Biases in News Sources

What Is Bias?

• Bias is a tendency to believe that some people, groups, ideas, etc. are better than others, which often results in treating some people unfairly.
• Explicit bias refers to attitudes and beliefs (positive or negative) that we consciously or deliberately hold and/or express about a person, group, or idea. Explicit and implicit biases can sometimes contradict each other.
• Implicit bias includes attitudes and beliefs (positive or negative) about other people, ideas, issues, or groups that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control, but still affect our opinions and behavior. Everyone has implicit biases that they have developed over a lifetime—even people who try to remain objective (e.g., judges and journalists). However, people can work to combat and change these biases.
• Confirmation bias, or the selective collection of evidence, is our subconscious tendency to seek and interpret information and other evidence in ways that affirm our existing beliefs, ideas, expectations, and/or hypotheses. Therefore, confirmation bias is both affected by and feeds our implicit biases. It can be most entrenched around beliefs and ideas that we are strongly attached to or that provoke a strong emotional response.

Resources for Examining Personal Bias

• Video and transcript from Facing History and Ourselves: Binna Kandola: Diffusing Bias.
• Watch: Defining Confirmation Bias
• Read: How to Escape Your Political Bubble for a Clearer View

From Facing History and Ourselves. Lesson 3: "Confirmation and Other Biases."

Source Bias

Factual Reporting vs. News Analysis 

"Evaluating news sources is one of the more contentious issues out there. People have their favorite news sources and don't like to be told that their news source is untrustworthy.

For fact-checking, it's helpful to draw a distinction between two activities:

• News Gathering, where news organizations do investigative work, calling sources, researching public documents, checking and publishing facts, e.g. the getting the facts of Bernie Sanders involvement in the passage of several bills.

• News Analysis, which takes those facts and strings them into a larger narrative, such as 'Senator Sanders an effective legislator behind the scenes" or 'Senator Sanders largely ineffective Senator behind the scenes.'

Most newspaper articles are not lists of facts, which means that outfits like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times do both news gathering and news analysis in stories. What has been lost in the dismissal of the New York Times as liberal and the Wall Street Journal as conservative is that these are primarily biases of the news analysis portion of what they do. To the extent the bias exists, it's in what they choose to cover, to whom they choose to talk, and what they imply in the way they arrange those facts they collect. The news gathering piece is affected by this, but in many ways largely separate, and the reputation for fact checking is largely separate as well." [italics and emphasis added]

From Michael A. Caulfield's Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers. 26: Evaluating News Sources (paras. 1-3).