In the last few weeks, I have watched someone on my twitter timeline gradually shift their point of view from “COVID and 5G have no link whatsoever” to “Maybe it’s not all lies” to “The mainstream media are liars and maybe one particular famous president is the subject of a trumped-up campaign”.
I’m not here to talk about COVID-19 and 5G, Akolade has done that here. I’m more interested in how we label different media outlets as being biased at best or at worst, as outright liars. It is a bit messier when you realize that the same news outlet can be the truth or can be fake news, depending on who’s doing the categorization.
I have a different view: that all news outlets (at least in the formats in which news is delivered today) are biased, and that it is not necessarily a conspiracy.
We like to think of news as a simple pipe connecting the source of the action on one end to the audience at the other. No filters, no added ingredients, just faithful connection. That is not however, what we want. There are so many things happening in the world at any one time that for instance, there can be a legislative hearing in the Senate, a drone attack somewhere, a wireless operator merger, a major corruption trial and a tax bill being negotiated by opposing parties, all in one day. It’s almost impossible for any one person to be so bright as to know and understand the little details of the different contexts (telecoms, anti-trust regulations, legislative procedure, trial processes and statutes, economics and fiscal policy, foreign and war policy) that we don’t expect a news outlet to simply tell us what went on that day. We expect a summary with commentary, telling us in more understandable terms what happened in those cases, what they mean for us, and why they matter.
That last point — why things matter — is the lifeblood of news today. If everyone is simply retelling what happened, we won’t need the many news outlets we have.
For every major event — the Biafra war, for example— there are several accounts of what happened. There was only one event but many angles, some perhaps better researched or better written than others, but the angles are diverse and the stories different. When we pick up a book about something that happened, we usually do not look for a chronology of events; we want a story, a narrative that tells us why, and why it matters.
This expectation we have of news outlets requires that they take a stand in what they believe the significance of an event is, and how they wish the audience to perceive it. Remarkably, many news outlets have been consistent over the years in terms of their filter in the news pipe — the angle through which they cover events. There are many adjectives — progressive, sensationalist, conservative, liberal, tabloid, anti-establishment, pro-government — that we forget that each of these is a take on the underlying happening events. Angles are to news what clothes are to a model — the same model is in Italian high fashion one day, in streetwear on another and looks alluring to very different customer groups in each costume. The news is the naked, no make-up, unardoned body, and that is not what fashion is here for.
There is no unbiased news anywhere; if you totally agree with a story’s angle then the angle lies smack along your line of thinking, it was not an unbiased take. We will do well to remember that, and rather than waste our limited supply of disappointments on media outlets, we should be more concerned with recognizing their angle and consuming accordingly.
There’s a popular story about a cup filled up to half with water, where an optimist is said to describe it as “half-full”, and the pessimist as “half-empty”. The factual description will lie along the lines of “118.5ml of water in a 237ml container”; but what’s the fun in that?
PS
The closest I’ve come to unbiased prose is reading results of scientific research. I can assure you, they are no fun.
