Last week I had an article published on Crikey on the bias of reporting on climate change by News Corporation. One of the more interesting critiques I’ve received about this piece has been that it is ridiculous for a clearly biased commentator (myself) to criticise other organisations for their bias.
These were really interesting comments and ones that really pointed to a lot of our thought processes around bias in the media. In attacking me for being biased, these people were defending the bias of another organisation, and trying to break down my credibility as an author.
This made me think about a blog post I wrote years ago covering the topic of bias, and how progressives in particular should respond to attacks that we are biased in our reporting. It’s a pretty common tactic for people to be attacked for being biased and looking back at it (the blog is now defunct, but I had saved the post), I think this part is still relevant:
How Should the Left Respond?
There are two ways I think the left are best to respond to such attacks:
1) Point out the hypocrisy. I always find it funny that it is those who criticise people for being biased that are generally the most biased of all. It is the responsibility of the left to point this out, not in order to attack these people for being biased but rather to attack their hypocrisy.
2) Embrace our bias. A lecturer I greatly respect once started the first lecture of a course he took with a slide that stated ‘Beware…Marxist at work’. What this lecturer was doing was openly acknowledging and embracing his bias, through letting his students know about it. As people who believe in academic freedoms and freedom of press the best way to fight the ‘bias attack’ is to openly acknowledge ones bias and publicly allow the public to deal with and accept those biases as they wish.
These are both tactics that I have seen in practice in media and the academic world and have been extremely good ways to bounce off attacks of ‘bias’. It is important for the left to continue such efforts to reject these growing attacks that are not only hypocritical in their nature, but also extremely dangerous.
On reflection, I think the second point is definitely the most valuable. Yes, I am biased when it comes to climate change. I see the science and I want us to take some pretty serious action on it. This feeling is part of a larger progressive nature of my politics. Yet, I feel that unlike News Corp. I am willing to embrace my bias. I don’t present myself as an ‘objective’ news organisation, who then is then deeply biased in their reporting on issues.
The issue with News Corp. really then is not their bias, but their unwillingness to be honest about their bias. If they were to be more comfortable in just coming out and saying ‘we don’t believe it and we’re going to campaign against it’, then I would be more comfortable (although, given their size and influence, not completely happy) with their role in the media sphere.