Medium Bias
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Bias is pervasive in the news.
Much of it is safely compartmentalized in an Opinion or Editorial section, siloed off from the actual news content. But fuzziness between these two worlds has caused untold damage to the public’s perception of what news actually is, how much journalists can be trusted, and whether or not there’s such a thing as objective reality distinct from one’s perception of reality.
Even when the editorial content has been concretely walled-off from the actual reporting, though, and even in publications that aim for balance between views, there will always be bias in the news.
This is not a dig at journalism: this is true of every possible medium and every possible flavor of content presented via those mediums. Information vehicles, by their very nature, imbue the information they present with latent biases.
When it comes to the news, for instance, consider how unlikely it would be to find, on the front page of a typical newspaper, a story about a plane that didn’t crash or a story about a terrorist attack that didn’t happen. Not a story about planes that were saved, not terrorist attacks that were prevented: a normal plane journey, and a normal, non-terrorism-afflicted day.
This would be unusual because planes almost always do not crash and terrorist attacks are massively abnormal. If the opposite were true, it would make sense to report on these things. But because most planes get from A to B without incident, and because most places around the world have never been targeted by a terrorist attack, it would be fairly bizarre to find reporting on such non-stories in any newspaper, much less on the front page.
The news, by its very nature, is about presenting the newsworthy. And “newsworthy” almost always means unusual or otherwise notable in some way. If you want to read about normal things that happen all the time, maybe read a list of statistics—that’s not what the news is for.
Thus, the bias at the root of journalism, with few exceptions, leans toward the newsworthy. It favors certain types of information, and consequently, skews the data about the world that readers of the news receive.
One potential consequence of this type of latent bias is that those of us who get most or all of our information about the world from the news could, over time, come to perceive plane crashes, terrorist attacks, and other unlikely things as commonplace. After all, we see these sorts of things happening in the news fairly regularly.
This is partially the consequence of what’s called the availability heuristic, which says, essentially, that we give increased perceived importance to things we can more easily recall from memory. Thus, if the most recent thing we heard about the airline industry is that a plane crashed, our brains will be likely to flag that article about the plane crash as more important and potentially more true than our understanding of how relatively safe airline travel actually is compared to other possible methods, based on less-recent, less-available data.
There’s also a hint of what’s sometimes called anchoring in this tendency, which is a type of cognitive bias that causes us to perceive new information through the lens of an existing, anchored piece of information that we already possess—that anchored information likely to have been derived from a data source we engage with regularly, like the news.
This medium-specific bias can be powerful, especially since it’s not obvious that it exists: we’re more likely to focus on ideological bias than medium bias, I think, when we pay attention to potential biases, at all.
But medium bias is also incredibly potent because it’s latent in every possible medium and format through which we might receive information.
Twitter has a bias toward information that can be contained within a certain number of characters and using certain types of media, like images and gifs. Its interactive tools, like retweets and likes, incentivize certain types of engagement and gamifies particular types of behavior. This, in turn, shapes content on the Twitter network.
Books are biased toward information that can be communicated using primarily words and still images: whatever can be economically printed upon pages, and increasingly, on digital pages, using contemporary technology. Books are generally longer than a tweet or a greeting card, though the exact contents and number of pages have traditionally been determined in large part by the printing and production infrastructure available, and the prevailing business models at play. The cost of production and methods of distribution, alongside the character of the object itself, shapes the content books typically contain.
The way music is distributed—from where it’s played, to the capacity of 45s and cassettes and CD-ROMs, to the transmission rate of early internet peer-to-peer networks—influences the length of songs and albums, the types of instruments, notes, and rhythms favored, and the genres of music that tend to get the most distribution and play at a particular moment in time. When music became portable because of radios in cars, when music began streaming and became necessarily bandwidth-conscious, when music was initially recorded rather than only presented live, in person: the shape of music changed.
These sorts of biases, then, are generally emergent from the limitations and possibilities of a medium, and the incentives, technologies, and traditions involved, rather than by people or entities intentionally trying to sway others toward a particular way of thinking or behaving.
Purposefully insinuated ideological bias of that kind often does exist within such content, as well, but the medium bias underpinning that ideological bias is arguably more pernicious and less likely to be noticed.
Being aware of this bias, unfortunately, doesn’t necessarily mean we can avoid it, or even avoid including it in our own work.
It is possible to be aware of how much information about the world we acquire from different types of media, however, and knowing that allows us to make an earnest effort to balance them out, just as we might try to balance our intake of ideologically slanted news or entertainment.
I have a special fondness for books, but if we glean everything we know about the world from books, which have specific incentives, business models, limitations, and advantages partially determining what information they present us with, and how they present it, there’s a good chance that some facets of the world will be obscured or invisible to us.
This is not because anyone in the book publishing industry is attempting to keep us ignorant. It’s just that the nature of the medium through which we primarily perceive the world can minutely or immensely distort our perception of the world in a non-insidious but very real way.
Consider, then, reading books and the news, but also listening to podcasts, watching films and television shows, playing games, talking to friends and strangers, taking in a play, and reading both obscure and popular blogs (and email-based publications) on the internet.
All of these mediums have their own pros and cons, and those distinctions extend all the way down to the most fundamental level of what they are and how they operate.
These biases are inextricable from the work, which means our only option, should we desire to more consciously focus our intellectual lenses, is to reconfigure our inputs, aiming as much as possible for medium agnosticism and omnivorousness.
If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy my podcast, Let’s Know Things.