Harvard College Democrats

Greetings, and a little game of What-If

Posted 12/31/09 by Nikko Pomata

I’ve been thinking back a bit on when we were all advised to blog over J-Term–was that really over a month ago?–and I figured, well, might as well start now.  A sort of New Year’s Resolution, perhaps.  (Yes, it’s not quite the new year; call it . . . an investment, then.)  So here I am, adding my own little bias to the (already well-tilted) blogosphere.

But fancy for a moment that I’m not biased, because the musings that have brought me to the blog this day concern that old favorite specter of media bias: what if our news weren’t biased?

Oh, no, it’s not just a matter of reporters being careful about their opinions; as far as I can tell, the bias exhibited by mainstream, non-opinion-based (sorry, Fox News, primetime MSNBC, and Daily Show/Colbert Report) news is not so straightforward as mere opinionated coverage.  But it’s still a matter of how a story is approached: what if reporters approached stories with the attitude that these stories have biases that must be reflected in their reporting?

Take, to start on the other side of the aisle, the University of East Anglia leaked documents scandal (or, as some of the louder commentators love to call it, “Climategate”).  Here is a story with, it seems to me, an inherent conservative (or, more precisely, anti-global-warming-action) bias.  Here is an example of members of one side of the debate enhancing their data presentation and thus their argument; you simply cannot report the story and make liberals look better, and, more to the point, you cannot cover it fairly without making liberals look worse.  But we do  not have to stray far to find an example of a story with a liberal bias: the conservative overreaction to the story they dubbed Climategate.  Because while I mention that that story does have a conservative bias, it doesn’t seem strong enough to warrant the story’s publishing outside of a couple of scientific journals, a UEA college paper, and maybe a couple local papers as well.  Because, after all, all the “scandal” really amounts to is the addition of a favorable points to a graph to make the unfavorable points look better; the data on which the climate debate is based is in no way altered.  Yet the moment conservatives around the world saw that email, they pounced on it like a bunch of idiots, acting as if it actually did show an alteration of data.  And if they acted like idiots, well, that’s precisely what coverage should show them to be.

It’s really about facts: how much should facts be pursued?  What should be treated as facts?  What is the role of uncertainty in reporting?  Take the lesson in fearmongering that was the leadup to the Large Hadron Collider’s startup.  The guy who stated on the Daily Show that the LHC had a 50/50 chance of destroying the world because of his personal probability theory based on concepts that would be dubious to a first-grader should not be given attention by serious media outlets, let alone interviews.  But it does reflect on a wider consequence of the concept of two sides to every story, and so we must ask: what if the media recognized that, just because those two sides exist, does not mean that both are serious enough to elicit coverage–or at least, that the sides are not equal; for example, a lot of concern by individual citizens might have been saved if, every time a news source mentioned “concerns” about the LHC destroying the world, it had also mentioned that scientific consensus held there to be hundreds of other “concerns” to be more likely to destroy the world than the collider.

So what if the media took it upon themselves to investigate those facts–to ask penetrating questions not just of the subjects of their interviews but also the material for their stories, to balance their stories not just by keeping out their own opinions, but by guarding against infiltration by those of the newsmakers?  Well, we might not have heard so much from those health care loonies this summer.  Imagine if news sources had taken greater pains to, rather than just showing some shouting town hall protesters, caveat that these were only isolated town halls and explain just how poorly grounded in fact the protesters’ rants truly were.  And think of how differently the debate might have continued had the media, rather than just showing Sarah Palin’s “death panel” post on Facebook as her opinion, compared it with the objective fact of the actual bill,  in which end-of-life coverage was ultimately left entirely to the patient, and stated that even considering that the opposite could be true would be a horrid perversion of legislative interpretation.

Were all of this the case, heck, we wouldn’t have much need to rely on analysis based on opinions, as non-opinionated media would be capable of telling us what may be improbable, absurd, or unethical, safe in the knowledge that that’s not necessarily bias just because it might, in a fair display of facts, benefit one side or the other.

But that’s just a ridiculous flight of fancy.