Comments on: Newspaper bias: just another social network

By: links for 2010-03-05 | Joanna Geary

links for 2010-03-05 | Joanna Geary — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:01:22 +0000

[...] Newspaper bias: just another social network “How slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they’ve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. " (tags: journalism internet) [...]

By: Matt Wardman

Matt Wardman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:49:54 +0000

One factor amongst many, surely – others would include story selection.

By: links for 2010-03-04

links for 2010-03-04 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:08:45 +0000

[...] Newspaper bias: just another social network Kevin: Paul Bradshaw flags up a University of Chicago study looking at bias in newspapers. "Interestingly, ownership is found to be statistically insignificant once those other factors are accounted for." What they did find was journalists probably aren't aware of the reinforcing effect on their coverage based on the similiarity in information and beliefs from their sources. "The result is social networks that don’t recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.” As Paul points out, this is the echo chamber effect in traditional news coverage. (tags: journalism socialnetworks information internet) [...]

By: Paul Bradshaw

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:31:48 +0000

Well we can hardly suggest that journalists ignore their readers in the pursuit of some abstract and unattainable notion of objectivity/neutrality – for all sorts of reasons. But we can try to be aware of the nature of our systems and practices, be transparent about those, and avoid being entirely shaped by them. This, for me, is one of the reasons why studying journalism as an academic subject (education) rather than just as a skill (training) is increasingly important.

But this isn’t what the blog post was really about – it was pointing out that the echo chamber argument doesn’t just apply to new media.

By: Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:50:24 +0000

Surely this is going to happen if a journalist is serving his or her readers correctly, covering the stories they are concerned about and generally reporting on local goings on?

Of course there could be bias, but would you expect a newspaper aimed at farmers is biased toward farming topics?

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:34:10 +0000

For me, it goes even beyond an echo chamber. Readers are just as responsible for media bias as journalists. Why? Because good journalists are aware of their biases and try to avoid them, whereas many readers accuse anything that doesn’t reinforce their political views of being biased.

I wrote a post on my own blog explaining this concept in more detail: http://tentrentingonmars.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-media-bias-and-reader-bias.html