Media bias
Media bias occurs when journalists and news producers show bias in how they report and cover news. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article.[1] The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.[2]
Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative.[3] Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries, for example China, North Korea, Syria and Myanmar.[4][5] Politics and media bias may interact with each other; the media has the ability to influence politicians, and politicians may have the power to influence the media. This can change the distribution of power in society.[6] Market forces may also cause bias. Examples include bias introduced by the ownership of media, including a concentration of media ownership, the subjective selection of staff, or the perceived preferences of an intended audience.
Assessing possible bias is one aspect of media literacy, which is studied at schools of journalism, university departments (including media studies, cultural studies, and peace studies). Other focuses beyond political bias include international differences in reporting, as well as bias in reporting of particular issues such as economic class or environmental interests. Academic findings around bias can also differ significantly from public discourse and understanding of the term.[7]
In the 2017 Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, S. Robert Lichter described how in academic circles, media bias is more of a hypothesis to explain various patterns in news coverage than any fully-elaborated theory,[7] and that a variety of potentially overlapping types of bias have been proposed that remain widely debated.
Various proposed hypotheses of media bias have included:
An ongoing and unpublished research project named "The Media Bias Taxonomy" is attempting to assess the various definitions and meanings of media bias. While still ongoing, it attempts to summarize the domain as the distinct subcategories linguistic bias (encompassing linguistic intergroup bias, framing bias, epistemological bias, bias by semantic properties, and connotation bias), text-level context bias (featuring statement bias, phrasing bias, and spin bias), reporting-level context bias (highlighting selection bias, coverage bias, and proximity bias), cognitive biases (such as selective exposure and partisan bias), and related concepts like framing effects, hate speech, sentiment analysis, and group biases (encompassing gender bias, racial bias, and religion bias). The authors emphasize the complex nature of detecting and mitigating bias across different media content and contexts.[25]
John Milton's pamphlet Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, published in 1644, was one of the first publications advocating freedom of the press.[26]
In the 19th century, journalists began to recognize the concept of unbiased reporting as an integral part of journalistic ethics. This coincided with the rise of journalism as a powerful social force. Even today, though, the most conscientiously objective journalists cannot avoid accusations of bias.[27]
Like newspapers, the broadcast media (radio and television) have been used as a mechanism for propaganda from their earliest days, a tendency made more pronounced by the initial ownership of broadcast spectrum by national governments. Although a process of media deregulation has placed the majority of the western broadcast media in private hands, there still exists a strong government presence, or even monopoly, in the broadcast media of many countries across the globe. At the same time, the concentration of media ownership in private hands, and frequently amongst a comparatively small number of individuals, has also led to accusations of media bias.
There are many examples of accusations of bias being used as a political tool, sometimes resulting in government censorship.
Not all accusations of bias are political. Science writer Martin Gardner has accused the entertainment media of anti-science bias. He claimed that television programs such as The X-Files promote superstition.[9] In contrast, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funded by businesses, accuses the media of being biased in favor of science and against business interests, and of credulously reporting science that shows that greenhouse gasses cause global warming.[35]
Religion[edit]
The Satanic panic, a moral panic and episode of national hysteria that emerged in the U.S. in the 1980s (and thereafter to Canada, Britain, and Australia), was reinforced by tabloid media and infotainment.[66] Scholar Sarah Hughes, in a study published in 2016, argued that the panic "both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives" whose ideology "was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through" tabloid media, sensationalist television and magazine reporting, and local news.[66] Although the panic dissipated in the 1990s after it was discredited by journalists and the courts, Hughes argues that the panic has had an enduring influence in American culture and politics even decades later.[66]
In 2012, Huffington Post, columnist Jacques Berlinerblau argued that secularism has often been misinterpreted in the media as another word for atheism, stating that: "Secularism must be the most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms. In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism. The religious right has profitably promulgated this misconception at least since the 1970s."[67]
According to Stuart A. Wright, there are six factors that contribute to media bias against minority religions: first, the knowledge and familiarity of journalists with the subject matter; second, the degree of cultural accommodation of the targeted religious group; third, limited economic resources available to journalists; fourth, time constraints; fifth, sources of information used by journalists; and finally, the front-end/back-end disproportionality of reporting. According to Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, "it has long been the American habit to be more suspicious of – and more repressive toward – religions that stand outside the mainline Protestant-Roman Catholic-Jewish troika that dominates America's spiritual life." As for front-end/back-end disproportionality, Wright says: "news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence occurring at the front-end of an event. As the charges weighed in against material evidence, these cases often disintegrate. Yet rarely is there equal space and attention in the mass media given to the resolution or outcome of the incident. If the accused are innocent, often the public is not made aware."[68]
Politics[edit]
Academic studies tend not to confirm a popular media narrative of liberal journalists producing a left-leaning media bias in the U.S., though some studies suggest economic incentives may have that effect. Instead, the studies reviewed by S. Robert Lichter generally found the media to be a conservative force in politics.[69]
Impacts of bias[edit]
Critics of media bias tend to point out how a particular bias benefits existing power structures, undermines democratic outcomes and fails to inform people with the information they need to make decisions around public policy.[70]
Experiments have shown that media bias affects behavior and more specifically influences the readership's political ideology. A study found higher politicization rates with increased exposure to the Fox News channel,[71] while a 2009 study found a weakly-linked decrease in support for the Bush administration when given a free subscription to the right-leaning The Washington Times or left-leaning The Washington Post.[72]
Trust in media[edit]
Perceptions of media bias and trust in the media have changed significantly from 1985-2011 in the US. Pew studies reported that the percentage of Americans who trusted that news media “get their facts straight” dropped from 55% in 1985, to 25% in 2011. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who trusted that news organizations would deal fairly with all sides when dealing with political and social issues dropped from 34% in 1985 to 16% in 2011. By 2011 almost two-thirds of respondents considered news organizations to be “politically biased in their reporting”, up from 45% in 1985.[19] Similar decreases in trust have been reported by Gallup, with an all-time low around the 2016 American presidential election.[73] In 2022, half of Americans responded that they believed that news organizations would deliberately attempt to mislead them.[74]
Jonathan M. Ladd (2012), who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of belief in media bias is telling people that particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased, he found, was extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.[75]