The case for a media bias dashboard
Emerging metrics let news outlets analyze their choice of stories, sources, and language. Can this aid audience trust?
This is an excerpt from a piece that ran in the Columbia Journalism Review. Click here for the original.
Twitter is excellent at capturing a moment in time — and that’s part of its problem. On the day Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced charges against Paul Manafort in the Trump-Russia investigation, some people on Twitter took perverse glee in sharing the story Fox & Friends previewed at 8:13am Eastern: cheeseburger emojis.
But what does that prove? ABC, NBC, CNBC, and Univision covered the emoji story, too. More importantly, a one-second screen grab from any network tells you close to nothing, when there are 86,400 seconds in a day.
Media critics can do better. They already have access to several Internet Archive tools that make investigations of bias and balance more rigorous: These include Television Explorer, Face-O-Matic, and Third Eye. The New York Times used that last one to find that Fox did cover Manafort’s indictment immediately after 8am, just like CNN and MSNBC. The cheeseburger story lasted only a few minutes.
And even more sophisticated methods could be on the way. Academics are making advances in large-scale content analysis, which can reveal much about news outlets’ choices of stories, sources, and language. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are allowing computers to read facial expressions and vocal tone. Researchers have also come up with new approaches to baselines, addressing the pesky question of what content to treat as normal or desirable.
Of course, none of these measures in isolation reveals whether a newspaper or network is “biased.” But if academics and journalists could just agree upfront on the methodology, there could soon come a day when we could inform our discussions using an advanced dashboard of metrics, rather than a single anecdote or flawed human recollection.
‘There’s gotta be some influence’
US politicians have been lobbing charges of “bias” since the earliest days of the republic, so it’s easy to see those charges as empty partisan ploys. Often, they are. But these are claims most Americans believe. And maybe journalists shouldn’t dismiss public opinion out of hand. After all, while 28 percent of journalists identify as Democrats, just 7 percent identify as Republicans. (A full 50 percent identify as independent.)
Most reporters will claim they know how to keep their opinions out of their reporting — but with humans notoriously bad at recognizing and managing their own biases, there’s a case that media companies really should care about this issue.
“I think most conservatives would just say that there’s gotta be some influence if reporters are disproportionately Democrats or liberals [versus Republicans],” says Matt Grossmann, Director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University.
Who cares?
So there’s good rationale for a bias dashboard. Whether anyone wants such a dashboard — or if they just want others to use it — is a different question. Howard Kurtz, host of Fox News’s Media Buzz, says audiences are too politically polarized, and would be skeptical of the neutrality of such a dashboard.
Tim Groeling, a communication professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, thinks the problem is even more basic: Most of the public just doesn’t care about the news.
An alternative could be to keep the tool completely internal, to advise the newsroom without publicizing findings. Think of it like Chartbeat for partisan balance.
Fox’s Kurtz questions how much appetite news outlets really have to pay for such a tool. But Jennifer Dargan, a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, speculates that the economics might work: Publishers could use the tool to prove to advertisers that they have a better-quality product.
There is, however, at least one bias baseline this tool wouldn’t address. That’s whether journalists — who frequently don’t live in the places they write about — cover the interests of political and economic elites over the actual concerns of their readers. There’s no metric for that, yet.
Tamar Wilner is a Dallas-based freelance journalist and researcher who writes about misinformation, fact-checking, science communication, and all things media. She tweets at @tamarwilner.
