The concept of “truth” is central to journalism, and audiences expect journalists to provide truthful accounts and analyses of recent developments. And, yet, truth can be a very messy thing that is difficult to grasp.
According to the realism perspective, truth is a judgment that accurately describes, or corresponds with, the way the world is, distinct from subjective human perspectives. Most journalists, at least in the United States, subscribe to the realism perspective. They typically argue that “facts” exist, and that conveying these facts is an important aspect of doing journalism and of getting at “truth.”
Yet, even “facts” can be tricky. For example, consider the unemployment rate in the United States right now. One might think that to be a pretty simple, measurable “fact.” And, yet, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the primary body charged with measuring the unemployment rate in the United States, offers six different calculations of it. Its primary calculation refers to the percentage of the labor force that is without a job and has actively looked for work within the past four weeks. However, it also considers the percentage of the labor force that has been unemployed for 15 weeks or longer to be a valid measure, as well as a the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed and is not actively looking for work because of discouragement due to economic conditions.
In short, when audiences say they “just want the facts,” the question becomes: Which facts?
Subscribing to this view does not require a person to reject the idea of “facts,” or to suggest that they are meaningless. But it does call attention to two things: First, there are often multiple ways to measure complex facts. (In contrast, it is typically easier to measure something like the number of students enrolled in a class.) Second, journalists have to work within the confines of time and space—a story can only be so long—and this limitation naturally requires them to select some facts at the expense of others.
Moreover, journalism involves more than just listing facts. It typically requires journalists to make sense of those facts, in order to help their audiences understand how certain information fits into a broader context, and what the implications of those facts might be. Indeed, this is the very basis of framing theory and the sense-making function of journalism.
Be cautious of arguments that “facts” do not exist, that “truth isn’t truth,” or that we should embrace “alternative facts,” though. Such arguments are often made in bad faith, so as to make competing measures of truth or interpretations of it seem equal when they are not equally supported by evidence. Instead, it is important to think critically about how facts were arrived at, and to avoid reflexively accepting or rejecting them.
This inherent need to be selective often leads to allegations of journalistic bias, especially when audiences perceive news products to deviate from their worldviews and preconceptions. For example, in the United States, there is a widely held belief in public circles that journalistic media have a liberal bias. (To be clear, empirical studies of media bias have historically found little evidence of this.)
Journalistic bias can be defined as prejudice toward certain ideas, issues, perspectives, or groups or individuals in the production and distribution of journalistic content.
Allegations of journalistic bias often fall into one or more of the following three categories. The first, issue bias, pertains to the proclivity toward certain kinds of issues, such as an overemphasis on crime or immigration. The second, framing bias, refers to the propensity to frame issues through particular prisms, such as the threat immigrants might pose (as opposed to the benefits they might offer), or to routinely use certain language, such as “illegal immigrants” instead of “undocumented immigrants.” The third, source bias, refers to the differential treatment of a story depending on who the main actors are—as with offering more positive coverage for members of a certain political party—or the proclivity to give certain kinds of sources a larger (or any) voice within a news product, for example being more likely to quote government officials.
Connecting all three of those categories is visibility bias, which involves the amount of attention or prominence given to certain kinds of issues, frames, or sources. For example, although a journalist may quote an equal number of sources from two opposing parties, they may routinely offer longer quotes in more prominent parts of a news story (e.g., near the top, which more people are likely to read) to one of the two parties. Similarly, visibility bias may become apparent when prime-time shows on cable news networks focus on stories about immigrant misdeeds, with more positive coverage of immigrants relegated to less-watched daytime shows.
In order to combat allegations of bias, journalists sometimes claim to be neutral and to offer “a view from nowhere”—that is, to offer a perspective without a position or that takes no side. A common way to enact that claim is to try to occupy a middle ground by simply capturing and broadcasting oppositional viewpoints and trying to give equal weight to competing sides of an issue. Crucially, such attempts take care to not convey the journalist’s own opinion on a matter.
It should be noted that this proclivity toward neutrality and balance is, itself, a form of bias that is especially prevalent among journalists in places like the United States. This is not to say that such an approach is bad but that it represents a predisposition toward a particular way of presenting journalism.
There are downsides to such an approach, though. In trying to be neutral and balanced, a journalist may promote false balance by assigning equal blame or acclaim when one side is more culpable or deserving of it. For example, by taking the position that “all politicians lie” or that “both sides share the blame” in order to appear neutral, a journalist may obfuscate the fact that some politicians make more verifiably false claims than others, or that one side is more responsible for an outcome (such as a government shutdown). In doing so, journalists distort reality and thus do a disservice to truth—and to news audiences.
This approach to journalism has also been taken advantage of by bad-faith institutional actors, especially in recent decades, through concerted efforts to “work the refs.” That is, if journalists are seen to be arbiters of truth—much as referees are the arbiters of rules within a game—then politicians and social and public institutions will allege news media to be biased in order to have their claims receive less scrutiny by journalists. If published, those claims are then granted greater legitimacy as they are carried by trusted journalistic organizations.
One element found in most definitions of “truth” is accuracy, or a focus on precision and the avoidance of errors. Accuracy is indeed central to journalism, and many aspiring journalists have failed a college assignment because they submitted a story with a factual error in it.
However, accuracy is not, on its own, enough for satisfying truth. For example, it may be accurate to report that one person said that 75% of peer-reviewed studies about climate change say it is not a real phenomenon. After all, they may have said such a thing. However, it is not true that such a proportion of peer-reviewed studies say that under any widely accepted way of measuring that fact. Similarly, it may be accurate to point a camera at a small crowd of people and zoom in so as to have them fill the frame, or to zoom out as much as possible to make it look sparse. After all, neither picture was doctored or manipulated after the fact in any way. However, the resulting image’s connotation that there was a large or small crowd may be untrue. Finally, it would be equally accurate to show a mug shot of a dejected person in a crime story or their happy, upstanding family photo. However, it would be difficult to ascertain which photo best represents the truth of who that individual is.
In short, accuracy must be supplemented by commitment to truth. We can call that commitment “truth-seeking.” This approach views truth as more of a process wherein the journalist aims to approximate truth as best as they can.
Truth-seeking typically involves an objective approach to journalism, wherein journalists seek to systematically observe and record developments; interview sources with intimate knowledge about that development (like eye-witnesses); verify claims by seeking out generally accepted facts and official documents; and ultimately produce the most plausible representation of that development.
The process of truth-seeking recognizes that journalists are inherently biased. Put another way, it is impossible for journalists to be unbiased because of their backgrounds and the structural constraints they work within. However, it recognizes that by systematically employing what are regarded as best practices in journalism, journalists can mitigate some of those biases and not fall into traps like false balance, all the while striving toward the ambitious goal of reproducing truth.
It is important to note, however, that in some countries, journalistic organizations are openly biased and explicitly reject the values of neutrality and balance. That is, in countries like Pakistan and Indonesia, journalists typically believe that openly advocating for social change and staking clear positions on which side in a dispute has the better argument—and sometimes substantiating those positions primarily through intuition or agreement with ethical or religious principles—is a better way of serving truth. Put another way, different journalistic cultures approach truth-seeking in different ways.
Facts are not ‘natural’ things that just ‘exist,’ and they should be considered critically.
There are multiple forms of journalistic bias, such as issue bias, framing bias, and source bias.
In the United States, journalists typically strive to appear neutral and to offer balanced accounts. However, bad-faith actors have taken advantage of this approach in various ways.
Accuracy is, by itself, insufficient for getting at truth. However, it is an essential component of truth.
Journalists will typically strive for truth-seeking by systematically using best practices in journalism, such as interviewing multiple people, verifying their accounts, and offering the best approximation of truth.