December 24, 2004

I’ve been told it’s a sign of aging, but I don’t care. I love NPR.

Much fuss is raised over bias in news sources. Fox News is right wing, according to The Ubiquitous They (TUT), while CNN has a left wing bias. NPR gets characterized as “leftist,” and I’ve got to admit that the radio organization seems to have earned the label.

But in citing differences, folks overlook the biases shared by Fox and CNN. The shared biases are far more dangerous, in my view, and far less commonly cited. My view comes largely from an article I read as an undergraduate by W. Lance Bennett entitled “News Content: Four Information Biases that Matter” which identified four systematic biases in mass mediated news sources.

personalization: news sources are disproportionately likely to report stories that relate to an individual with whom the consumer of news can identify

dramatization: news sources prefer dramatic stories – outside of Bennett’s essay, this preference often leads critics to use the word “sensationalism”

fragmentation: since news is presented to make money, news broadcasts are usually designed to entertain viewers rather than to inform them. as a result of this bias in design, news sources frequently omit background information that would allow the viewer to view a news item as a part of a larger whole rather than as an isolated incident

authority-disorder bias: news sources are disproportionately likely to report on stories in which events may be clearly compared or clearly contrasted with the words or actions of a purported authority figure

My affection for NPR comes from the biases identified by Bennett – the “Four Bennettian Biases”, as I’ll call them. While the NPR newsroom may be justly accused of listing to port, NPR does an unusually good job of avoiding the Four Bennettian Biases. Those biases are more dangerous than a lean to the left or right for at least three reasons:

1) while a left- or right- tilt may slant information, the Four Bennettian Biases often make relevant information unavailable altogether
a. the opposite perspective – that no political tilt evinces a more egregious breach of journalistic objectivity than do the Four Bennettian Biases – is based on the faulty premise that protecting the public from insidious democratic or republican urgings is more important than bringing issues of national importance to the public consciousness in the first place
b. I accept the contrary premise that providing slanted information is better than providing no information at all
c. a preoccupation with mass mediated democratic-republican urgings at the expense of concern for inadequate issue-raising emphasizes the short-term over the long-term, I think
2) the Four Bennettian Biases are more pervasive than biases to the left or right
a. while Fox News and CNN may serve as counterweights to one another, almost all the news sources exemplify the Four Bennettian Biases
b. the only televised news source that may avoid the Four Bennettian Biases is CSPAN
3) the Four Bennettian Biases are largely unrecognized, so consumers may not take those biases into account when consuming news
a. whereas democratic or republican leanings are so frequently denounced that consumers may keep them in mind while reading, watching or listening to the news

The Four Bennettian Biases may also be newer biases than political tilt. Many critics denouncing political tilt in the modern news implicitly hearken back to a time when news was ostensibly unbiased. They bash modern news sources by comparison. But a general rule of thumb for interpreting the words of others is: beware the Myth of the Hallowed Yesterday. Political bias is nothing new. In fact, if we use the beginnings of the American republic and 2005 and endpoints, ignoring what one might characterize as intermediate fluctuations, we see a decrease in the political tilt of news sources. In the days of the Federalist Papers and Paine’s Common Sense, “newspapers” frequently bashed one political candidate or party and extolled the other. There was no semblance of objectivity. Today, by comparison, even what is probably our most politically tilted major source of mass mediated news – Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News – at least pays lip service to the ideals of fairness and balance and, by comparison to the tabloid-like newspapers of the late-18th century, comes close to the mark.

While NPR doesn’t deviate from the ideal of objectivity as much as Fox News does – the “absolute value” of Fox News is less than the absolute value of NPR, if you will – NPR does lean leftward. But NPR does a great job of avoiding the Four Bennettian Biases. We should note, however, that NPR gets government dollars and that CSPAN, the other Bennett-friendly news source I’ve mentioned here, has a tiny viewership. Maybe NPR’s funding and CSPAN’s audience size suggest that a news source in line with Bennett’s values is commercially impossible.

Getting Speculative . . .
The commercial impossibility of Bennett-friendly news points to a deeper-rooted problem in the US – citizen apathy. After all, Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the news tycoons are only selling the public what it wants. Murdoch & Co. would provide unbiased, detailed news if doing so was profitable. But the citizenry doesn’t want news disentangled from the Four Bennettian Biases and free from political tilt; it wants entertainment tailored to the viewers’ preexisting beliefs. Citizens don’t seek unbiased information because they don’t care about unbiased information. They don’t care about unbiased information because they don’t care enough about problems of national governance. American citizens take their nation’s prominence and solidarity for granted, as did the citizens of the late Roman republic, and the resultant unconcern for things political will foment the demise of American hegemony. Such is the path of dominant nations. No nation, especially a republic, can long endure without a concerned and informed public.