Sources of biased journalism

There’s much discontent at the state of journalism, not least at the BBC. What’s insufficiently appreciated, however, is that bad journalism doesn’t just arise from individual incompetence and time pressures. There are also systematic structural forces towards bad and biased reporting. Here’s a list of some of them: I make no claim to completeness; some are more applicable in some news organizations than others; and these are in no order.

 - Low pay. The problem here isn’t just that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. It’s that journalists are often paid less than PRs. This leads to many of them being insufficiently critical of their sources simply because they might want to work in PR later.

 - Cost-cutting. Foreign correspondents have disappeared, as has much investigative journalism, and has been replaced by cheap celebrity gossip and cobbling stories together from a few tweets. What Ben Rhodes says of the US echoes in the UK:

All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

 - Class. Over half of top journalists were privately educated. This generates a host of distortions, such as a greater sympathy for the rich and powerful than for the poor, and a lack of understanding of economics: “Money? That’s what comes from daddy!”

 - Exchanging favours. For years, the relationship between the police and media has been too cosy: the police feed stories to journalists who in return downplay or ignore stories of police malpractice. This is one reason why it took years for the brutality of the police at Orgreave or Hillsborough to become properly known. In the same way, advertisers buy not just advertising space but a cooperative silence, broken only by the occasional brave maverick such as Peter Oborne.

 - Misplaced deference. The problem here isn’t just what Adam Smith called the tendency to respect the rich and powerful more than the wise and virtuous. Younger inexpert journalists often need help, which causes them to seek expertise where little exists. Fund managers, for example, are often presented as well-informed when in fact many are simply rip-off merchants. Similarly, their habit of being at the end of a phone with a ready quote about latest market moves or economic releases gives City economists more influence over journalists than academics have.

 - Laziness. It’s easy to get a story by getting quotes from talking heads. It’s harder to find out what’s really going on. This leads to a bias in favour of those talking heads, and against groups which aren’t so rich or organized as to have spokesmen; compare, for example, coverage of banks to coverage of anti-capitalist protestors or of the rich to benefit recipients.     

 - Overcompensation. The problem with trying to balance is that you can sometimes overdo it and topple over – hence, for example, the Today’s programme’s otherwise odd decision to interview Ann Coulter and its giving more coverage to Conservative than Labour voices. Similarly, in the 90s the BBC’s liberal arts bias led to it being unsympathetic to business but in recent years, it has over-corrected and become insufficiently critical. I’ll plead guilty myself here. I might have sometimes been too uncritical in the day job of Brexiteers or active managers, as I’ve tried too hard to be “fair”.

 - Libel laws. As Nick Cohen has shown, the cost of defending libel writs is so high as to have a chilling effect upon journalism; the misdeeds of the rich and powerful simply don’t get reported at all. This helps sustain inequality by leading the public to under-estimate the venality and corruption of the rich.

 - Wanting the scoop. Journalists’ healthy urge to get a story leads to a reliance upon sources who have their own agendas. We see one baleful and widespread effect of this in the advance leaking of speeches; “the Prime Minister will say today…”. Such leaks mean that analyses of the speech are quickly out-of-date and stale, with the upshot that the speaker gets less critical coverage than he should.

 - Cognitive biases. Every profession is prone to deformation professionnelle. One of journalists’ biases is the fundamental attribution error – the tendency to over-emphasize personal factors and under-rate environmental ones. For example, politicians are described as “weak” – think of John Major in the 90s – when in fact circumstances, such as a fractious party, make them so. It’s this failure to put things into context that led John Birt in 1975 to complain of the BBC’s “bias against understanding” – a bias which, says Steve Richards, still exists today.

  - News itself. “Dog bites man” is not news, “man bites dog” is. This means that everyday tragedies such as the fact that tens of thousands still die of poverty are underplayed, whilst the most trivial of first world problems are covered in depth. Also, news prizes “human interest” stories. These are almost equivalent to committing the base rate fallacy – of failing to ask “how common is that?” This can lead to a class bias: lively stories of benefit fraudsters get covered whilst the millions of decent people living in desperate conditions get ignored.

These biases tend to have the same effect: they lead to insufficiently critical coverage of the rich and powerful. In this sense, the claim that because the BBC is doing a good job because it is criticized from left and right is dubious. In fact It can be biased leftwards because of individuals’ occasional maladroit judgments, and biased rightwards for the above reasons.

You might object here that I’ve missed the obvious – that journalists do what their billionaire bosses tell them. That, though, is my point – that even without such pressure and without any conspiracy, journalism is biased to support the existing order.

Comments

[Matt Moore]

'Low pay' is never a cause of anything - its an outcome of something else. In this case, a very willing supply of eager-but-dim Henrys and Henriettas. Journalism is still very cool, and there are lots and lots of people quite willing and able to work for next to nothing.

The other blade of the scissors in this case is that the public don't demand high quality information. The primary satisfaction from news is a sort of refined entertainment value. Those who need actual information get it from specialist sources like Blomberg

[Luis Enrique]

there is also something, which I can tell I am going to fail to articulate very well, which is a combination of a desire for sensation with a strange attitude to the truth. When deciding whether to run a story journalists do not ask is this true or reasonable, but more something like: does this stand up? They need stories, and they set their 'good enough' bar low. They have structural incentives not to probe the flaws in a story because doing so will ruin the story. When you sit in that news meeting with the editor, they do not want to hear "nothing to see here", the industry selects individuals who can make a story out of nothing and somehow convince themselves that's a valid thing to be doing.

Matt "'Low pay' is never a cause of anything - its an outcome" - causality can run in two directions

[MN]

A fairly decent list. I also think Nick Davies's 2008 book, Flat Earth News, should be compulsory reading for anyone with even a slight interest in news (especially Chapter 4).

Won't come up with an alternative list, but will mention one thing I've found in my experience, which is that news organizations are prone to the same office politics that afflict any organization. This can impede the people with the best knowledge of a story from setting the editorial direction, as they don't always have the loudest voices.

In my experience, this can become a real problem when a story gets big and you suddenly have an abundance of cooks. And some of these cooks can be sharp-elbowed types who see the story while its big as a great vehicle to advance their ambitions.

In these situations, the reporters who know the story best can lose complete control of it at precisely the time it's getting the most attention.

[Andy Cooke]

I'd add "Artistic snobbery".

That is: people that work in the journalist industry tend to see mathematical and scientific illiteracy as not only being nothing of which to be ashamed, but often something of which to be proud. This lends itself to the writing and promotion of mathematical (even arithmetic) and scientifically illiterate (and even completely logically incoherent and inconsistent) stories.

[gastro george]

Ah, that was Ann Coulter that I bumped into on the Today programme this morning. I never thought (perhaps naively) that she was actually that insane. It was definitely a WTF moment.

[An Alien Visitor]

In the 1980's you only needed 5 o Levels to get a job on a newspaper, I should know I went for the interview!

The 'professionalisation' of many trades such as journalism has led to a class bias, which was predicted and widely discussed at the time. This did not stop the Blairites pushing through that agenda!

Culturally, of course, we are in a cesspit, where programmes are now disturbed by 5 minute entertainment news reports. This is what the 'masses' must want and what the 'masses' want...

I sometimes watch RT and I don't know if it is because it is their foreign service, but the quality of the reporting, while obviously serving certain interests, seems of a far higher intellectual standard to the news media we put up with.

Our media is a never ending stream of objectionable and privileged and nauseating 'columnists'.

If we were to follow up your list with a list of 'how to solve the problem' then putting the 'columnists' up against a wall would be high up on the list.

[Blissex]

as to sell-side Economists it is not just City Economists plenty of academics are also sell-side. A few because of ideology but many because of the prospect of working for the sell-side as "consultants" or a new employer. Only those political economists who are willing or condemned to suffer on a miserable upper-middle class professorial salary wont feel the temptation to ingratiate their potential sponsors on the sell-side.

[rogerh]

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Humbert Wolfe's words from way back.

The media has become more trivialised and more tribal. Advertising revenue down, support from vested interests up. Ed Bernays started the rot back in the '20s when he invented spin and the politicos caught on. Anyway, where else is a 2.2 in meeja studies to get a job? Indeed getting any sort of job that pays is a pressing problem.

[Blissex]

«Culturally, of course, we are in a cesspit, where programmes are now disturbed by 5 minute entertainment news reports. This is what the 'masses' must want and what the 'masses' want...»

«The media has become more trivialised and more tribal. Advertising revenue down, support from vested interests up.»

I tend to agree with the previous commenter that the problem is the 'masses'.

The 'masses' don't want to pay for good journalism, don't want to pay for loyal politicians, don't want to pay for internet services, and so on. The (southern propertied) 'masses' by and large think "Blow you! I'm allright Jack" and consequently "Entertain me!". They think that politics, information, communications, are spectator sports.

The 'masses' in other words think like absentee rentiers, and much good it will do to them :-).

The problem is that systems designed by (and not necessarily for) absentee rentiers tend to be long lived and resistant to change, especially when there is a sliver of hope for some of the outsiders to become insiders.

[Chis]

Another bias that is natural to news is speed. We get reports of things happening now. Lots of improvements to the world happen slowly, whereas many bad things happen quickly. If only the very recent is reported, we get a distorted world view.

It's why we don't generally know how many fewer are dying in war, how much improved developing countries are off, wtc.

[MN]

Yes, speed is a news bias. The first take on a given item of news, which is usually just a headline, has to be done within seconds of the news breaking, and the second take within minutes of that. Then a decision has to be make whether a third take is needed. Most news doesn't make the cut, so the first couple of takes are all you're left with.

I'd focus on the practical question of what this implies about most news given the speed/quality trade-off, rather than the abstract point about good things happening slowly and bad things happening quickly. If anything, we're bias against bad shit happening slowly, eg climate change, the erosion of public services caused by austerity, the political and social collapses of countries and whole region.