1. Should factual writing contain bias?
By
Jacob Hargrave
Bias – the action of supporting or opposing a particular person or thing in an
unfair way, because of allowing personal opinions to influence your judgment.
We are all a little bias, for example: I like green grapes, but I don’t like red
ones. This is called personal bias. We all learn biases from people in our
lives, from situations we find ourselves in, from the media and from books. In
every day life with things like choosing grapes, or a new sofa colour it’s okay,
but when you have a job, like a journalist, you have to write unbiased and
without personal opining, but this must be hard at times especially when you
have to write about something you have a very strong opinion about. There is
then a risk that it will not be a balanced argument.
An example of this is on the programme This Morning where Kevin Maguire
from the Daily Mirror newspaper, who are known to support the Labour Party
is with Andrew Pierce from the Daily Mail, who support Conservative. Every
week they discuss something political and often cannot agree. This makes a
balanced argument when you see them together on the T.V, but reading one
or the other newspapers, there is less likely to have an unbiased or fair
argument, as they both have strong opinions. In the photo below you can see
that the Daily Mail shows Brexit in a positive way but the Mirror does not as it
shows Davis Cameron looking concerned. This shows that the bias of the
journalist and paper affects their presentation of Brexit.
The BBC has a Charter and an Agreement that says that journalists working
there must be impartial. Which means basically that they cannot take sides
and must report on a “breadth of view” and they must look at both sides of the
argument and report on them without preconceptions or bias. Also the
Handbook of Journalism has similar rules. They say, “ We must always strive
to be scrupulously fair and balanced. Allegations should not be portrayed as
2. fact; charges should not be conveyed as a sign of guilt. We have a duty of
fairness to give the subjects of such stories the opportunity to put their side.”
Even though this is the case, all journalists have opinions though and these
might affect how they write about an issue and even though is might seem
that they are writing something factual they can add things like implied
judgement which is based on their bias rather than a balanced viewpoint.
Bias can mean that we are misled, misinformed, mean we make a wrong
deduction or a poor decision. For example in advertising: you do some
research on the best way to get a stain out of your best t-shirt. One website
could tell you that their product is the best one to get out the stain. This may
be the case with a product, but the truth is you will get the same result if you
put your washing machine on a 90oc wash with no products at all. The
company advertising are not lying but they are also not informing you of the
alternative, which would not make them any money.
Another example of bias in the media was found in a report done by
Independent.co.uk. They found that 75% of press coverage on Jeremy
Corbyn in his first two months as party leader was misrepresentation in eight
national newspapers and worse coverage in three newspapers associated
him with terrorism. All of this can have a very negative effect on how the
readers perceive him to be, and may make a decision on whether to vote for
him or not based on what they have read.
Because of the above I feel that factual writing should not be allowed to
contain bias and it should be regulated more. It’s difficult though because we
are not always aware of bias and newspapers by using particular wording that
can influence our decision-making. If an author is writing one sided then it
should be stated at the beginning or in the headline. This way as a reader you
can decide whether you want to read on.
The problem with newspapers is that they have no way of letting the reader
know the content of an article. The article may not be suitable for some
people because of its sensitive nature, but there is no restrictions to them
3. buying the paper, or even reading somebody elses. There are groups of
people that are more easily influenced, e.g people with mental health
problems and the young. A poll by PR Group Gorkana found that 82% of the
British public they asked thought that newspapers had “power and influence”
over their readers and because they have such influence over our thoughts
and feelings about things that happen in our every day lives, I feel that there
should be a watchdog that monitors the newspapers and if they feel that
something is bias, especially with a sensitive topic like racism, terrorism or
violence then they should be able to take action against them and make them
accountable.
