I'm not talkin fast, you just listenin' slow

Audience perception and media bias

Being an active and donating listener of my local NPR news station, 88.1 WYPR-FM, I thought it would be interesting to see what NPR had to say about the media coverage of the presidential campaign. In many media course people discuss the role of the audience. Surprisingly, NPR put much of the bias accusations on the shoulders of the audience. In the two podcasts I listened to (News & Notes, 11/7/08 and Talk of the Nation, 11/12/2008), the media's bias, or at least the perception of that bias, was a product of what the audience wanted to hear, or how the audience listened/read the coverage of the campaign.

When discussing journalists' displays of emotion in response to the Democratic nomination of President Obama, Farai Chideya asks did those displays "breakdown the objectivity of journalism?" Kelly McBride, an ethic group leader at The Pointer Institute, a journalism training organizations, says that those displays were completely predictable given the historic value of the event. She reminds us that journalists indeed human; they cannot live outside of the society in which they report.

The two go on to discuss the sort of clarity between opinion and news in print media versus the sometimes mixed news-opinion nature of cable news programs. McBride's comments get interesting when she suggests that it may not be the news organizations that drive these differences, but the readers and viewers. She points to the fact that even though viewers may reply, when surveyed, that they want hard news, that when asked about the high ratings of cable new programs they the realness of the coverage and tend to watch (or read for that matter) news that shares their same biases. McBride goes on to say that the real questions concerning news transparency and bias should be "Is this work fair?" and "Is this work distanced enough; does this work serve the audience?" However, "distance" is relative: if you are a viewer who wants to connect with the story, maybe that distance would turn you away form a hard news broadcast.

A few days after this story aired, Neal Conan and the NPR Ombudsman, Alicia C. Shepard, discuss NPR's own charges of election bias, Shepard, like McBride, puts the weight of the bias on the listeners. However, Shepard makes it clear that the crux of the problem is actually listener's perception of a bias, and not necessarily a true bias on behalf of NPR programming. In her own small study, NPR notes that Shepard received "282 e-mails specifically accusing NPR of favoring Obama, and 252 emails accusing NPR of favoring McCain." They go on to note that out of NPR programming, there were 168 McCain-Palin stories and 146 Obama-Biden stories between August 1 and September 30. From just looking at these numbers, Shepard is right to conclude that NPR really wasn't unfair to either candidate.

Shepard says, and I would have to agree, that "We as human beings have strong core beliefs, so when we hear something opposed to that we react strongly," so it would be normal for someone to claim media bias when they disagree with something. Concerning NPR's perceived liberal bias, they bring up a 2005 UCLA study (Groseclose and Milyo, 2005), in which the authors conclude that despite "conservatives frequently list NPR as an egregious example of a liberal news outlet... by our estimate the outlet hardly differs from the average mainstream news outlet." However, they do conclude that the average news outlet has a "strong media bias." Specifically addressing the campaign, researchers at the Pew Research Center's support the conclusions form the UCLA study when they found that of the stories covering Obama, only 29% were negative, while 59% of McCain stories were negative (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2008).

Considering that both of these studies support the claim for a liberal media bias, I agree that NPR's coverage of the campaign was "only slightly left of center" (Neal, 2008). What I find most interesting, are Shepard's claims about an audience-created perception of bias. It would make sense that one is quick to claim unfairness or that a story lacks objectivity if that person disagrees with the conclusions or ideas presented in a story, simply because claiming bias is easier than arguing your case.

As an active listener, Shepard's and McBride's questions about an audience's role in producing biased media interests me. Now when I listen to my NPR podcasts and local WYPR programs, before I shout "Not fair!" I should look at the context of the story and then ask myself, as Shepard suggests, "Is it really biased, or do you just not like it?"

References:

Chideya, Farai. "Assessing Media Objectivity in Election 2008." News & Notes, November 7, 2008. NPR podcast: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96751048. Accessed 02/06/09.

Conan, Neal. "NPR Ombudsman On Charges Of Election Bias." Talk of the Nation, November 12, 2008. NPR podcast: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96751048. Accessed 02/06/09.

Groseclose Tim and Milyo, Jeffrey. "A Measure of Media Bias." The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 2005, vol. 120, no. 4, pp 1191-1237. University of California, Santa Barbara URL: http://www.polsci.ucsb.edu/faculty/glasgow/mediabias.pdf. Accessed 02/07/09.

Project for Excellence in Journalism. " Canvassing Campaign Media: An Analysis of Time, Tone and Topics." Pew Research Center, October 22, 2008. URL: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1001/campaign-media. Accessed 02/07/09.

Shepard, Alicia C. "When it Comes to Core Beliefs, Bias is Everywhere." NPR Ombudsman, November 3. 2008. NPR Blog/Column: http://www.npr.org/ombudsman/bias/. Accessed 02/06/09