Bias in media reaches fever pitch

It’s great that Canada won two medal in sledding and that one of the girls, Heather Moyse, is from Summerside PEI. National pride is important and regional pride on PEI is a way of life.

We’re not big so anything that puts on the map is great.

The media are falling all over themselves to gush prose and praise on medal wins. One line got repeated over and over. It struck me as the dumbest example of media bias.

“But five one hundredths away from the podium is what made me come back to sledding,” Heather Moyse told the reporters. “So I guess I’ve got to be thankful for that five one hundredths, because a gold in home country with Kaillie is better than a bronze would have been in Torino.” Toronto Observer

Great, they worked hard for four years to shave “five one hundredths of a second” off their time to slide down a track. Not one reporter questioned the wisdom of dedicating 4 years to that goal.

Of course not, Canada has Olympic fever and anything that gets the athletes to a medal, save drugs, is worthy of praise and lots of press coverage.

Are these athletes shaving 5/100ths of a second to save lives, reduce poverty, or end human misery? Hardly, it’s just their personal goal and some patriotic pride going down. They are entitled to their choices in life but shouldn’t someone question why the public is funding this at a cost of more than $1 billion?

Yesterday a student at Holland College interviewed me and repeated the old canard that the local media run with “Do you think your reporting has bias? Are you objective?”

Of course my writing has bias but so does every other journalist. Elimination of bias is not a goal in journalism. The real goal in journalism is to make sure your stories show the bias of your employer.

If a reporter writes stories that offend media owners, advertisers or other powers-that-be, those stories will not likely get published. If by some mistake the editor lets one of a story that offends an advertiser slip through the filters, someone is going to get fired. A reporter in New Brunswick was fired last year for reporting that Premier Graham was less than an academic wunderkind with his phys ed teaching degree.  Four years later Premier Graham resigned over conflict of interest charges.

Bias in the media comes from what stories get told, what is reported in a story, how it’s told, and what’s left out. The simple refusal to cover an important story is one way of censoring what the public reads.

Of course, the game has changed now with social media and bloggers. People Tweet stories long before paid journalists get their stories in circulation.  Social media and bloggers can force good stories into the public’s attention and then big media will report them.

On PEI, the Charlottetown Guardian wouldn’t cover the assault of a boy with a disability by his para-transit driver. Pat and the Elephant, the para-transit company, is part of the establishment and bad stories about them are never reported in the Guardian.

After some negotiating, I convinced a CBC radio reporter to cover the assault, if I allowed him to report it first. Dehumanizing treatment from Pat and the Elephant

Media outlets rarely report negative stories about advertisers. For instance, the Toyota safety problems would only be reported if they became national news. Offending car dealers who are big local advertisers is taboo.

Selection of what stories to report, leaving out the back story and not questioning popular logic are some of the ways the media introduce bias into reporting.

We have bias as well. We’re biased for the Canadian Charter or Rights and Freedoms, the plight of the poor, weak, disabled and disenfranchised. We’re also partial to technology and the arts. We try to report stories that matter as accurately as possible.