News Seem Biased Against Your Side? That May Be a Good Thing

Over the last week, a few people have been asking me for my take on media coverage regarding Israel and Gaza. Is there media bias? Ironically, I assigned a study on this very topic in my class this week. When I made the syllabus months ago, I had no idea another controversial Israeli military operation would be in the news. A generation later, Vallone, Ross and Lepper’s classic study is instructive for understanding how audiences perceive media bias.

The study is based on media coverage of the Beirut Massacre from 1982. Like most controversial military operations, accounts differ and it is impossible to fully say what happened. What most parties agree to is that at least 700 civilian refugees were murdered by a Lebanese Christian militia, and the Israeli military bore at least some responsibility for not stopping the killings in territory they occupied at the time. However, Vallone and his co-authors felt there were so many factual disputes in 1985 that they could not score a 16 question “objective” questionnaire to test study participants’ knowledge of the incident.

Instead, the study focuses on how participants make sense of news content. Vallone, Ross and Lepper had a novel study design. They recruited groups of self-identified pro-Israeli students, pro-Arab students, and neutral students. (Today, we would probably recruit a pro-Palestinian group instead of a pro-Arab group.) Every study participant was shown the exact same 36 minutes of television news coverage, then asked a short set of survey questions about the portrayal of Israel. Here’s how the 3 groups evaluated the media’s treatment of Israel on a 1-9 scale, with 1 being opposition and 9 being support:

Each survey question followed the same pattern, which Vallone, Ross and Lepper called the “hostile media phenomenon.” Pro-Israel viewers saw the news coverage as biased against them. Pro-Arab viewers looked at the exact same news stories and reached the opposite conclusion. Neutral audiences are somewhere in the middle. We shouldn’t interpret neutral viewers skewing towards “media bias against Israel” as a strong sign of biased coverage. It could also mean “neutrals” were more sympathetic to Israel than Arabs at the start of the study.

People tend to see the news as biased against them. As I explained to my students, there is a key difference between perceptions of media bias and “actual” media bias. “Actual” bias is inevitable whenever we tell stories, because we can’t describe everything going on in the world and we can’t perfectly represent others’ perceptions of the world. These biases are easiest to observe in story selection, because we can start with an objective set of possible stories and compare it to an objective set of stories that actually get published.

Perceptions of bias are more relative. In order to label some set of news coverage as “biased,” we need to have some conception in our heads of a “less biased” alternative. People who feel very informed on an issue and take a particular side seem to have an easier time imagining alternatives. Vallone, Ross and Lepper found viewers who described themselves as highly informed and supporting one side saw more bias in the news than less informed people supporting that side. (Today, these groups may be the people who only consume partisan news.) Meanwhile, people describing themselves as well-informed neutrals saw the least media bias of any group.

For journalists, these survey results are hardly surprising. Many veteran reporters are actually reassured by accusations of bias, as long as those slings and arrows come from all directions. Leaving the most active and partisan readers unhappy is often a sign that a reporter did a good job of maintaining their independence. When only one side complains about coverage of a controversial issue, that could be a warning that journalists tilted too far to cater to the other side.

Who Shot Down the Plane? Expect Biased Coverage

Within the last hour, United States intelligence officials have publicly confirmed an assessment that a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying 295 people crashed in eastern Ukraine this morning after being shot down by an antiaircraft missile. As of writing this post, no one knows for sure what happened and who may have fired a missile.

As we might expect, politicians on both sides of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine are denying involvement, while placing blame on the other side. Ukrainian officials blame pro-Russian separatists, claiming separatists also fired on Ukrainian military planes earlier this week. Putin went on television to blame Ukraine , saying “This tragedy would not have happened if there was peace in this land.” NATO’s secretary general released a statement saying “the instability in the region, caused by Russian-backed separatists, has created an increasingly dangerous situation.”

Obviously, there are no independent sources who can give a clear and unbiased account of what happened earlier today. The passengers and crew of the Malaysia Airlines flight are dead. If anyone fired a missile at the plane, they have a good reason not to take responsibility. Historically, militaries almost always deny responsibility, at least initially. Shooting at a civilian passenger airline is considered a heinous act that tends to bring strong condemnation from the rest of the world, even when the incident is accidental. It’s easy to imagine that if either Russia or Ukraine is proven to have fired the missile, the United States and other European powers may shift their stance against whoever took down the passenger jet.

For a reporter, covering this situation is extremely difficult. Everyone has an incentive to lie. To make it worse, there is no way for reporters to independently know who is lying and who is not. Some Associated Press reports indicate that one or more AP reporters saw an antiaircraft missile battery in separatist controlled parts of eastern Ukraine earlier this week. However, that evidence is far from knowing who hit the fire button and why they may have done it. Reporters in these situations are faced with two bad options:

1. Shrug your shoulders and print everything. When reporters do not know who is credible, they often default to a stance of assuming everyone is credible. This is what we would expect under journalistic norms of objectivity, where the burden is normally on the journalist to find some reason to reject a nation’s claims.
2. Reject one nation’s claims as being self-serving. Several nations that have adversarial relationships with the United States rarely get news coverage by US outlets. American news agencies rarely quoted the Soviets during the Cold War, or Iraqi leaders claims about weapons of mass destruction in 2003-03.

A wide range of studies have shown that news coverage (at least American news coverage) is less objective when it comes to foreign policy. When writing a story, reporters have to make a guess of who to trust, so they typically the officials from their home country more than other officials. Drawing from Entman’s 2004 studies of framing and foreign policy, American news outlets may be more likely to feature the story over the plane being shot down because it involves the Russians, while they may be less likely to feature Israel sending ground troops in to Gaza today. (It will be interesting to see how these two international crises are covered on television news tonight, since TV news cannot broadcast on both at the same time.)

Eventually, we would expect coverage to become somewhat more objective over time. Nations often begin to drop their denials. Reporters may have more of an opportunity to piece things together over time. Drawing on the case of the Iraq War of 2003, Baum and Groeling (2009) argue that policymakers will always have some advantage in framing foreign policy because other reporters and the public have less direct interaction with foreign affairs. These advantages diminish over time. However, it is unlikely that they would go away completely. Clayman et al (2007) found that journalists tend to be less aggressive when asking questions in press conferences when asking about foreign policy.

Now that Joe Biden has said the plane was “shot down, not an accident, blown out of the sky,” we would expect most American news agencies to go along with his assessment. We’d expect to see fewer doubts or hypotheticals. If American officials publicly say someone is at fault, expect to see that nation’s denials start to disappear from mainstream U.S. based reporting.

 

Update (10 AM PST, 7/18): The United States has issued a preliminary intelligence assessment that the plane was shot down by pro-Russia separatists. The latest Washington Post story puts Russian denials in the 13th paragraph, after quoted from Obama, Samantha Power (US ambassador to the UN) and two leading Ukrainian officials. It’s a way to publish the denial, but only after the deck is stacked to the side endorsed by the President of the United States.

An Odd Form of American Exceptionalism?

As I assume many readers are aware, Barack Obama decided to address the nation at 9 PM ET last night. 9 PM is a traditional time to try and catch the largest number of viewers. Any earlier and the West coast audience would be stuck in traffic.  (OK, a lot of people in LA would still be stuck in traffic, but you can’t win them all.) If you haven’t seen the speech, it is embedded below.

Obama’s timing makes a lot of sense for the American audience. If he waits any longer, he may look non-committal or indecisive. Advocating a bombing on the anniversary of 9/11 may not have gone over well. Unfortunately for President Obama, a number of people had already made different commitments to chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

And the USA just scored in soccer, so just be aware that all the USAUSAUSA you're seeing in your feeds is not a result of this speech.

— Caitlin Kelly (@caitlin__kelly) September 11, 2013

For those of you who do not follow soccer, the US-Mexico rivalry has grown increasingly bitter over the years, continually bringing in more viewers. ESPN reported a 1.9 overnight rating, not including people who watch online. That rating is comparable to ESPN’s baseball and basketball broadcasts. Of course, soccer is hardly the most popular sport in the US, but it is in many parts of the world.

How many heads of state could decide to address the nation at the same time as a major World Cup qualifier and still get their citizens’ attention? The United States may be on its own.

Syria and the Range of “Publishable” Opinion on War

As the Obama administration has aggressively pushed its case for military strikes against Syria, people have asked me why mainstream media organizations appear to reduce the debate to a question of either military strikes or doing nothing. This framing seems to help the administration’s argument: doing nothing is morally unacceptable, therefore the United States needs to engage in military strikes. Where are the more substantive anti-war arguments? Some sociologists have already written about the ethical case against bombing Syria. Can sociology help explain why we don’t see similar arguments in major American news organizations?

Sociologists have studied a wide range of news coverage, but tend to focus more on the conflict between states and non-state actors (i.e. political protests) than conflicts between states. News coverage of war and foreign policy tends to be the domain of political scientists who have crossed over in to communications departments. Scholars agree on three broad premises: American officials tend to dominate coverage, foreign officials are overwhelmingly excluded, and presidents have large advantages over other officials. But when will we see opposition to a president’s military plans in the mainstream American press?

Reporters’ deference to official sources has major implications for coverage of potential military interventions. News organizations will only publish opposition if that opposition comes from official sources. Anti-war protesters sitting behind John Kerry during Wednesday’s Senate testimony did not get quoted in the news, but New York Republican Michael Grimm got his own story for turning against Obama’s planned military action. As Congress debates options over the next week, I would expect to continue seeing Congressional opinion appear in major news outlets.

If anything, I would expect to see more Congressional critiques in the next week, if some Democrats take a stand against President Obama. Members of Congress tend to receive considerable attention when criticizing a president of the same party (See Groeling 2010). Journalists were wary of labeling the incidents at Abu Ghraib “torture” when they were first revealed. However, the same journalists paid close attention when John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Colin Powell turned against the Bush administration’s policy regarding the treatment of detainees. Unlike most issues in this Congress, Syria cuts across partisan lines, which should attract more journalists to the Congressional debate. Current and former military officials have also been in demand. These officials are among the first to oppose the Commander In Chief. They could also do a better job at explaining who the sides are in Syria, a long-raging conflict that is still unfamiliar to most American readers.

In the case of Syria, news coverage includes a fairly wide range of officials, but it is unlikely to include a strong normative stance against war. After Vietnam, a range of critical media scholars asked why the news media wasn’t opposed to the war from the start. As the Iraq War dragged in to 2007, critical scholars again asked why the news media wasn’t opposed to war from the start. These critiques are rarely based in political economy. Instead, the critical approach to coverage of war takes on a moral dimension. In this critique, journalists have a normative obligation to speak truth to power, opposing war and condemning torture. Deference to sources is seen as a moral failing. Why won’t journalists take a stand?

Sociology is particularly well equipped to explain these issues of morality and what is “right” in journalism, because our discipline includes both macro-scale theories of news content and micro theories of how individual journalists behave. How do broad normative structures like deference in war affect journalistic behavior? For starters, Clayman et al (2007) found  journalists ask presidents more deferential questions when it comes to war than other topics. In one part of my dissertation, I find that newspaper reporters were significantly more likely to quote criticisms of foreign leaders than critiques of any other target (both were significantly more quotable that statements which did not include critiques, based on looking at every statement from a sample of press conferences). These studies help explain how journalistic deference works on a day-by-day basis, but they don’t fully explain why journalists tend to avoid taking moral stands.

Setting aside war for a minute, journalists’ daily experience involves listening to competing viewpoints and not being fully sure which side is right. For example, imagine that a local television station here in Los Angeles wanted to do a story on the city’s murder rate. People in different neighborhoods may have different explanations, based on the socioeconomic and racial demographics of their neighborhood. Criminologists could pose competing theories as well. How could a journalist figure out which theory is the best, if they only have six hours to complete their story? As Mark Fishman explained in an underrated classic of early newsroom ethnography, journalists face these dilemmas of who to trust every day. There is rarely a good answer, but journalists cannot afford to be paralyzed by uncertainty. The best available heuristic, Fishman argues, in deferring to well-placed official sources.

Once we understand the ambiguities that reporters face with mundane stories, we can begin to understand the difficulties in reporting on a proposed military strike in Syria. Military experts aren’t quite sure how much bombing Syria would cost. How can journalists form their own answer to the much more complex question of what effect a bombing would have on Syrian politics? They can’t. Reporters have to rely on sources and hope those sources actually know something. Journalists want to get as much information as possible, so they are keenly aware of any gaps in their reporting. (And skeptical editors will point these gaps out). Since news organizations have to keep producing new material, they can’t wait and collect more data like academics can when faced with ambiguous results.

It’s difficult for a journalist to know which side is “right,” and it is almost impossible to prove that one side is “right” to a skeptical audience. Journalists will face considerable criticism for saying that someone is right. Inevitably, some readers will favor the other side and accuse the journalist of bias. It’s worth bearing in mind that even in investigative stories, journalists don’t label a “right” side, they label a “wrong” side, painstakingly building a case that can withstand scrutiny. There are, of course, other standards for making moral claims when writing about politics. Plenty of people see one side of partisan debates as the “right side” and have grown increasingly frustrated with journalists who also pay attention to the other side. Since American journalists face considerable risks and few rewards for publishing their own moral judgments, it is easy to see why they would avoid waging their own moral campaign against bombing Syria.

It’s more or less impossible for news coverage to prove to a skeptical audience that someone is doing the right thing, or doing the best job they can. Maybe this is why people are so hard on journalists. It is easy to point out the faults and imperfections in news coverage, blaming journalists for a “moral failing.” It takes nuanced academic research to understand the day-to-day complexities of the newsroom, and how these complexities shape the range of news content we read every day. This posting is the first of what I hope will be many where I use the insights of social science research to help explain patterns in the news.