how to understand bias in media bias charting
there’s always an issue with these charts — they chart “relative bias” on politics, not “objective reality” on fact based information. we also need to understand the principles of “accuracy” and “precision,” as well as “correlation” and “causation,” “lenses” and “frames” in cognitive observations, and finally, the concepts of “intrusive” and “non-intrusive” study in terms of social science.
the concept of bias has to be understood first — it is a means of correcting measurement in instruments like scales and rulers to establish objective truth in recording data. the same scale will read differently at different altitudes and it must be tared to calibrate it so it falls in line with other instruments that have been used to perform the same experiment and it can be used as a test to prove it accurately. when using a vessel to hold quantities to weigh, the scale is tared to zero with the vessel on it to remove the weight of the vessel from the measurement and get a true reading. rulers and measuring cups are mass-manufactured and the gradients on them are printed with varying degrees of accuracy and agreement. people who are careful with their tools never use the end of the ruler, they start with the first inch mark because the tip of the ruler will always be untrustworthy from the manufacturing process. scientific instruments and fine tools are built with exacting quality control for both accuracy and precision in fixed applications, such as chemistry or machining parts.
in settings where humans are involved, the concept of bias is the same as in hard applications where the inherent inaccuracy of the human observer as an instrument must be corrected for to fall in line with the scientific method of finding provable and repeatable results to confirm hypotheses, theories, and laws. in the study and practice of method and theory, social scientists are taught and trained to recognize their own cultural lenses which cause them to frame what they observe through their own experience. this comes down not only to how people interpret what they see, but also how they pose questions to explore issues. a white person from their experience will ask different questions from a black person in their experience when they look at the same subject, one may look at an issue from the top down, one from the bottom up — on issues like understanding and interpreting data about a subject like slavery and racism, a white person will approach it naturally from a capitalist lens as their role in the culture would inform, the black person would look at it from a marxist lens — however, both would be unaware of how or why they do that if they aren’t exposed to and made aware of it. both are true and valid perspectives, however, they provide a broader context that is necessary to ground and be objectively true, comprehensive, and conclusive.
in terms of the statistical principles of accuracy and precision, the more data that is collected that is accurate is informed by precision when there is agreement among independent trial and test and we reach what we consider a consensus truth of objective reality. when hundreds or thousands of people/reporters observe something from multiple lenses and find agreement in the interpretation of what is seen, we could call it common wisdom, but in truth it is a valid hypothesis with consistently repeatable results.
so when we get to saying that media skews left or skews right there are multiple conditions we need to take into account, but in the end, it is a way of discrediting information to confirm an individual’s lens of perception to validate cognitive bias over what consensus of agreement in accurate and precise recording and reporting of observations. taken as a whole set — the observations of international journalists, diverse american journalists, etc — will correct for each others individual biases if the sample set is comprehensive and balanced. what you will find are statistical outliers that have extreme views and will pull the mean and median where the objective truth lies to one side or the other and create a relative bias or relative center. this center is fair to both idealistic perspectives, but it is not fair to objective reality — because nature doesn’t really give a shit if you believe in it or not, it is an entropic system that does whatever it is supposed to do.
so, when we want to chart what biases media have, we start by looking at how these outlets report actual, hard, irrefutable statistical fact. this can be as easy as saying something like financial data, sports scores, or the weather. but when we get to issues that are held up by the scientific method in physical or social science, like the climate or economics, we can see true corruption of reporting of observable results that establishes an agenda and can be characterized as manipulative on how the message is delivered.
journalists are not trained to abstract themselves from the subjects they study the way sociologists and ethnographers are — they corrupt and influence what they report upon through intrusive study, not hide in blinds in the forrest watching native savages dance while wearing pith helmets. there are diversity issues in newsrooms and ownership that reflect a pattern of white male ownership for centuries and the framing of stories from that sole perspective — in reality, journalism schools have required courses for broadcasters to teach them diction so they sound neutral… while we talk about race issues like code switching, news teaches people to present as white middle class midwesterners from the 60s — the statistical normal of the population curve that is by focus group shown to have a certain resonance and comfort level in audiences. AP style is dictated by an editorial board of white people for a century, it defines how words like “terrorist” or “militia” are used, or how to normalize a word like “obamacare” as short hand for the ACA, when its etymological root is an intentional political communication method of attaching racism to the legislation through a pejorative. “slant” is a different concept than bias — it is where editors select certain stories to cover and others to ignore, ask questions differently, or it frames language in ways that present data through a singular cultural lens and frames them to persuade instead of inform.
when you have an issue like the climate, where 99.9 percent of the international scientific community is in consensus over their interpretation of observable agnostic data, and the media outlet reports it as a debate over its validity, or denies it, you have a clear instance of relative bias instead of objective reality. it would be the same as reporting that the dow jones industrial average is something different than it was at close, and then saying that “the middle” is somewhere between the real number and the imagined number.
these charts, which are not generally produced by social scientists, do not take any of these principles into account. they are charting what is relative bias to reach a relative center, meaning that extreme media that patently lies pulls the center as statistical outliers. in all of these exercises, critical thinking is required to analyze the data on multiple levels — not the least of which is through an economic lens where all of these are commercial businesses in competition with each other and motivated by profit margins in an attention economy, which will inherently bias them all towards their markets. if we take a different approach from behavioral or market economics, and explored it through an ethnographic lens of race or gender, we’d see a different chart altogether. if we applied a political science lens, we’d see another overlay.
but in all things media, one needs to first establish the scale and ruler with the truth that media up until very recently was completely controlled by rich white men with sufficient means to own and operate things like printing presses and broadcast antennas and satellites and secure licenses from the government to operate within spectrum or ink business deals with each other for carriage on their systems. the information we consider to be objective via our collective experience is historically only produced by a certain ruling demographic.
when we map this over the whole culture, and its politics whereby women and people of color were disenfranchised from the vote when the nation was established by slave owners who were able to secure unequal representation to entrench their economic dominance, we see that the “liberal” cause — which by textbook definition means “extension of individual liberty and freedom” — is one of equalization and enfranchisement of the disenfranchised classes into the political process where they have self-agency. applying principles of accuracy and precision, the more diverse set of eyes and voices brings us to higher truth with more representation of lenses in more accurately measuring objective reality. when we have tens of thousands of camera phones instead of just cameras from three news networks, we have a more comprehensive set of data to work with. what we are psychologically trained to interpret is that someone with more money and more influence is more correct than the masses — that one tv anchor is more trustworthy and credible than thousands of independent observers — when logically, and scientifically, this is bullshit.
it is a common chestunt that “reality has a liberal bias.” well, this is true in both the way we understand classic liberalism and how we characterize “liberal” in the vernacular of the american political conversation — where somehow there has been a semantic shift where the word that is defined as “individual liberty” now means “government tyranny,” but that is a whole other subject of language and culture. what is more relevant here in that expression is we have long called humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences “the liberal arts and sciences” since we established universities. the scientific method is liberal in the definition of the word that one must be “open minded” to confirming or disproving hypotheses and testing them through controlled experiments. we must be willing to be wrong to prove ourselves right, and we must be able to think critically to assess lots of data that proves or disproves our conceptions. you can’t learn anything if you aren’t “liberal minded,” live a life of curiosity and discovery, have the neuroplasticity to accept new information and change because of it, and value challenge and creativity. all of these these things are non-normal statistically. they buck common wisdom, they open doors and reveal new things that upend the conventional way of thinking. if we think of “conservative” in the meaning of the word to be cautious about change and perpetuate the status quo, then yes — to be successful in documenting reality as we discover it and understand it and explain why and how it is, we must be liberal minded.
“liberal media” is not homogeneously white in its lens, and it not singularly biased because of it. reality itself has no bias, and all other biases are measured around objective reality — the eyes that see things from different angles to be able to see all sides. in aggregate, when its combined observations from diverse perspectives land on an acceptably precise sphere of agreement around a data point, it becomes more objectively true to reality.
the statistical outlier of the homogenous view will try to pull it away from its accuracy by using unequal weight to distort the findings, discredit them, and then accuse of bias falsely to achieve a goal which is either intentional and devious, or simply unrecognized from a life of privilege that does not see things from the other lenses and values their perspective as equal.
when we consider “media bias” we need to think carefully about our understanding of the true definition and meaning of these words, and also how they have come be warped by people who don’t necessarily understand their deep intellectual concepts so they can be discussed adequately. what you’re talking about when you talk about being “fair and balanced” as being “non-biased” doesn’t mean you have to be fair to misinformation because one side or the other holds that as their truth, and in being balanced, you allow bad data to distort what the center is. fairness isn’t accurate or precise, and journalists need not be fair to both sides — their only responsibility is to be fair to the objective reality, not to the people they cover or quote, or the people who support the advertisers on their platforms.
that’s not being fair, it’s called pandering.
