Do The Media Lie?

      In straight reporting, the answer is "not on purpose."  It's a quick streetcar to court or unemployment.  For commentary, the answer is "not on purpose, but...."  Commentators, editorialists, have an agenda.  They have opinions and they're sharing them with you -- and that's very subjective.

      But there are other ways to miss the mark, starting with the fact that reporters are human beings. Start with the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart.

      I have shrunk it down to show the shape, a kind of lambda centered a bit to the Left, which pretty much matches most people's general impression.  The vertical axis rates the ratio of truth to opinion for sources -- and none of them are at the very top.  Nobody gets everything right all the time.  Nobody can entirely remove the subjective element from what they have seen, heard, or been told about by witnesses.

      A comment has been sitting in my to-be-reviewed file for awhile now; I'll release it after this blog post, but it expresses a common perception:

      "Dunno if I've said it here, but the few times I've had firsthand knowledge of news stories the reporting has had significant material errors. If the stories had been controversial it wouldn't be hard to make the jump to blaming bias...but these were boring local stories, only interesting if you know the people personally."

      And what the heck, he's probably right.  The late Robert A. Heinlein said much the same about Time magazine.

     There are multiple reasons for this.  The first and simplest is that even though you and the reporter were at the same event, you were not looking through the same eyes; you were not looking at the same things at the same time from the same location.  One of you paid close attention to the elephant, the other to the mahout on the elephant's back -- or to the band playing a dramatic fanfare.

      Worse, the reporter is quite often not there at the time, and has to talk to eyewitnesses.  You'd think that would be simple, just ask them and write it down -- but remember that we're not all looking at the same thing all the time and even when we do, we form different opinions about them, which influence our perception.  And memory is not a straightforward playback; every time we recall, every time we tell the story, we select, edit and reinterpret events.  Eyewitness testimony is often the best we have -- but it's imperfect.

      Some things -- many things -- are recorded, sound or pictures preserved.  Surely that's accurate?  Yes, but only for what it shows clearly.  Cameras can strip context: we only see what the camera was pointed at.  We only hear what the microphone picks up, and even then, did you hear "Yanni" or "Laurel?"  A trick of Elizabethan drama was to play out elements of some scenes behind props that concealed that action from the cheap seats at ground level, but not from the costlier balconies.  Some televised sporting events -- professional wrestling, for example -- and political rallies will concentrate the audience on the side of the arena the cameras are pointing towards.  And what we see can have a big impact; people who heard the Kennedy-Nixon debates on the radio thought Richard Nixon had done very well over John Kennedy; people who watched a cool, composed Kennedy on TV versus a sweating, blue-jowled Nixon thought the reverse.  Even if you were "there when it happened," you may have missed it.  Or the reporter did (this used to be a great advantage to having two or more newspapers/Radio/TV newsrooms in a town -- if Action News or The Leader-Union missed something, maybe the Tribune-Chronicle or Eyewitness 11 didn't).

      No news source is perfect.  Some are better than others.  Some traditions help; the "Five Ws (and one H)" concentrate attention on verifiable facts; inverted-pyramid structure, for all that it was invented to simplify editing for column-space (and later time) puts those facts right up front.  Internal, pre-publication fact-checking (a dying art, and sadly so) helps.  External, post-publication fact-checking can be useful to the reader (though give greatest weight to fact-checkers who show their work, with links and references).  Even the traditions of a newsroom matter.

      You will not get perfection.  Even when you read about a Little League game you watched from the stands, you may find the reporter missed a play you thought was crucial.  The final score will be right; the stats will not be deliberately wrong.  But Johnny Doe may get more of the reporter's attention than Ricky Roe, and you may even be right that it is undeserved.

      You will not always find that opinion and reporting are clearly delineated.  If the "news" show is named after the star?  I tend to expect more commentary; in video, if the anchor's name is just embedded in the title ("The Network News with Some Guy") or not there at all, you're probably getting news.  Newspapers and websites, it's not as easy -- but overbearing and salacious ad content is often a good indicator of low factual content.*  Likewise host demeanor; personality-forward types have often got an ax to grind.

      Ideal news, totally unbiased and free of error, well, there isn't any.  But some are better than others, and they can be used to cross-check one another.  News is a highly competitive business; the media bias chart shows that they do not march in lockstep, and will tell you who leans which way as well as who is more likely to slip in a few stretchers and opinions.
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* A caveat: everybody, almost, sells "chumbucket" space online, usually at the bottom of the webpage, filled with questionable ads for questionable stuff.  Apparently the outfits that buy this space and resell it pay well, but it means even pretty decent news sources have got a little dog poo on their shoe soles.