Talking Productively about "Bias"

For a while now I’ve noticed, as have many other teachers, that students throw around the word “bias” an awful lot when talking about sources of information, with mixed results. On the one hand, it gives them a framework for talking about how information can be tainted and suspect. On the other, it can become nearly the only lens through which they view media, and it can have really negative consequences. Take this tweet (which I responded to at the time) as an example of what many teachers experience:

For these students, “bias” has gone from being a useful strategy for detecting bad information to an all-encompassing view of all information. In this view, anything that takes a strong position – especially on a controversial topic – is biased, and therefore untrustworthy. The credentials of the person presenting the argument don’t matter, and neither does the process by which they came to their conclusions. All that matters is neutrality, and anything that breaches it is bad. But eventually, and dangerously, neutrality in this view becomes an impossible standard, so the effect is less the elevation of one type of source and mistrust of others, but a mistrust of all sources of information and a corresponding deep cynicism and withdrawal. This is bad for obvious reasons. It’s especially bad, though, because it becomes a way for the people practicing it to place themselves above the reach of petty bias, making them feel sophisticated. But this kind of blanket mistrust is not actually sophisticated because it requires almost nothing of us. It’s easy, cheap, and destructive.  

For a while all my efforts to combat this attitude came up short. This was because I didn’t fully appreciate how deep-seated and total it was. What I’ve found is that you can’t devote a lecture or reading or two to this issue and put much of a dent in it. To really complicate this viewpoint for students in a fundamental way requires a longer-term, more structural focus. 

Last semester, I succeeded far more than I ever had before in combating first-year composition students’ reliance on “bias” as a framework for judging sources, and in the process we had richer conversations about media and sources of information than I’d experienced in any FYC class. What ended up happening was that many students started to see bias as not as a bad thing to be avoided, but as an inevitable thing. Of course, the “bias is inevitable” view is destructive when bias is seen as inherently bad, because it leads to “everyone is biased, so I’m checking out.” But that’s not what happened here. Instead, “bias is inevitable” led to discussions about the responsibility of citizens to be savvy news consumers. And some students came to the conclusion that bias, openly declared by journalists and commentators, can actually be good because it is a kind of honesty, and hence a way of creating trust (more on this below). 

Below is a description of what we did, but these are, for me, the key takeaways:

Keeping bias around as a useful frame, but nuancing it significantly – and specifically taking it out of the context of conservative vs. liberal bias - was hugely helpful. We did this through readings and discussions, explained below.

Also helpful was grounding the almost useless word “media” in individual people: the journalists and commentators who report and interpret the world’s events. We did this through their research projects, also explained below.

Re-framing the discussion about media and information from reliability to openness - and very early in our discussions - was also a key move. In the reliability frame, we’re focused on judging, and there’s an incentive to find flaws in sources and use those flaws as a basis for dismissing them entirely. In the openness frame, we pay attention to our own persuadability and have to give good reasons for denying an argument’s validity. (This is similar to moving from doubting to believing.)

Here’s what we did

At the most general level, we devoted ¾ of the course (12 of 16 weeks) to the theme of modern media and journalism (though I don’t think that length of time is necessary to productively nuance the bias frame). In this stretch, students completed two projects: 

- an IMRaD-style report on the work of a single journalist (I defined “journalist” as someone doing, or who had done, significant on-the-ground research and reporting; I stuck with currently working journalists) 

• they chose their journalist from a list of about 40 that I created, or they chose their own with my approval 

• we spent 8 weeks on this

• this journalist-specific focus was, I think, the single biggest thing that nuanced students’ views about what “the media” is, and was also hugely important in changing their view of bias. 

- and a presentation that made an argument about what this journalist’s work tells us about modern media

• this was also the topic of the Discussion section of their report, so the main thrust of the presentation assignment was refining their argument and turning it toward a new rhetorical situation – from written to spoken argument.

• they had the choice of giving an in-class presentation or creating an e-presentation and posting it online

• we spent 4 weeks on this

At a more fine-grained level: Our discussions over these 12 weeks were driven by several readings we all did and the individual readings students were doing as they got familiar with the work of their own journalists. Three of our in-common readings were particularly good discussion-starters and touchstones to come back to over and over again (which also served to clarify & amplify the ideas of these texts over time).

- This collection of short essays from Harper’s presents seven diverse viewpoints on the theme of openness to the perspectives of others, which the editors argue is eroding in the age of Trump. This was the first thing we read, we came back to it many times in our class discussions, and several students mentioned these essays in their end-of-semester reflections. Because I didn’t want to overwhelm students at the beginning of this unit (and to create some accountability and discussion), I put students into groups of 4 and made each group responsible for reading two of the essays and summarizing them for the rest of the class. I assigned questions on the theme of openness to guide their summaries. 

- The Influencing Machine, a graphic nonfiction book about US media and the history of journalism, by Brooke Gladstone and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, was our main text for this unit, and we read most of it. Particularly useful was the ~10-page section on bias, but much else in this excellent book was helpful too. In the bias section, Gladstone argues that a focus on left/right, liberal/conservative bias is useless, boring, and counterproductive, and she presents nine other types of media bias that are far better lenses. The ones students seemed to grasp the best and use the most in their own thinking were 

- “Fairness bias,” where two unequal sides in a debate are presented as equal – with climate scientists and climate deniers being the classic example. Once we talked about this concept, students started seeing it everywhere. 

- “Visual bias,” where media and media consumers are drawn to visually compelling stories and ignore stories without obvious visual appeal. The examples we discussed here were two stories in the media at the time: the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the New York Times mega-story on the Trump family’s long history of tax evasion. They all knew something about the former and next to nothing about the latter, and what they knew about the Kavanaugh hearings was highly visual: his pinkly enraged face, and Christine Blasey Ford’s calm, frightened demeanor. (This also connects with “narrative bias” – our tendency to focus on stories with obvious protagonists, antagonists, and conflict at the expense of attention to more complex series of events.) 

- (Also, “confirmation bias” isn’t in Influencing Machine but we read about and discussed it, and it was a very useful concept that students seemed to grasp and appreciate.)

- This excellent breakdown of the changing nature of media credibility by Jay Rosen differentiates between old and new ways that media create trust in news consumers. Where media outlets used to rely on institutional cred, like the reputations for accuracy built up over time by national or local newspapers, they now deploy a range of strategies that center on transparency, or “showing your work.” One trasparency technique is to report on reporting – like when the NY Times dropped their big Trump tax evasion story, they also dropped a story detailing their arduous, year-long process of researching it. They showed their work. Another transparency technique is when reporters declare their biases, especially when those biases don’t fall into neat conservative/liberal categories. The example Rosen uses is a tech reporter who declares a bias against big tech companies because of their tendency to disregard consumers’ need for privacy. 

**This point about declared bias being good resonated with students, and we came back to it over and over: The idea that you can create more trust in readers by declaring your biases. This helped move students away from the idea that neutrality is the holy grail of journalism, and toward the idea that every view is partial, and that it can be useful when a reporter declares the exact boundaries of their partiality and allows readers to decide how to think about their reporting.** 

In addition to the readings, I made and repeated two points in lectures and discussions that seemed to resonate: 

Referencing partisan news commentators like Sean Hannity’s obsession with casting, for example, the Mueller investigation as “biased” because some of the investigators are (supposedly) Democrats, I pointed out how “bias” can simply mean “having an opinion,” which is a useless frame. In Hannity’s logic, being a Democrat or a Republican, or having come to any conclusion at all about US politics, would be disqualifying. When we say that no one who has ideas can be listened to, we are effectively cutting ourselves off from any sources of information – an untenable situation for democratic citizens. 

And, referencing arguments about climate change and denialists’ charge that climate scientists are biased, I pointed out that “bias” can mean “knowledge.” When someone devotes their career to studying a topic, they are going to come to some conclusions about it, and those conclusions are a form of knowledge that we should at least be willing to hear because we respect the process of knowledge-gathering. To label that knowledge as “bias” because it happens to align with the view of one political party more than another is, again, to close ourselves off from information in untenable ways. And it also amounts to accepting, and possibly spreading, propaganda. 

So, when “bias” = “having an opinion,” or when “bias” = “knowledge,” we are in a very bad place indeed. 

The Results

The biggest overall positive result of all this was the conversations we had in class about the role of bias in our own judgments about media credibility, and our discussions about the ways media outlets use bias to their advantage. These conversations – along with students’ own written reflections – indicated to me that students’ views on media bias had changed substantially over the course of the semester. Many had started with the neutrality-fetishizing view of bias I tried to summarize at the top of this post, but ended up arguing in their final assignments that bias could be viewed positively. 

Two students studying veteran environmental journalist Andrew Revkin noted that his biases came from decades of research and reporting and that it would be a disservice to his readers to hide them. That is, once they found out the depth of his knowledge and experience, they wanted to know his biases; or, put another way, they wanted to know what conclusions he’d come to. 

Three students studying Sean McElwee, whose outspokenly left-leaning journalism could be characterized as activism, initially approached him with varying degrees of distrust, but they came to see him as an important voice worth paying attention to, especially in debates about ICE. One student made the argument that it was McElwee’s “bias” that gave his reporting its passion and individuality.

These conclusions came from students’ deep dives into the work of individual journalists and our readings and conversations about the nature of bias. Individually, students saw real people doing their best to tell stories about the world. In aggregate, the class saw a media landscape made up of these individual people, to the point where, for some students, the word “media” began to feel so zoomed-out as to be barely useful at all. 

As a side benefit, I learned a ton about the journalists students wrote about. Some, like Revkin, I already knew a lot about. But others, like Eliza Griswold, I only knew slightly but now know much better. And students brought perspectives very different from my own but that I found persuasive. For example, I’m a big fan of Ezra Klein’s podcast, but one student argued thatVox, which Klein founded, and it’s “explainer” ethos was bad for journalism because it cloaks its biases as neutral facts rather than being up front about them. 

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the way this assignment sequence went. Students did excellent work, and I got lots of positive feedback from them.