If only it were that easy. Avoiding bias isn't just about using a neutral tone and consulting the facts. Bias runs much deeper than that, and it isn't at all mutually exclusive with neutral tones or factual accuracy, either.
Here's an experiment. Choose a recent world event and read different news sources about the event. Not opinion columns, just regular articles. Let's take the recent anti-government protest in Beirut as an example. Here's ABC News (United States), The BBC (Great Britain), Al Jazeera (Qatar), Tasnim News Agency (Iran), and Deutsche Welle (Germany) covering these protests.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything from the world's greatest news personality.
Take a quick glance through at least a couple of those articles. They cover the exact same event, but check out how they frame their story. What historical context do they give to this event? What individuals and groups do they choose to cite? How do they describe the different factions in this story? Which quotes from the protesters do they choose to use? Each of these articles have different answers to these sorts of questions, each one presenting different pictures for the exact same event. And here's the thing: none of them are factually inaccurate or using slanted rhetoric.
It's not just news, either. It's an inherent part of how we receive and impart information of any type. Being a history graduate student, I'll use the field of history as an example. The process of creating History with a capital "H" involves consulting all sorts of credible sources, extracting verified facts, and weaving together a narrative. But which credible documents do you consult? Which verified facts do you include? How do you integrate all of this information into a historical narrative?
Once more, it's tempting to say "let the facts speak for themselves!" and leave it at that. But think about the implications of that for a moment. If you were a historian trying to chronicle the present, in order to document the present right now, you'd need to use bias. You'd need to make decisions about the questions from the above paragraph. Otherwise, you'd have to go through literally every single document about the present and include literally every single fact you find. Could you imagine how long it'd take to write the History for a single day if you included a multifaceted, well-sourced section about every documented event that happened during that day?
In the United States, we all remember how George Washington crossed the Delaware River to fight Hitler in a bare knuckle boxing match [citation needed]. But why do we not mention almost everyone else who has ever crossed the Delaware before or since? On the other hand, why have we not studied George Washington's bathroom etiquette in depth? It's because historians have collectively decided that those aren't important details to include. And if they didn't make those sorts of decisions, we'd have impossibly pointless and boring history classes that would take weeks just to cover what happened in a single hour of any given day.
And that concludes everything we know we know about the 11,584,137th person to ever cross the Delaware. Now, onto one of my personal favorites, the 11,584,138th person...
No one would study History if that were the case. We need to chisel down how much information we include to make it digestible, and those decisions ultimately come with bias. How important do you consider peasants, or merchants, or artists, or nobles, or prostitutes, or incredibly good looking internet bloggers when creating your History? Do you think History is closer to a biography of certain great individuals or of mass movements determined by complex social factors outside of any one individual's control?
Regardless of your answer to that last question, you're probably going to mention some influential individuals and some influential mass social movements either way. What kind of individuals and movements do you include? And how influential does an individual have to be, and how big does a movement have to be, before either of those meet the criteria of "influential" in the first place? Does that change based on the relation between what these individuals or movements stood for and your own world outlook? That includes not just your opinion on an issue, but how much you think a certain issues matters; if you care more about the issue of environmentalism than animal rights, regardless of your actual stance on either issue, would you be more likely to include themes from the environmentalism debate in a History textbook of yours than those of animal rights? If not, how would you decide which themes to put in there?
It's not just modern History that suffers from bias problems, either.
We often think of the Middle Ages as super religious, defined by peasants whose life was dominated by the church. And, yes, that was the case for a lot of people. But it's also important to note that during this time most people who could read or write came from the church. Most of our sources from the time period, therefore, come from clergy members, and the result is that our understanding of the time period is heavily skewed by a religious perspective. There is evidence to suggest that plenty of non-religious people were around back then, too (check entry 9, though the whole list is worth a read). Considering where most of our historical sources from that time period come from, though, we're given a lot more information about the church and its importance than a more comprehensive variety of sources would reveal.
In reality, most people from the Middle Ages enjoyed playing chess against Death.
What's crucial to understand here is none of these examples necessarily involve deliberate bias. Yes, certain documents we use from the past might consciously be trying to alter how people might view the world. Yes, certain historians will purposefully cherry-pick facts only if they conform to the narrative that they wish to create. But other times, it's all the nuances of both our general world view and how we view History specifically that subtly inform how we decide what constitutes "real" History.
This makes History sound like a field prone to bullshit, but this type of debate isn't exclusive to History in particular. Not by a long shot. The point is that, when it comes to choosing what information to include and how to frame that information, we are always making decisions about what is "important" no matter what area of knowledge we're talking about. Decisions like that are impossible to make without bias on our part. I mean, how many people completely agree on what's important in life in general, let alone what's important when it comes to a particular topic?
Bringing it back to the news, when we're reading an article, we're reading a collection of facts and interpretation of these facts that come about as a result of countless processes of selection beforehand, and even if an attempt is made to be neutral about the subject of the article it doesn't erases the biases of everything that led to it. On top of that, "neutral" itself is a relative term, because different groups of people have different default "neutral" positions.
I've heard people call Al Jazeera, one of the world's most respected news sources, unreliable because it's "anti-American", for instance. Yet that's just as revealing about our own biases in the United States as it is for those who write for Al Jazeera. In the US, both major political parties consider United States power and influence to be a good thing, and therefore the "neutral" middle ground between these viewpoints does too. The Democratic Party may generally prefer a more restrained and multilateral version of United States hegemony, but it doesn't question US supremacy itself. So when Al Jazeera includes perspectives of those who do and don't like US hegemony, in their own attempt to be neutral because they're based in a part of the world that doesn't automatically consider US supremacy to be good, we are tempted to see it as "biased" because it doesn't fit with our version of what is neutral. In reality, there is no such thing as truly, objectively neutral.
Except for those from the Neutral Planet, of course.
So when it comes to bias, it's not just a matter of people explicitly stating their opinions, lying, using charged rhetoric, or even purposefully being biased at all. Yet, for those who do want to talk about a topic and be biased, what facts they do and don't include is much more important than taking potshots at the people they disagree with. Only choosing facts that make the people you don't like look bad, while not explicitly saying a single bad thing about them, has the dual benefits of painting them in a poor light and not making you look biased in the conventional sense! Documentaries are great at doing this, though it happens everywhere.
Let's take something that is in no way controversial: racism in the media. In today's day and age, no one in the news is going to blatantly come out and say black people are criminals. They don't need to, either. Just disproportionately cover crimes with black perpetrators and people will unconsciously fill in the blanks on their own. Bombard people with images of black folks as criminals and you don't need to say a single prejudiced thing about them. Hell, I would imagine most people involved with the news don't even do this on purpose, and are unconsciously perpetuating this racist imagery that they themselves were bombarded with growing up. And it's not because those people thirty years ago were consciously racist, either- they almost certainly grew up in the same environment with the same sort of stimuli. I could go on, but the point is that we can't entirely escape the confines of our biases.
That sounds like cynical resignation that could justify total bullshit because "nothing is really unbiased, man! What's the point of exchanging information if it's inherently impossible to be completely objective? Might as well just say fuck it and write whatever you want!"
Caution: that's a slippery slope toward becoming an "edgy" doofus
who has nothing particularly interesting or noteworthy to say.
But that doesn't have to be the case. Most of us don't enter into friendships or romantic relationships expecting the other person to be perfect. Instead, we get to know people we feel a connection with; if we judge them to be overall good people, we build a bond with them. It's when we allow for imperfection while still valuing the other person and how they can help us grow that we open up the possibility for very rewarding and positive experiences with them. There's no reason we can't exercise that same idea for how we deal with information: valuing what we get while making sure we understand it isn't flawless.
Like with almost every other problem, awareness of the issue is the first step. By understanding that no single source of information can ever be perfect by itself, we can seek information from a variety of credible sources and mold our own outlook to make it as well-informed as possible. When I say a "credible" source I don't mean an unbiased one, of course. I mean one that has trustworthy factual accuracy and is held to a certain set of standards, whether journalistic, academic, peer-reviewed, or whatever else. If we consult a diverse group of quality sources and expose ourselves to as many merited ideas as possible, then we can expand our worldviews and grow intellectually.
This approach may take more effort and nuanced thought than pretending you are immune to bias or embracing "fuck it!"-style cynicism, but the results are more than worth it.
