white men by white women.
Many
media outlets reinforce the public’s racial misconceptions about crime by
presenting African Americans and Latinos differently than whites – both
quantitatively and qualitatively. Television news programs and newspapers
over-represent racial minorities as crime suspects and whites as crime victims.
IS UNBIASED JOURNALISM
POSSIBLE?
This expectation that a journalist is objective
and unbiased took hold in the U.S. in the early-to-mid 20th century, and while
of course, a journalist should not act as public relations agent - i.e.
representing and pushing the agenda and narrative of a specific entity - we
cannot expect any human to achieve individual neutrality or objectivity. Why?
Because humans are, by nature, biased. This is why journalists need to adhere
to a journalistic process, which seeks to vet and verify information, interview
sources, and get at the truth.
INDIAN MEDIA
A study of 30 Indian newspapers and 41 Indian
TV channels with the largest viewership rates in the country confirms the
existence of rampant media bias for the two years from 2017 to 2018.
The study relies on rating editorial articles
that focus on religious, gender, and caste issues as either liberal, neutral,
or conservative; and then compiling these scores by each newspaper to find the
overall bias in each outlet. The results unsurprisingly and unfortunately show
the consistent existence of media bias—for example, except for eight
newspapers, the papers all express biases far from neutral. And this bias
consistently correlates with viewers in India expressing similarly biased
social, economic, and security attitudes.
Although government measures are exacerbating media bias, the media
retains some agency and could work to limit the influence of politics on
reporting. Currently, 36 percent of daily newspapers earn over half of their
total income from the government of India and most major TV stations have
owners who served as politicians themselves or who had family members in
politics. Although it would be difficult to convince larger outlets to
participate since they benefit from their government backing, smaller
independent outlets can start this movement towards neutrality. Many small
outlets already eschew government funding and report with less biased views.
These publications in India, therefore, deserve more attention and more support
to reduce media bias.
CONCLUSION
Thus, bias can distort the role of media is a very damaging way that can be
detrimental to its existence. It goes against the very core of journalism.
While it is very tough to forego any kind of bias, it is important as
journalists that we try to get information from all kinds of sources and with
proper verification, to ensure that our personal bias does not hinder our
responsibilities as a reporter.
COMPILED AND EDITED BY:
Stuti Garg & Deepshikha
Batch of 2024
Department of Journalism
28/06/2022
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