"Biased?"
7 December, 2000
Sometimes I feel like Alice, fallen through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy world. Take the daily newspaper. For a very long time I only subscribed to the Sunday paper. On Sunday morning I would read the front page, then turn to the editorials and comics. Later in the day or later in the week I would thumb through other parts of the paper. Sometime this last year, as part of a promotion, they started giving us the weekday paper, free. On a typical weekday I would read the front page. That's it. If it weren't for Michael reading the funnies, the daily papers would never be opened.
But a couple of weeks ago the News Guild went on-strike. The newspaper showing up on our doorstep suddenly was much thinner - sometimes no more than 12 pages. The striking reporters and columnists set up a web site where they are posting news articles and commentary every day.
And suddenly, I'm reading the paper. I open it up and look at the whole thing. I go to the union website and browse the headlines, reading the stories that grab my attention. It's kind of weird. But it brought another bit of topsy-turvy-ness to my attention.
As always happens after an election, people are making claims of bias in the news media. Republicans talk of the "obvious liberal bias." Democrats lament the "puzzling conservative bias." Other parties decry "corporate bias" or "large-party bias" and so forth.
There are biases in the media, but they aren't as simple as all that. Last week was the anniversary of "The Battle in Seattle," the protests against the World Trade Organization summit. Several of the organizations which participated in the protest planned new demonstrations to commemorate the event. All the local and regional television stations had extra news crews out, looking for newsworthy incidents related to the protests.
In the wee small hours of last Wednesday morning, a 43-year-old woman who had checked into a downtown hotel the day before smashed the glass out of the window of her 43rd-story room and leaped to her death. Her body struck the pavement just a few feet from a delivery truck driver who was going about his business at 5:45 in the morning. He described it as the most horrifying thing he had ever seen.
The police quickly cordoned off the street to begin the investigation. News crews showed up, but as soon as they learned the event wasn't related to WTO, they left. A newsworthy event happened, but it wasn't covered by any of the television stations, and it received barely two inches in the two local daily papers. Now, in the newspaper's defense, both dailies are operating on reduced staffs because of the strike. One of the striking writers did cover the story, and the union posted her in-depth coverage on their website.
But the incident does illustrate the true bias that underlies most of the news coverage available to us. In a world where hundreds of cable stations and the internet compete with the traditional broadcast and print media for our time, reporters must grab our attention fast. That means they cover only the most sensational, lurid, and titillating stories. They only cover stories that can by summed up in a pithy headline or cute one-sentence introduction. They cover stories that are related to topics which their focus groups and polls tell them we care about. Or they cover stories related to events that everyone else is covering.
And above all, they rush to be first to report anything, no matter how flimsy the evidence is, or whether they have actually checked any of the facts.
Last Wednesday every local station led with a story about the windows of a certain chain of coffee shops being smashed. No one mentioned the woman who decided to end her life just a few blocks away from those vandalized stores. It was assumed (though hardly proved) that the vandalism was related to the WTO protests. Because the WTO anniversary was one of the few topics the local media had been covering for the previous week, that's all they thought we would be interested in.
I'm sorry, a human death is more important than some smashed windows in a coffee shop. If those same windows had been smashed a month ago, they wouldn't have been the lead story. If the woman had mentioned the WTO in her suicide note, she would have been the lead story.
Which is just backwards. Topsy-turvy.
Maybe we've all fallen through the looking glass. It would explain a lot.