Confronting Bias Bloat

The Associated Press (AP) story, “Sobering’ report shows hardening attitudes against media”, should ring alarm bells in all the right places.

The first three paragraphs are clangers: “The distrust many Americans feel toward the news media, caught up like much of the nation’s problems in the partisan divide, only seems to be getting worse.

“That was the conclusion of a ‘sobering’ study of attitudes toward the press conducted by Knight Foundation and Gallup and released Tuesday.

“Nearly half of all Americans describe the news media as ‘very biased,’ the survey found.”

The AP story draws upon a random survey of 20,046 American adults conducted between Nov. 8, 2019 and Feb. 16, 2020, and the story’s money graph is a blow to the solar plexus: “The study found 73% of Americans feel that too much bias in news reports is a major problem, up from 65% two years ago.

“Those surveyed also didn’t believe much in honest mistakes. When there were inaccuracies in articles, 54% of Americans said they believed reporters misrepresented facts, while 28% said reporters were making things up in their entirety.”

The study suggests that American media is suffering from bias bloat, some of which may be related to President Donald Trump whose feelings towards what he regards as a biased media are not friendly. Trump would say that the media is heavily biased in favor of those politicians who wish to see him hanging on a hook in Hell. But the 73% number indicates the dissatisfaction is related to matters other than Trump’s disdain for reporters and critics. Shall we take the survey seriously and give up attempting to make Trump porridge of it. The notion that the media is biased predates Trump.

The media has always been biased. News reporting on the John Adams-Thomas Jefferson campaign was heavily biased, as anyone who bothered to read contemporary accounts of the campaign would attest.  A Jefferson reporter depicted Adams as gay in manner at a time when gaiety was frowned upon by a majority of voters. A reporter favorable to Adams disclosed rumors of hanky-panky between Jefferson and one of his slaves. And the reporter in both cases was the same reporter, an excitable Scotsman whose body, at the close of an eventful life, was found floating, belly up, in a river. He had tippled too much and stumbled into the river one dark and ugsome night. So people said at the time.

The anti-Lincoln media, particularly in the south, but also in some northern papers, was fierce. But it was generally known that newspapers of the day were little more than party organs, and such biases were to be expected. Heads in the pre and post-Civil War period were turned by ideas, not biases.

In the post-modern world, our world, heads are turned by biases, not ideas, and that is the chief difference between thoughtless, humorless politics and the witty and wonderful world of Lincoln.

When a speech was interrupted by a heckler who claimed Lincoln was two-faced, Lincoln, not the handsomest of men, turned on the heckler and asked, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?” The audience laughed at the joke; the heckler might easily have been won over by it. Few in Lincoln’s day succumbed to the bad habit of taking jokes seriously, as happens daily in modern twitterdom.

Bias and prejudice are necessary in life, politics and journalism. A bias in favor of republican government or democratic practices ought never to be condemned by lovers of liberty. Was Fredrick Bastiat biased in favor of the perishable liberty provided by the free market as against a socialist planned economy? You bet he was. He spoke to the ages, not to the moment only, which is why he remains so pertinent and quotable.

News and editorial page editors will have noticed there are two ways to answer the 73% of Americans who feel that too much bias in news reports is a major, neglected problem. You may ignore them and carry on, or you may want to introduce a bit more diversity in your product. Ignoring the problem in the recent past has boosted the numbers of people who feel America’s media is suffering from indigestible bias bloat by a factor of 8% in the last two years alone.

Since bias and prejudice are irreducible givens in politics and news reporting, it may be time to open news and editorial pages to alternative biases. The debate in the English media between George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian socialist, and Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Shaw’s opposite number, put no one to sleep, and the fisticuffs sold papers. The problem in Connecticut’s left-leaning media is that there are too many Shaws and no Chestertons at all.

A conservative friend, told recently by a progressive friend that bias in news reporting was much ado about nothing because most reporters were objective, responded that what was needed desperately in Connecticut’s objective reportorial stables were many more objective conservative reporters and opinion writers, the sort of people who take Bastiat and Chesterton seriously.