“If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Malcolm X
There are many forms of bias. In politics, most people focus on biases such as those that predispose them to agree with ideas they already like, even if there isn’t evidence to support those claims. More recently, implicit or unconscious bias has become more widely known as it supports stereotypical reactions to oppressive ideas about groups of marginalized people based on categories such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability.
Another form of bias that is rarely discussed but profoundly limits our understanding is structural bias. Structural bias transcends both political and implicit biases, but it can weaponize both of them.
In his book, News: The Politics of Illusion, W. Lance Bennett, lays out the four key structural biases.
Personalization bias “is the overwhelming tendency to downplay the big social, economic or political picture in favor of the human trials” (Bennett 40)
Dramatization bias can be summarized as the focus on crisis news “with rising action, failing action, sharply drawn characters, and, of course, plot resolutions” (Bennett 41). This also leads to a “tension between not reporting important stories that are hard to picture and reporting possibly unimportant stories because they offer great visual images” (Bennett 42).
Fragmentation bias, or the decontextualization of information and ideas, is “the isolation of stories from each other and from their larger contexts” (Bennett 42).
Authority-disorder bias is the tendency to rely on official sources even when those official sources should be questioned. The disorder portion is the tendency to frame stories as chaotic and find resolution by any means necessary, including normalizing conflict (Bennett 43).
Each of these structural biases operates to shape our understanding of important events in ways that adhere to a structurally acceptable narrative form that limits our ability to think critically and better understand current events and their relationship to our past and future options.
Let’s examine each of these structural biases and how they have been used in the last week to structure our understanding of the attack on the US Capitol.
Personalization Bias
The focus is placed on the people who attacked the Capitol. Many news outlets have created empathetic stories about the insurgents through their portrayals. Some have focused on how individuals have been held accountable, by losing their jobs or being arrested. This continues the narrative idea that this is the act of a few people in a ‘mob.’ The actions of the president and some members of Congress have been noted, but the vast majority of media coverage has been disconnected from the larger social, economic and political history that allowed this attack.
The personalization bias allows the attack on the U.S. Capitol to be both shocking and unsurprising. It is an extension of the violent rhetoric and violent actions of the current administration. Furthermore, the current administration is a result of a history of social, economic and political conditions that allows such violence to be expected by many marginalized people and to be hidden for those who don’t experience this marginalization.
Dramatization Bias
Much can be said about the power of a never-ending news cycle, increasingly speedy technology to deliver news, the connective power of social media, and behind-the-scenes manipulations of algorithms. What is also clear is that these tools build on narrative techniques to dramatize our lives. They build crisis where none exists and downplay actual crisis in the service of another bias, the authority-disorder bias.
The dramatization bias helps to desensitize us to information that is important. There are a few key ways this is accomplished.
1. Making non-crisis events seems like crises
2. Provide unactionable information about critical topics
3. Make crisis news seem hopeless
Let’s look at each of these, how they work, and what this means.
News reports, often called clickbait, frame common activities such as the foods we eat, the products we use and the activities we enjoy as imminent threats. Because of the lack of regulation in many areas in US society, people have well-founded reasons for being concerned about food and product safety. However, these articles demonize items that from our own lived experience we know are safe and fail to adequately report on known dangers. By making non-crisis events seem like imminent threats, they cause us to live in a state of hyper alarm and arousal. We implicitly know that we cannot trust them.
When information is provided about either items that are false crises or those that are truly imminent, these articles do not provide information about how to act. For the false crises, most actions fall into the realm of personal responsibility. People are tasked with trying to determine if the latest item is good or bad on their own. We must rely on own networks and our own methods of critical (or not) engagement. When it is a topic on which we typically know little and have little support, such as the role and responsibility of government, articles rely on tried and true narrative ‘resolutions’ including the idea that government doesn’t work or that government leaders need to figure it out themselves. These kinds of narrative resolutions eliminate the possibility that regular people can take meaningful action.
The result of this fearmongering through false crises and leaving people with few or no options is to create hopelessness. For many, instead of identifying this as hopelessness, they empower themselves by seeing their lack of hope as a type of critical cynicism. Regardless of how it is framed, it prevents people from taking action to create change in their lives and communities. It actively disempowers the people that media is supposed to be informing and that government is supposed to serve. As a result, it becomes propaganda that serves the interests of media conglomerates, advertisers, governments and other wealthy and powerful institutions rather than the people.
Learn more about the propaganda model in this video
Fragmentation Bias
Like the personalization bias, which downplays the social, economic and political context in favor of narrow stories about individuals, the fragmentation bias shows that when context is provided it often remains narrow and disconnected from the larger whole.
Throughout the last four years, many economic explanations have been offered to explain the reason for Donald Trump’s appeal with the people who vote for him. However, most of these explanations have been isolated from each other. There are explanations that focus on how he appeals to white working-class voters. These explanations do not recognize that the average Republican voter has a higher income than the national average (Hafner). These analyses do not link the economic explanations for this group to the corporate leaders and Congress people who support him who have significant economic power. These economic explanations do not link to the social and political reasons for supporting him and often suggest that it is possible to support him only for economic reasons, when it seems clear from those who attend his rallies and advocate for him on social media that they like his non-economic messages. A prior reluctance to identify with racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, ableist and other oppressive and exclusionary messages has lessened as he has emboldened his followers to express their hatred.
Whether the oppressive language is crass or more seemingly polite does not matter. His followers have embraced the ability to be more open through social media, through public gatherings, by wearing pro-Trump apparel and by shouting at marginalized people in verbal tirades captured on video. The Republican Congress members and the executive branch have embraced this too by enacting oppressive policies and engaging in hate speech.
Thus, it is fragmentation to cover the Capitol attack as an aberrant action rather than as an extension of the current administration’s rhetoric and policies. It is a direct result of an incitement to violence from the president and members of Congress. The Capitol attack is a direct and expected result from the president and his staff in organizing the rally and crafting the propaganda rally speech and all his speeches throughout his campaign and administration that have allowed his followers to view storming the Capitol as righteous.
It is fragmentation to cover the actions of the Capitol police as surprising and not link their actions and inaction to the white supremacist origins and ongoing nature of policing and the military.
There is much to contextualize. Recognizing the fragmentation structural bias, helps us ask important questions so that we can learn the context and critique the information that is presented to us.
Authority-disorder Bias
In cases of political crisis, the authority-disorder bias is often one of the most profound biases. In the attack on the Capitol, many news sources struggled to reach Capitol police and wanted to rely on their official interpretation of events. As outlined above, Capitol police’s official interpretation needs to be questioned. Their role and history need to be interrogated. Similarly, when Congress members are responsible for inciting violence, it is critical to critique their role and response.
Throughout the current administration, the media have had a difficult time knowing how to handle the president’s authority when he and members of his administration cannot be relied on for accurate information. The media’s desire to resolve disorder by relying on authority figures must be challenged. The media and viewers must learn how to evaluate sources for credibility using criteria other than the source’s official position.
Those affected by and involved in events must be consulted for news stories. The implicit and explicit biases of news media is apparent in their desire to interview and empathize with participants in the attack on the Capitol when they do not want to interview the marginalized people they demonize in other stories of crisis. They feed into political agendas of powerful leaders when they elevate ideas of criminality in marginalized people. When the media does include marginalized people, they demonstrate their biased agenda when they require a ‘both sides’ debate that legitimizes those who advocate for the dehumanization of and violence toward marginalized communities.
The most common resolution of disorder is an appeal to authority. In cases of deep, unresolved crisis, the media may rely on the idea that the disorder cannot be resolved. The appeal to authority results in an acceptance that things are always difficult or a reliance on an elusive, hoped for peace or unity, when the authorities themselves are preventing peace and unity by failing to enact policies that establish and preserve human rights. There is no peace without human rights for everyone. There is no unity with fascists. Disorder becomes accepted. As with the dramatization bias, hopelessness is acceptable, because a vague, false hope has been offered.
In a democracy, the true hope comes from the people. The power is with the people. It is an abdication of duty to take people’s power away by making them think they have none. While most individual citizens and residents do not have the same power as elected officials, corporate leaders, and wealthy power players, we have collective power to make significant change. This collective power is continually ignored and diminished by a media system that is part of a corporate leadership that does not serve people but serves media conglomerates. While certain journalists may do their best, they too are often unaware of these biases that structure the system.
What Do We Do?
It can be disheartening to learn that the media system is not on our side, even if many of us have felt that all along. Again, this is not to say that individual journalists do not try to do their best. They still are enmeshed in these biases. We all are enmeshed in bias. Now that we know about these biases, we can work to see how they operate in what we read, watch, listen to and talk about. Once we identify them, they hold less power over us. We can notice that we have the collective power to change these systems and address the crises that affect us.
Here are some steps we can take on this journey.
Learn more: Even within this biased system, not all journalism is the same, independent journalism and investigative journalism help us think more critically about what is happening and help us interrogate these biases
Support and join organizations that work on issues you care about to create collective power
Invest in community care (social support) and sources of joy, healing and rejuvenation
Divest from capitalist notions that our worth is determined by our productivity, including our need to ‘doom-scroll’ to validate the capitalist production of crisis news, and at the same time be gentle with ourselves in how challenging this can be
Have you ever had something turn your day around? A compliment from someone important in your life or an unexpected kindness. We have the power to care for each other and lift each other up. We’re doing it every day. We can continue to harness this power to tackle the problems that we’ve been told are insurmountable. Every story we’ve been told that has been the triumph of a sole individual was in truth the story of a collective. We can be those people propelling the change we need.
We can tell our own stories and in doing so change the world.
Sources
Malcolm X quote is from his speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem (13 December 1964), later published in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965), edited by George Breitman, p. 93.
Bennett, W. Lance. (2009). News: The Politics of Illusion. (8th ed.). Pearson Longman. (There is a newer edition, the 10th now available. All quotes and page numbers come from the 8th edition.)
Hafner, J. (2016, May 5). Trump voters earn a lot more than you might think. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/05/05/donald-trump-average-voter-income-72000-middle-class/83972800/
Photo Credit & Description
Word cloud of media bias terms created using wordart.com.
About the Author
Amy E. Harth is a white, disabled, queer anti-oppression researcher. She earned a PhD in interdisciplinary studies from Union Institute & University. Her research focuses on Western media representation of Africa.
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