Reading Bias
AS YOU WELL KNOW, you are a fair-minded person, able to overcome any preexisting biases or prejudices that you might have. Which you don’t. Have biases, that is. You can examine any situation objectively, no matter how passionately you might feel about the issue at hand. On the whole, there has never been a more evenhanded, open-minded, square-dealing person than yourself. Well, guess what: me, too! I can listen to both sides of any argument, weigh them carefully, and pick the winner on the basis of merit. And here’s the thing: writers are that way, too. They see clearly, analyze objectively, present fairly, never cut corners, never jump to conclusions. How do we know? They tell us. Now, the other guy . . .
Enough of that nonsense. I was beginning to get the shakes from truth withdrawal. I’m not dispassionate and objective. Nor is David McCullough, or Bob Woodward or David Brooks or, well, anyone. Including you. We try, most of us, most of the time. But we’ll never escape who we are. A lot of what we think is, if not hard-wired in us, so entrenched that it might as well be. We can struggle to overcome it or succumb to it, but it’s a fact of our existence.
Disclaimers
THIS ONE ISN’T FOOLPROOF (what is?), but you want to know one way of sniffing out bias? See what the writer says he isn’t biased against. I can’t tell you how many times I have read (or heard on television or radio), “I don’t dislike soccer.” What follows is invariably a catalog of all the things wrong with soccer as a spectator sport or even a mildly human pursuit, at least from the writer’s or speaker’s perspective. And if the above statement is immediately followed by, “No, I really don’t,” what comes next will be really bad. Two “really”s? It’s the devil’s spawn. I decided some years ago to take special pains, whenever that disclaimer appeared, to notice if the rest of the article did something other than trash soccer. I’m still waiting.
I was thinking about this while reading conservative columnist David Brooks’s The Road to Character (2015). Near the end of his book, having thoroughly trashed American culture since roughly 1960, which by no means excludes the world of online self-promotion, he offers this astonishing disclaimer: “I’m not a big believer that social media have had a ruinous effect on the culture, as many technophobes fear.” Any guesses how long it takes the “but” to appear? Wrong. There’s a sentence in between. Is Mr. Brooks trying to deceive us? Deluding himself? I don’t think so. Rather, I get the sense that he really does feel that he’s made peace with the Internet Age, recognizing that it arrived, took up residence, and shows no signs of decamping anytime soon, so he might as well make the best of it. He just has reservations about what sort of “best” might be made.
Quotes, Etc.
ONE WAY OF DETERMINING the leanings of a writer is to examine whom he quotes and whether the context around those quotes is approving or derisive. Nearly everyone who writes nonfiction will have occasion to cite, quote, or paraphrase someone. It may be true that no man (or woman) is an island; it is absolutely true with writers. And the people to whom we are beholden, who have played the role of models or ideals or irritants in our lives, are likely to show up in our texts from time to time.
Those borrowings, however, aren’t cost-free. When a writer uses other people’s words, he’s under a set of obligations. One is to credit the person whose words he uses. This duty is to both the person quoted or paraphrased and to readers. Students (and former students) will recognize this obligation as lying behind the rules about citation and plagiarism, which can be summarized as a matter of intellectual property: people deserve recognition for what they write, and any attempt to limit that right is theft. But it goes beyond that “academic” position. Even if they are speaking—in an interview, for instance—they are entitled to their words being credited to them, including not being credited if they request that. In news articles especially, we see someone quoted but not identified. They may have any of a thousand reasons why they want their name kept out, in which case their name becomes something like “a highly placed source.” Such lack of attribution does not necessarily indicate that the writer made up the statement, despite what detractors of the news (who may have their own reasons to discredit the reporter or the media in general) may claim. A witness to gangland activity may, quite reasonably, not want to die. An employee might wish to still be employed but believe that the truth needs to come out. Another may not want to open himself up to prosecution. Or he may not want to acknowledge publicly that he knows the person being reported on. The speaker’s reasons are as various as speakers and cover a wide range of legitimacy behind those reasons. If you are a reporter, however, your job is not to question those reasons; if you give your word to the source to keep their identity secret, you must do so.
A step beyond the unidentified speaker is information “on background.” In this case, the writer offers neither the identity of the speaker nor the specific words used. It may not be the most emotionally satisfying way to receive information, but if the information is genuine, would you rather have that or nothing? Who speaks on background? A surprising number of political figures. How many times have we read or heard, “an administration official, speaking on background” in the course of a story? Lots. It’s a way to release general information without getting down into the weeds. Corporate figures do it, too. Here’s a difference, although it won’t hold up in all circumstances: speakers on background tend to be official sources who aren’t ready to be quoted (and whose statements likely have approval from higher-ups), while speakers who are quoted but not named tend to be leaking information that someone (possibly that same higher management) doesn’t want released. In all of these cases, the reporter follows the wishes of the source unless she informs the source ahead of time that she will not do so. In such cases, the source is unlikely to cooperate.
You want to see how this works in practice? Early on in All the President’s Men (1974), the tale of unraveling the Watergate break-in orchestrated by Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are trying to figure out who this character, E. Howard Hunt, was who had attached himself to Charles Colson’s staff at the White House, Woodward makes a call to “a young presidential aide he had once met socially.” During their hour-long conversation, Woodward promised that the aide’s name would not be attached to the article, and the aide told him that Hunt had been ordered by someone to investigate Senator Edward Kennedy’s personal life. While he would not or could not identify the source of the order, he strongly intimated that Colson had known about the assignment. And this in the midst of a cover-up that would become legendary for its fog of misinformation. There you go—no attribution, no direct statements, all background, but no less true for all that.
And on the subject of quotes, there’s the small matter of accuracy. If you have never had to transcribe another person’s statements, you have no idea how difficult that can be. People don’t always carry their thoughts through in a straight line. They ramble. They backtrack or sidetrack. They produce jumbles of speech known as “word salads” in the manner of a well-known leader of the free world. Try untangling one of those sometime. Well, you know what? You must. People deserve to have their words conveyed correctly. That doesn’t mean what they meant to say but what they actually said. If they misstated, that can be emended later; if they were misquoted, that’s writerly malfeasance. Of course, voice recordings make that easier. Reporters (and others) used to carry tape recorders; now they just whip out their smartphones.
Fair(ish) Treatment
BEYOND ACCURACY, SOMETIMES THE media best serve the public interest by allowing a speaker to correct something said earlier, even if that something was perfectly quoted. One afternoon in the summer of 2018, President Trump said of Russian interference in the 2016 election, “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia.” The statement was of a piece with the tenor of his entire discussion of the Russia probe that afternoon, and the response was predictable: how could he go against his entire intelligence establishment, who were united in saying that it definitely was Russia, and so on. The next day, he offered a revision of his earlier sentence, saying that he meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,” explaining that he was using “sort of a double negative.” He went on to say things that suggested he didn’t really mean that at all, as when he said, as he has often done, that it “could be others, you never know.” His first statement was not an instance of misreporting, given that the whole world could hear him actually say it. But he got to come out the next day and rework the problematic sentence. News people didn’t refuse him a forum for retraction. Readers and listeners could decide for themselves which version was more likely. Which they did, along the usual fault lines. That’s fair.
What’s not fair is to change a speaker’s words by oneself.
In examining the sides of a discussion, does the writer offer balance not only of space but of analysis? Okay, you’re right, almost nobody offers true balance. But do they come close? Or is the opposing view presented as a straw man, set up only to be knocked down? You see it all the time in online comments, so-and-so backs Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, so she’s essentially not merely a Democrat but a Socialist, practically a Communist who desires to take away our freedom. While such-and-such backs President Trump, so he really supports white supremacists (who sometimes express favorable opinions of the president) and therefore a neo-Nazi who desires to take our freedom away. From all appearances, our freedom is a delicate flower ceaselessly imperiled by all sorts of jackbooted knaves. Now, comment writers are not professional journalists, and they are held to a low standard of veracity, but we do see folks who write for a living get carried away with rhetorical guilt-by-association from time to time. It ain’t pretty. Certain newspaper opinion columnists make character assassination their stock-in-trade. Cal Thomas generally portrays liberals as devils incarnate or at least as persons led astray by a devil. I believe they must be related to the conservatives whom Paul Krugman knows; each group is reduced to caricature by the respective columnists.
Rhetorical Tilt
WE CAN LEARN A lot about a writer’s leaning by observing the slant of the words she uses. This is related to the fairness business above but is getting down to the microlevel. What kinds of words does she attach to the people or views she admires? To the ones she resists? Just yesterday I came across an op-ed in my local newspaper about an upcoming vote in the state on an antigerrymandering bill. For those of you who don’t live and die politics (I mostly die, or at least groan a lot, but that’s another story), gerrymandering is the process, long practiced by both parties and recently perfected via big data, of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to resemble Rorschach test images. The goal isn’t to create weird shapes for their own sake but to make some votes (the district-drawing party) count more than others (the out-of-power party). For the moment, we’re less concerned with maps than with rhetorical flourishes. The writer’s blurb after the column says that he “is not associated in any manner with the ballot initiative.” Sounds like the soul of impartiality, no? But if we get down in the weeds a bit, we find that the supporters of the initiative aren’t even present. Rather, the key sentence about them is couched in the neutrality of the passive voice, “An initiative has been proposed . . . and has received enough valid signatures, etc.” But the opponents are abundantly active: “Those invested in the political status quo have claimed,” and so on. “Invested,” “status quo,” and “claimed” are all charged words. You can hear the weight in them: “claimed,” for instance, carries at least a slight taint of “wrongly” or “unfairly” that tries to push in unless the word is modified quickly.
Since I find myself in general agreement with the writer that gerrymandering tends to undermine the first principle of democracies that majorities are supposed to win power, I am inclined to look beyond his tilting the rhetorical scale. Others who see the practice as the fruits of fairly won elections (even those that have resulted from heavily gerrymandered districts) will likely find the words unfairly charged. That’s readerly bias in both cases. Which accentuates or cancels out writerly bias on a case-by-case basis.
Here’s the thing about bias, though: within limits, it doesn’t mean that the writer is wrong or that the article or book has no merit. Nor does it mean that the bias you find in her makes her worse than the bias you may or may not acknowledge in yourself. Discovering the nature of a writer’s bias will, however, let readers see where she’s coming from and heading to, so that they can question (interrogate is the in-vogue term these days) the intent and the methods by which she pursues her case.
Care for an example of how to acknowledge your bias? If you’re going to write about the role of psychedelic drugs in modern psychiatry, you’d better be prepared for questions. Among them, the preeminent concern will be something like, “What in heaven’s name is wrong with you?” There will inevitably be a presumption that the writer is some sort of druggie seeking to justify his own interests. Or else someone with a financial interest in resurrecting a long-buried idea. This is precisely the situation of Michael Pollan, best known for his writing on food, in his 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Pollan, it should be noted, is something of a professional skeptic. He writes about food, diet, restaurants, gardening, and his own misadventures in construction with a raised eyebrow that questions the current enterprise. In his In Defense of Food (2008), for instance, he explores how food myths embraced in the late twentieth century about such elements as whether dietary fat and cholesterol correlate as strongly as believed with cardiovascular disease and how “nutritionism” has turned Western attitudes toward food consumption into an increasingly wary and uneasy relationship. In much of his work he doubts his own reactions as much as those he challenges.
Such an approach serves him well in this book. Of the 2006 article detailing a study that found that a dose of psilocybin could prompt mystical experiences, he writes that it “piqued my curiosity but also my skepticism” about the value of psychedelics. The interest came from the fact that there were serious, academic researchers who for some reason were willing to risk damage to their reputations in order to reexamine the potential benefits of hallucinogens, this time weighing them against the hazards. Such was not the case a half-century earlier when LSD hucksters like Timothy Leary and the “acid tests” of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters brought the entire class of drugs—and those who studied them—into disrepute.
Pollan further tells us that he had no youthful experience of any psychedelic drugs, having been born a touch late (1955) for the flowering of LSD experimentation but right on time to receive all the antipsychedelics messages the society began putting out in the late sixties. The allure, moreover, of a drug-prompted mystical experience would seem lost on someone who confesses that he was unsure that “he has ever had a single ‘spiritually significant’ experience,” a philosophically materialistic person who never considered himself “as a spiritual, much less mystical, person.” He does, however, note that he understands that there may well be limits to the “scientific-materialist perspective.” In other words, he knows what he thinks but suspects that what he thinks may not be everything that is thinkable. He announces that he will attack the questions raised by this new-old science with openness but also doubt toward all parts of the story, including his own role.
One place that this reserving of judgment proves useful is in his own exploration of the experience of the drugs in question. There is no way to know what a trip on LSD or psilocybin is like except by taking one. We can read all we want, but an experience so completely internal resists mere description, even by those who have undergone it. Yet Pollan does not wish to seem (or be) a drug-addled enthusiast seeking to justify his own life choices.
So, then, bias: be we ever so honest with ourselves and our readers, none of us can ever be wholly aware of our slants in this direction or that. Those can only be seen from the outside. The best we can hope to do is be honest about where we think our bias lies and work against it where we need to. After all, we’re not fooling anyone but ourselves; it’s not as if readers won’t notice. Especially if they don’t share our viewpoints.