Press Annotation: Structural Bias
The Order in Which We Present Information Can Affect How the Reader Understands It
There are a lot of ways to tell a story. Many of them, by design, are meant to come from a single point of view, or at least a narrow point of view. In journalism, the first-person narrative, which I have my students working on now, allows the writer to be a participant, to shape the narrative. There are remarkable examples of this kind of reported writing — Joan Didion, Joseph Mitchell, the writers in Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism or the various collections of literary journalism. Normal Mailer used a variation of this in his best nonfiction (Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, in which he wrote in what the novelist calls the third-person limited, but inserting a character named Norman Mailer).
The benefit of these approaches is that they recognize bias and account for it. Didion, for instance, often functions as the reader’s surrogate, as in Slouching Towards Bethlehem in which she reports on the hippie movement in San Francisco for a middle class, mostly conservative audience. She is an outsider and can comment as an outsider.
Mainstream print journalism has traditionally — at least over the last half a century — attempted to limit the imposition of the writerly voice, of the narrow point of view. The New York Times and The Washington Post — probably the too biggest mainstream outlets — rarely allows its reporters to write in the first person, at least in their news pages (opinion and magazine sections have different rules). This does not prevent bias from derailing stories.
I’m not talking about the bias charged by conservatives, that the Times is liberal, for instance, and that there is no difference between what happens in its news and opinion pages. This is obviously false. But a kind of bias — one that accepts the conventional narratives or defends institutional prerogatives — does color its news coverage, especially on matters of foreign policy, where officials sources dominate. These official sources always come from a rotating cast of characters who share a limited viewpoint: America is exceptional, and has the right or responsibility to guide or control events. Nearly every foreign policy question or international issue gets viewed through this lens, which then minimizes the role played in coverage by people who are directly affected.
This has certainly been true of the coverage of the war on Gaza, which has been earmarked by an Israel-centric focus, the reliance on official sources and statements, and the impact of the war on the election.
A story by the Post yesterday is fairly reflective of this approach. It presents all necessary points of view and is quite detailed — but its organization, the order in which it presents its facts and sources, imposes an institutional and pro-Israel bias.
This starts with the headline, which sets the larger framing and alludes to how this story will unfurl. The blame here is the war, but not Israel. Hamas gets centered and treated as a ruling government, which means they are at least equally to blame for what is not just hunger but near-famine conditions.
Oxfam speaks immediately, but the story then shifts to near-exclusive explanations from Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces, which takes up the lion’s share of the story. This is what I mean by structural bias.
We are about halfway through the story. The overuse of Israeli government sources creates a rhetorical frame. The Israelis have been tasked with setting a theme that the rest of the story will build from, one that allows the Israelis — who have leveled much of Gaza and who have targeted numerous aid convoys — to place blame for this growing humanitarian catastrophe elsewhere.
I would like koto think this comment offsets the thematic frame. It doesn’t. It comes way too late in the story.
Again, the order in which we present information matters, especially in long stories. All points of view have to get a hearing early in the story so that the arguments that are made by sources and in quotations are part of a dialogue and not buried by a pre-ordained narrative.
Fairness and balance are words that have been corrupted by Fox News’ use of them. But they do factor into how we think about building a story — both in terms of who we talk with and how we organize the story. These are the people most directly affected, yet they are almost wasted at the bottom.
Part of me thinks this should be two stories. One giving voice to people in Gaza and the other a debate — a true debate — over why it is happening and what can be done.
Why hold what may be the best quotation for the end? Readers are unlikely to get here.
I don’t want to assume intent, and I have no idea whether the writers or the editors drove the structuring of this story. My point here is to show that, even in what we think is a straight news story, choices made by writers and editors can inject bias. We need to be sensitive to this, as readers, and better at understanding how these choices affect what we, as writers and reporters produce.