A Wee Blether

I enjoyed James Poniewozik’s interesting piece, “Polarized News? The Media’s Moderate Bias” in Time last week. Though I’ve been aware of what Poniewozik calls “moderate bias” for years, it really hit home just last year when I studied global climate change and the media in my Creation, New Creation, and Ecology course at Columbia Seminary.

Turns out, the same folks used by the tobacco company’s in the 80s and 90s to suggest smoking wasn’t bad for you have been hired by big oil to suggest global climate change isn’t occurring. The moderate media has to / loves to cover two sides of a story, so even if international scientistic bodies publish reports on the ill effects of climate change, and there’s a tiny minority of scientists (or talking heads) questioning their findings, the news story can often become a simple: scientists disagree on climate change.

Poniewozik also mentions “status quo bias.”

Moderate bias also grows from a related phenomenon: status-quo bias. Journalists, like anyone, have a built-in bias toward believing that what was true yesterday will be true tomorrow. Establishment news outlets grow cozy and comfortable with other establishments. One reason some journalists insufficiently questioned the run-up to the Iraq war and underestimated the housing bubble was that they listened to their usual, credentialed sources — and the history of the past decade is the history of the experts being wrong.

Anyways, that’s just something to think on because moderate bias affects us all, and a whole lot. It’s probably not always bad, but I do wonder how we’d read the Bible without moderate bias or status quo bias. Or, further, how we’d love our neighbor.

Then again, I usually take Elie Wiesel’s perspective pretty seriously and he doesn’t mince words about taking sides:

I swear never to be silent whenever and wherever human lives endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourage the tormenter, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere when human life are endangered. When human dignity is in jeopardy, that place, at that moment, must become the center of the universe.

Too tough?  I don’t know.  With Wiesel’s holocaust experience as background it’s hard to call for folks to back off from taking sides.  But one also doesn’t want to polarize unnecessarily.  Hmm, I guess the point is to take Poniewozik’s basic perspective and always watch for bias since even moderate bias is sinister enough.

image by Robert Linder