Hidden Bias: An Annotation

Word Choice and Syntax Color a Story on Immigration in The Post

A story in The Washington Post the other day offers a textbook example of how small choices — word choice, syntax, sources — can create unintended bias in our news stories, allowing underlying assumptions to color the way readers read and understand the news.

Written from the perspective of national security hawks, normalizing the Trump administration’s crackdown on the border, and lacking comment from immigrants or their advocates, the story narrows the debate in ways that make immigrants the bad guys. Their movement north is a crisis for the United States, the story says over and over, with management of the border being the only concern.

The bias here is not overt. It is hidden in the reporting, in the various choices made by writers and editors, and it likely colors the response of readers. If this story was published by an outlet that admits its bias and did not view itself as a neutral observer, I would have no qualms. But The Post news pages are not supposed to take a side, unlike The Nation or The National Review, or even the paper’s own editorial and op-ed pages. Bias is a problem here not because it exists, but because it seemingly violates the purpose and audience of The Post’s news pages, which I would argue are to present information neutrally for an educated audience who has some familiarity with the issues at hand.

There are several approaches that can be taken in reporting, each of which is tied to a story and news organization’s purpose and target audience:

There is straight opinion, which can feature reporting or not — think the op-ed sections of major papers. The goal of these pieces is argument and persuasion. The writer is expected to take a side and defend it.

There is the magazine-style immersive approach, which sometimes is called literary non-fiction or creative non-fiction. This approach eschews neutrality and allows the writer to be a presence in the story, often producing work that can be produced no other way. It admits its biases, but also gives the reader an entry point into the world the reporter/writer is exploring.

There is advocacy journalism, which has policy change as its goal and wears its biases on its sleeve. Think of the reported stories in The Nation, The Progressive, or The National Review.

And there is what I’ll call straight newspaper reporting. One goal of straight newspaper reporting is neutrality, is presenting needed information without direct comment from the writer (others’ opinions come in through the interview and quotation process), giving readers a chance to make up their own minds. The goal is not balance, which assumes that all voices are equal in their importance. It is to find legitimate sources and pieces of data, and to present them in a way that does not place a thumb on the scale.

A reporter writing about vaccines does not have to include bogus science cited by anti-vaxxers, though the reporter should include other concerns raised by those skeptical of vaccines, such as religious objections and parental control.

The same goes for environmental issues. Climate change is not in question. The science supports its existence and the role humans have had in its acceleration. Reporters do not have to include deniers in their stories, though they should give critics a chance to raise concerns about balancing business and climate, for instance, or other objections that fall under policy concerns.

When we turnt to news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is an expectation that they will present the news in a neutral manner, that they will do their best to managed the human tendency to insert bias into their reporting. Stories in these large national papers — and in papers like the Chicago Tribune, The L.A. Times, and the Dallas Morning-News — are run through a gauntlet of editors, each of whom seeks to find flaws: failures of logic, missing information, false assumptions, and biased language.

They are not always successful. Friday’s report in The Washington Post on Biden’s immigration efforts is one of those failures. It pretends at straight reporting but is tarnished by bias in its choices of words, sentence structure, overall organization, and sources.

Word choice does most of the work in this piece, as I note in my markup. The key word is “crisis,” which only has a loose definition in the piece and which indicates an underlying assumption — that an increase in refugees flowing north is a threat. The word is repeated, and other language is used in the same way, flowing through sentences structured to create contrasts between what Biden may be doing and this “crisis” posited by the Post.

As for sources, note who is not represented in the story: actual immigrants and their advocates. The entire story unfolds from the point of view of Border Patrol agents and the national security apparatus. Basically, there is information that is not included, points of view that are necessary to understanding what is happening at the border. The story, in cherry-picking sources, narrows the context and pushes the reader toward a narrow set of policy possibilities, all framed by the notion of control and crisis.

Read the story and then look over my annotation of the story, which I shared with my students. I’m curious what readers think — am I being overly sensitive to the language? I don’t believe so, but I’m open to hearing other points of view.