Most news reporting is biased. We tend not to notice 90 percent of the time because we all agree with the bias of that reporting. And because that bias isn’t directly related to partisan politics.
Consider, for example, the local news staple of a report on a house fire. Local family loses their home and all their possessions. The parents and all three children got out safely, but the family cat has not been found. A firefighter was treated and released for minor injuries. The fire has been extinguished and the local Red Cross is providing shelter for the displaced family.
The fire itself is regarded as Bad News. The family’s escape is Good News. The disappearance of the cat may turn out to be more Bad News, or Good News if it is later found, unharmed. The injury to the firefighter is Bad News, but their subsequent release and the minor nature of the injury is, relatively speaking, Good News. The reliable assistance of the local fire department and Red Cross is Good News.
This is how news works. It is inescapably “biased” in that it is presented and received as either Good News or Bad News. And most of the time, no one complains about the bias implicit in all such judgments because everyone agrees. What kind of sicko wouldn’t agree that a family losing their home is Bad News? And who could be so demented as to not understand that the family surviving the fire is Good News? It would be bewildering not to report such news as Good or Bad. It would be inaccurate not to do so. To report on a family losing their home without acknowledging that this is Bad News would be to get the story wrong.
Those who complain about “media bias” will say that this distinction between Good News and Bad News isn’t what they’re talking about. But it is. This is where it starts.
Hold that thought for a second and let’s consider another, more obvious example of how this Good News/Bad News frames most news reporting: the Sports section. Yesterday, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Dallas Cowboys 27-13. That’s the headline here in Philadelphia: Eagles Win. In Philly, this is a Good News story. In Dallas, though, it’s a Bad News story: Cowboys Lose. (Of course, in both cities, reporters will also note that this was a meaningless end-of-season game in which the playoff-bound Cowboys rested their top starters, etc.)
This is how sports reporting works. Games are a zero-sum contest with winners and losers, so the outcome is Good News for the winners and Bad News for the losers, and reporting on the story of the game from each team’s hometown will reflect that. Everything else about the stories will be the same — the score, the statistics, the implications for both teams in any playoff race — and none of the facts will usually be in dispute, but one report is celebrating the Good News of a victory while the other report is lamenting the Bad News of a loss.
Again, we usually don’t complain about such “bias” in the Sports section because the real-world stakes aren’t as high. It’s simply an expected convention of sports reporting based on an acknowledgement of the joy or disappointment of the hometown fans. Those fans, after all, were making this same judgment about Good News and Bad News with every cheer or boo as they watched the game unfold. Ignoring their cheers and boos, their celebrations and lamentations, would mean ignoring a big part of the story — it would mean getting the story wrong.
So let’s turn back to the local pages and look at another story. This one involves hungry poor children getting a nutritious hot meal.
That’s Good News, right? I mean, objectively speaking, hungry children getting fed is a Good Thing. If someone fails to recognize that then there isn’t even any point in arguing about the categories of Good Thing and Bad Thing with them. Like the understanding that a family losing their home in a fire is Bad News, the fact that hungry children being fed is Good News shouldn’t require any explanation or defense.
Yet the story of local hungry children being fed is not usually reported as a Good News story. Sometimes it is — if the meal in question is being provided by some innocuous, non-controversial local charity on Christmas Day, then it’s fine. Everyone agrees that’s a Good News story and it gets reported with the warm glow of glad tidings of great joy.
But that’s not what happens when the children are being fed by, say, a government-funded school lunch program. Then it becomes a “political” story, and thus something we have to pretend is neither Good News nor Bad News, but a matter of zero-sum controversy. “Politics,” you see, are more like sports — there’s a winning team and a losing team. And those teams become the focus of the story — not the hungry kids.
What that means, ultimately, is that a great deal of Good News is never allowed to be reported as Good News. And Bad News — even calamitously Bad News — doesn’t get reported as Bad News. These stories are, instead, reported as “political” news, meaning — in an effort to avoid partisan bias, or to avoid potential accusations of partisan bias — we pretend that their outcomes are neither good nor bad.
And that means we get those stories wrong.
That means we report on 16 million Americans gaining access to medical care as something other than Good News. And that’s wrong. That’s factually wrong. It’s inaccurate. It’s wrong in the same way it would be wrong not to recognize that the local family surviving the house fire was Good News.
This has corrosive, wide-reaching implications for journalism and for politics and for the very possibility of democratic self-government. It fosters the notion that government can never do anything good, because every good outcome produced by government action is not permitted to be reported as Good News. It trains us to perceive everything through a distorted zero-sum lens, one that imagines that justice anywhere must somehow thereby entail an equal and opposite injustice somewhere else. It trains us to resent one another — to mourn when others rejoice and to rejoice when others mourn.
And that, too, is wrong. It’s inaccurate. It’s not true.
Anyway, they found the cat the next day in the neighbor’s yard. It escaped the fire unharmed. That’s Good News for the poor family that just lost their home. And it should be Good News to you, too.
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