The Citizen Journalism Manual…

11. On bias

Published in

PacificEdge

9 min readJul 30, 2022

“But I think that no matter how smart, people usually see what they’re already looking for, that’s all”…Veronica Roth, Allegiant.

BIAS is the expressing an intentional or unintentional preference for something such as a particular point of view, politics, ideology, interpretation of history, and so on. It is something that citizen journalists should look for and it is something that citizen journalists indulge in, whether they mean to or whether it is done unconsciously.

Bias is generally thought of as something negative because it ignores, devalues or otherwise downgrades other points of view. When we consider a bias for presenting factual evidence in a story and for fair and comprehensive reporting, bias can be viewed as something positive.

How bias works

Bias through personal filters

In thinking about the whether something is biased we should remember that we all assess information through the filters of our own experience, education, knowledge, beliefs, assumptions and attitudes. Allowing these things to distort our perceptions leads to reporting what we think is true or what we want to be true rather than what is actually true.

Similarly, our emotional response to something can bias our reporting. It might be best not to write when we are feeling emotionally charged. Wait until we are calmer and can see things more objectively.

Dealing with biases

Our work in citizen journalism will expose us to a range of biases. Some of these have to do with our own biases and their role in influencing who we talk to, the questions we ask and what we write. Others are biases common in our society that we need be aware of.

Identifying when a bias is operating is important, especially when it is one of our own. Here are some of the biases we might find present in ourselves and in decisions made by business, government and others.

Common biases

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is reporting and giving credibility only to information that supports what we believe. Contrary information is disregarded. We focus on what we think is true and what we want to believe and reject what does not agree with our beliefs.

Social media provides a wealth of examples of confirmation bias. One example I have followed is how people opposing vaccinations often link only to research and reports confirming their oppositional stance and seldom link to those supporting vaccination. This, despite some of the reports and research they link to having been disproven or shown to be erroneous or deceptive. Those supporting vaccination sometimes do this, however they appear to do it less frequently.

The danger that confirmation bias brings to groups is that it creates an ‘echo chamber’ in which supportive messages acceptable to the group are bounced back and forth and contrary evidence ignored or regarded in a hostile manner. Thus, certain beliefs and attitudes are adopted as truths and become embedded as shared group beliefs, like a fly in glue (that’s an analogy, something we can use in our writing to reinforce a point).

Authority bias

This is a bias that attributes greater credibility and influence to people with some kind of authority, whether formal or informal.

Sometimes, people without qualifications pass themselves off as having authority, such as some influential people writing on health on social media. The authority of others may come through formal qualifications, experience or roles such as medical staff or police.

When dealing with people making comments we can ask:

who is delivering the message and what are their motivations?
what do they claim to represent? — a civil authority? a profession? an organisation?
do they have a formal role in the organisation they speak for?
do they have authority, formal or informal, to speak for some group, ethnicity or religion?
are they empowered legally or by qualification or experience to deliver their message?
how likely is what they say to be true?

Availability bias

This is making choices based on what is available at the time.

People are talking about the availability bias when we hear them ask ‘why doesn’t the mainstream media report this?’. It is a useful question for which there are a number of answers:

one explanation is what media organisations regard as newsworthy to their audience; in a specialist publication there is little value in reporting things that a readership is not interested in; we see this in social media where an admin might disallow some post because it is ‘off-topic’
media organisations have only limited space in print and online publications or time in TV and radio production in which to report something; this means that some stories of potential interest to an audience go unreported
another reality is that media organisations do not have reporters in all places and so miss what could be significant and interesting events.

The availability of mobile phones with cameras capable of stills and video photography, as well as telecommunications networks and social media have reduced the availability bias by broadening reporting by people posting images and news that they come across on social media, as well as by citizen journalists; the Russian war in Ukraine provides examples, with Ukrainian citizens and citizen journalists posting short video pieces on Telegram and Twitter; the development can be regarded as a democratisation of journalism through enlarging the pool of material.

We are now exposed to a broader range of information than we were in the days when print and electronic (radio, TV) media fielded reporters in distant parts of the world. Today, reporting is done by the big news agencies such as AAP, Reuters, CNN and others who have journalists and photographers ready to go to or who are based in different regions. Freelance journalists, photo-and-video journalists supplement the work of staff journalists.

There are also ‘stringers’ available on call to produce news content for a media organisation in another city or country. As an example, I used to be a Sydney-based stringer for a Melbourne-based national public radio news service. A producer in Melbourne would call and brief me on their needs and I would produce interviews and radio current affairs material and courier that to Melbourne.

Even though more material is available now, what becomes news remains a small part of the quantity of material with news potential. We only have what is available to base our citizen journalism upon—the availability bias.

Path dependency

Availability bias can lead to what is known as ‘path dependency’. This occurs when an initial choice made from what is available sets us or an organisation, business or government on a particular path of consequent choices. Decisions along one axis constrain possibilities along another.

Take computers. If we buy, say, an Apple or Windows laptop then we set off down a path dependent upon the software, peripherals and other equipment that are compatible with the brand. This makes working with the technology easier because of compatibility between equipment, software and operating system, however at the same time it limits choice, directing us along a certain path dependent on Apple or Windows-compatible products.

Path dependency can be a difficult thing to escape from because we invest time, energy and funding in what we engage in.

Sunk-cost bias

Sunk-cost bias often follows from path dependency. When we put resources — financial, technological, emotional, intellectual, material, temporal — into something the tendency is to stick with it even when the outputs are of lower quality and even when adopting something new would produce better outcomes. The sunk costs in resources hold back change.

In writing about organisations we sometimes find the resistance to changing course is based on the high cost of the change. As an example, a national, community-based organisation invested in purchasing a website theme and invested volunteer knowledge and time in integrating mapping and membership systems. That done, a new member who had knowledge of IT systems then wanted to use a different theme and membership system, however the financial and volunteer time costs sunk into the existing system led to his idea being opposed. With the original system having been debugged and now working well, the sunk cost bias favoured continuing to use what was working.

When the NSW state government decided in 2017 to cancel local government amalgamations, some local governments had already sunk costs into infrastructure for amalgamation to the extent that de-amalgamating would have been too disruptive and expensive. This illustrates how sunk cost bias in decision making is linked to path dependency. Those local governments had already travelled along the path of amalgamation to such an extent that they had become dependent on its continuation.

A further example is the transition to renewable forms of energy that Australia is going through at the time of writing. The coal and fossil fuel industries have considerable sunk-cost investments in fossil fuel processing and distribution, however a heating climate is driving a move towards renewables that could leave fossil fuel infrastructure as stranded assets—those no longer of use.

The way to determine whether sunk-costs should determine the path is to assess outputs rather than investment.

The sunk cost bias van be a driver of innovation or a brake on it, and we are likely to come across it in our journalism.

Status quo bias

We find this where the existing or default situation is framed as the preferred. It may be based on sunk-cost bias and any consequent path dependency. Sticking with the status quo can be seen as the easier choice. It might not be the best choice.

An example occurs in politics when a government talks up a threat and claims to be the only party capable of properly addressing it, biasing the status quo as the preferred solution.

In media communication we need to look out for messages framing the status quo as the preferred solution, rather than changing it. We see the bias during election campaigns. Promoting change would call for a reframing of the situation.

Loss aversion bias

Loss aversion arises when the potential outcomes of decisions are framed in terms of loss rather than gains. This is powerful tactic and can be used to reinforce the status quo bias.

It can develop from path dependency and sunk-cost bias where financial and other resources have been invested in something and the loss through taking a different path is said to be too great.

Being aware of biases

As citizen journalists it is helpful if we identify our own biases so we make our stories inclusive of ideas we personally do not agree with but which make for better-rounded stories that better inform our readers. Including them does not imply we do not criticise them. At the same time we look out for the different biases in individuals, businesses, government and even community organisations we write about.