Press Critique: Confirmation Bias
The New York Times, Biden, King Lear, and the Accepted Narrative
The New York Times should know better. It is supposed to be the jewel of American journalism, the paper of record, but its coverage of the presidential race over the last month has offered one example after another of what reporters should not do and what news organizations should avoid doing.
Take Saturday’s story on President Joe Biden and the calls for him to step aside as a candidate:
Sick with Covid and abandoned by allies, President Biden has been fuming at his Delaware beach house, increasingly resentful about what he sees as an orchestrated campaign to drive him out of the race and bitter toward some of those he once considered close, including his onetime running mate Barack Obama.
It is a story that paints Biden as isolated, consciously calling forth some of the most cliched trope of political reporting — Biden as “increasingly resentful” and unwilling to do what is right by his party and the nation. It is written in a way that deliberately harkens back to the end of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, to presidents who were made to leave office against their will because it was the right thing to do.
The story, by White House reporters Peter Baker, Michael D. Shear, and Katie Rogers, is constructed on a mix of unnamed sources and public statements, and employs the kind of overwriting I teach my students to avoid. The story is not an actual news report, but a link in a larger political narrative and, rather than serve an informational purpose that will be useful to voters, it reinforces the stories we’ve decided upon.
I’m not saying that what’s being reported is untrue, or that Biden should remain the candidate (he would drop out as I finished writing this). I hope he does stand down, both because he is proving himself frail and vulnerable at a moment when the GOP is pushing he testosterone, and because I just don’t think he understands the moment we live in.
But that’s an opinion, based on my own analysis — and I’m not suggesting it is anything more.
The Times is engaged in something different here. The paper labels this story “analysis,” which frees it from some of the stricter rules we impose on straight reporting. But the story goes beyond what the analysis genre should allow. Its choice of detail and language inserts the writers’ voice and point of view, and in doing so it presents opinion as fact and surreptitiously tells the reader how to interpret the world.
Rule 1: Only Shakespeare is Shakespearean.
Consider the story’s use of well-worn tropes: The angry, aging president. The former allies stabbing him in the back. The former patron turned villain. All serving to reinforce the idea that Joe Biden must step aside, that the party is in convulsions and horribly divided, and to create a sense of inevitability.
It’s all so “Shakespearean,” as the writers make sure to tell us. We are to see Biden as King Lear, aging and going mad, refusing all but his most loyal supplicants’ advice. “Shakespearean” lends a false gravitas to a story built on innuendo. Its use as an adjective for national politics is a tell, a pretentious one, but a tell nevertheless. It sounds high-minded, dramatic, but it is the worst kind of writing and reporting, and should signal to the reader that the story is not news at all, but a kind of wishful thinking, an op-ed masquerading as reported news analysis.
“Shakespearean” is only one of numerous insertions of the writers’ voice and opinion, perhaps the least subtle, but part of a pattern in which the writing overwhelms the basic reason for journalism.
Rule 2: Too many adjectives spoil the story.
I watched Tokyo Vice recently on HBO. It focuses on an American who gets a job as a reporter for Japan’s largest newspaper. The reporter, Jake Adelstein (played by Ansel Egbert) files an important story. He’s still green, a raw reporting talent, and the story apparently suffers from his inexperience. His editor Eimi (played by the brilliant Rinko Kikuchi) hands the story back with a bit of sage advice: limit the adjectives. Cut them back and, if possible, eliminate them. She doesn’t say why, but it is something I’ve long told my reporters and now tell my journalism students. Too many adjectives (and adverbs) create bias.
Why? Simply, adjectives and adverbs are modifiers. Their role is to alter or enhance the meaning of nouns (things) or verbs (actions). Some can be neutral, but most are interpretive, words that tells us more about the writer than then thing or action being described. They are, as I tell students, “value words,” or words that impart opinion or weight. They describe the perspective of the writer and may not accurately present the world as others see it.
Let’s look at the lede again: He is “increasingly resentful” (adverb modifying adjective, which together modify his state of being). The modifiers here carry a lot of weight and and may be accurate, but they likely are excessive and they present point of view.
Rule 3: Word choice matters.
Excessive use of adjectives too often is a substitute for making good word choices. Students do this frequently. They will describe “urgent needs” and “troubling rises,” never questioning whether the modifiers insert bias or the writer’s point-of-view. The goal in journalism is to present information clearly and without inadvertent bias. We use neutral language — or try to — to guard against our placing our thumbs on the scale.
Again, the Times’ lede uses strong language: “abandoned by allies,” a president “fuming.” We want strong and vivid language, but we also need to take care that we do not allow our biases to affect word choices, that we do not choose words that unnecessarily color the factual information we are trying to impart.
The Times, heeding the larger “Shakespearean” narrative it has been pushing for three weeks, fails this test, as far as I am concerned. Late in the nut graph section (the paragraph or paragraphs that sum up and contextualize the story), the writers paint this picture:
Mr. Biden has been around politics long enough to assume that the leaks appearing in the media in recent days are being coordinated to raise the pressure on him to step aside, according to people close to him. He considers Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, the main instigator, but is irritated at Mr. Obama as well, seeing him as a puppet master behind the scenes.
Word choice creates meaning. It tells us who to like and dislike, trust and distrust. The writers tells us there is a plot — “coordinated” leaks that Biden, because of his experience, must “assume” (a remarkably complex conditional!), and that Biden ( who never actually speaks) “considers” the former House Speaker an “instigator” and the former president as a “puppet master behind the scenes.” These assumptions — not Biden’s but the writers, carry a lot of weight. Too much, in fact, given the paucity of on-the-record comments.
Rule 4: Avoid unnamed sources except when absolutely necessary.
The Times has published guidelines governing the paper’s use of anonymous or unnamed sources. The paper says “these sources should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.” Their use “is sometimes crucial to our journalistic mission,” because they
can give readers genuine insight into the uses and abuses of power — in Washington, on Wall Street and beyond. In sensitive areas like national security reporting, it can be unavoidable. Sources sometimes risk their careers, their freedom and even their lives by talking to us.
The paper uses a test of sources before granting anonymity (As an aside, these should be rules for all sources):
How do they know the information?
What’s their motivation for telling us?
Have they proved reliable in the past?
Can we corroborate the information they provide?
There should be a fifth requirement, that the story is more than gossip, that it is vital to the readers’ lives and not just inside baseball. The Times — and most of the outlets close to power— struggle with this. They have turned political coverage into a question of polling and horserace analysis, which is easier for them to cover but is nothing more than empty media calories.
A certain amount of bias is inevitable, but our goal is to limit it as much as we can through word choice, story organization, and the choices we make in reporting. The media’s job is not just to tell stories, but to challenge accepted narratives and the conventional wisdom. The legacy houses — print, broadcast, and cable — long ago gave up on that part of the mission.