Overcoming Bias

A Journalist's Guide to Culture & Context

Sue Ellen Christian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415790772
  9780415790772
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351816861
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Networking
• Index: Computer Science

Journalists go out of their way to avoid purposeful bias in the news. But there is a more pervasive set of internal biases and flaws in thinking that can lead to unintentional inaccuracies and distortions in news coverage. This engaging book offers a fresh take on reporting without bias, targeting the way that we categorize people, filter information and default to rehearsed ways of thinking. Included throughout are stories and on-target advice from reporters and editors, providing real-world voices and experiences. This advice and guidance is coupled with practical exercises that give readers the chance to apply what they learn. Overcoming Bias will teach readers to edit their thinking for habitual errors, making them more perceptive journalists. It provides a career-long foundation for challenging bias. This is an ideal text for a course on multi-cultural reporting or journalism ethics; it may also be used as a supplement in any course on reporting and writing, as each chapter deals with potential biases that emerge at each stage of the story process, from story ideas to editing.

1
Context, Culture and Cognition

Making the case for refl ective practice in journalism

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• To understand the elements of effective multicultural reporting.

• To recognize that a journalist’s own culture may affect how he or she interprets and understands news events.

• To know the journalistic principles that support inclusive journalism.

FOCUSING ON DIVERSITY

I stood in a bunkhouse on a sod farm on the outskirts of metropolitan Chicago. The wooden structure was shared by seven workers, all men from the same village in the south of Mexico. They came here to work, earning in eight months what their families could live on in Mexico for a year. The bunkhouse kitchen was crowded with three stoves and four refrigerators, one held shut with a rubber trash can fastener. The rich scents of their dinner of beans, rice and meat wrapped in soft white bread instead of tortillas clung to the unmoving air of the summer night. At the time, I covered suburban issues as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and was writing a story about migrant workers in the fields of the far suburbs of Chicago. I was trying to get it right.

I had enough sense to know I needed to tell the story of the area’s migrant workers by actually trying to talk to them, afterhours, away from their bosses, and away from government agriculture officials. I had gotten myself there, among the workers, and was attempting to converse with them through an interpreter about their lives away from home: the hours, the working conditions, their often poor health, the struggle for higher wages, the skimping here in the U.S. so that more cash could be sent back to their families in Mexico. I had enough sense to ask good questions, questions about adequate housing, fair wages and accessible healthcare.

Still, it was tough going.

Age, gender, language and culture made for a gap in understanding between journalist and source. A journalist needs to be able to jump that divide, to see the situation from another’s vantage point. Jumping the divide happens when you’ve done background research into the issues at hand. When you have a basic understanding of the ways that people in a culture communicate. When you select words that build trust and not distance. When you’re honestly interested. When you set aside your own ideas about how things and people should work.

I sought to ask questions that would lead to revealing answers and not just adequate responses. I searched the place for clues that would help me portray how these men felt about their temporary lives there. I think they struggled to explain to me and to show me, to tell me the truth, but not so much truth that their jobs were jeopardized.

I am white, middle-class, English-speaking, Protestant and college-educated. My sources were Mexican, lower-income, Spanish-speaking, Catholic and had limited formal education. As I interviewed, I was constantly aware of all these labels—all the ways in which journalist and source were different. I tried not to thrust my values on their situation. They had their own view of what their problems and joys were.

I wrote the story, approximately 2,000 words long, and it ran on the front page of the metropolitan section to about a million readers, the Sunday circulation at the time. (You can read part of the story in Appendix A.) I heard through the local organization that advocated for the welfare of the migrant workers that the workers thought the story was fair. They sent copies home to their families.

Yet this story is one that stays with me. It captivates me nearly 20 years later because of its many layers: The practical matter of getting and keeping a job that pays a living wage; the emotional issues of distance and longing for family; the different standards of health care in the two countries the men shuttled between; the large-scale bureaucracy of immigration and the small-scale lives of a band of men who were not in the military or on some survival adventure but on a survival excursion of a different kind. Even the uncertain rhythms of the growing season.

It also stays with me because of what this book seeks to explore: What we as journalists bring to the story because of who we are, and how our thinking about the world affects accuracy and fairness.

To do a story like the one on the migrant workers well requires understanding that there are many ways to look at the world, each valid in its own right. I know now, after many more years of reporting, writing and editing, what I didn’t fully know then: That none of those labels for journalist and source mattered, and that those labels mattered terribly. This book is about how journalists acquire, filter and judge information, and how we must do our utmost to provide information as free from preconceptions and assumptions as possible. We must engage in label-free thinking.

Part of the job of a journalist is to figure out which of the labels matter and why. We have to know the why in order to tell the right story, the truest story at that moment.

pause & consider Read the excerpt of my story¹ in Appendix A. Use your university or newsroom library database to access the entire story or visit www.routledge.com/cw/christian to access the link from the Chapter 1 page. Talk with a peer about something you learned about the men’s culture from reading the excerpt. Reflect on how your own culture differs from that of the migrant workers and whether that matters.

JOURNALISM WITH AN OPEN MIND

Journalists work in a multicultural, multiethnic, multifaceted world. Communicating information about the world—without systematically excluding any group of people from news coverage—requires being conversant in diversity. Journalists need to be aware of and knowledgeable about the differences around them. This diversity includes but is not limited to diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, geography, physical ability and socioeconomic standing.

Journalists also need to understand how their own thinking processes can influence a news account. To give a fair account of a person or situation requires monitoring one’s assumptions, biases and prejudices, and favoritism. Only then can we be as accurate as possible and portray news events with relevant context. After all, excellent journalism is founded on seeking and telling the truth. Truth relies on context and on accuracy, which is influenced by our perceptions, interpretations and conclusions about people and events.

Understanding Your Mind

An important step to achieving a journalistic standard of accuracy and fairness is to understand how, as an individual journalist, you encounter the world. What preconceptions do you bring to different situations? What do you notice? What don’t you notice? How do you categorize people and events? How does your upbringing affect your ability to interact with people unlike you? Is your mind able to tolerate some ambiguity in a situation, or do you need things to be concrete and quickly defined? Knowing your own mind allows you to better navigate the mental processes that unfairly bias your thinking. News audiences need journalists who view the world with an open mind.

Journalists benefit from looking inward in order to better report on the outer world. To better understand how your culture has shaped your thinking about others, take the Social Attitude Survey in Appendix B. Figure your score using the system provided.

To think further about your results on the Social Attitude Survey, see item 1 in the Exploration Exercises at the end of this chapter.

Reporting with an Awareness of Culture and Context

News reporting requires that a journalist cross into cultures unlike his or her own. Says Rick Hirsch, managing editor at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Overcoming Bias Online
• About the Author
• 1 Context, Culture and Cognition Making the case for reflective practice in journalism
• 2 Habits of Thought How cognitive processes influence journalistic practice
• 3 Encountering the News How the mind organizes and interprets information—and how story ideas get lost in the process
• 4 Story Without Stereotype How stereotypes may influence reporting in stealthy ways—and what to do about it
• 5 Understanding Culture, Understanding Sources How social groups serve as lenses for looking at the world
• 6 Training the Reporter’s Eye What gets journalists’ attention can influence how they portray events and explain behaviors
• 7 Critical Decisions Before Deadline Why even experienced journalists neglect certain facts and what to do about it
• 8 The Power of Words and Tone When words suggest unintended meanings
• 9 Attribution and Editing Without Bias When to include data and how to determine cause
• 10 Journalism and Reflective Practice Cultivating an open mind
• Appendices
• Glossary
• References
• Index