Do you still follow the news? I do, but not nearly as much as I used to. Even though from a young age I hungered to know what was happening in the world, in recent years I’ve scaled back how much news I read and listen to. I could blame that increasing disinterest on my growing distaste for media bias.
But that description, though true, skips over what actually happens. It’s more like this:
I click on a news story because I’m drawn to the subject, and start watching, listening, or reading. The facts are there, and useful to my understanding. Then something hits me wrong. Perhaps it’s a loaded adjective, a dismissive description, or a clever aside. Or a quotation or video clip presented in a way that tries to guide how I’m supposed to feel about it. These little cuts, if repeated, eventually wound the story enough that I lose trust in it.
I’m disappointed… again. I really wanted the person telling the story to help me see the topic more clearly. Instead, I’ve begun seeing the biases in the story.
What exactly just happened?
I’ve become aware of how the writing has been packaged, if you will.
And how it is, subtly or not, intentionally or even unintentionally, trying to convince me to view information in a certain light.
How news framing shapes a story
News framing refers to the choices that shape how a news story is presented. In the news business, journalists and editors must decide what to emphasize, which sources to quote, what context to provide, what language to use, and what to leave out. Every news story must fit within the time available for an audio or video report or the space available for a written one.
But those choices can influence how readers understand an event or issue. Emphasis, omission, language, sourcing, headlines, and tone can affect what seems important, which explanations receive emphasis, and how the people and events in a story are perceived. That’s why the framing of news matters greatly.
It’s important, however, not to confuse framing itself with bias. Some degree of framing is unavoidable. A journalist cannot include every fact, interview every source, or explore every possible interpretation. Decisions have to be made about what matters most and how best to tell the story.
The power of small choices
A recent Media Literacy Council guide gives an example: Three news organizations covering the same event described an opening of public land with the words “returns,” “opens” and “finally opens.” The guide notes that “finally” carries an implied judgment about how long the opening took. The event hasn’t changed. Its framing has.
News framing can work in less obvious ways as well. Consider the different effects of describing the same person as an activist, advocate, protester, or agitator. Or which side of a dispute gets quoted first and at greater length. A fact contrary to the main point of view might appear near the top of a story, deep inside it, or not at all. A headline can emphasize confrontation while the story beneath it describes a more complex and nuanced reality.
None of these choices automatically makes a story unfair. The more useful question here is: what does the framing accomplish? Does it help readers understand the subject more clearly, or does it steer them toward a conclusion the reporting itself may not fully support?
That doesn’t mean news stories need to be devoid of personality. Some of the most engaging journalism carries the unmistakable voice of its writer. The deeper question is whether that voice simply illuminates the subject or begins steering the reader toward the writer’s own point of view.
What does a well-reported news story look like?
Rather than asking whether a news story is completely free of media bias, we could simply determine whether it gives us what we need to understand the subject and make up our own minds about it.
A good place to start is with a story’s evidence. Where did its important information come from? A well-reported story identifies its sources, whenever possible, and makes clear the evidence supporting its central claims, such as eyewitness accounts, interviews, documents, or other sources. These key details help us distinguish between what is known, what is claimed to be true, and what remains uncertain.
Let’s dig into a real-world example to see if we can hold ourselves to that standard.
Consider what has happened to crime and retail businesses in San Francisco over the past decade. In 2014, California voters approved Proposition 47, which reduced penalties for several lower-level drug and property crimes. Among its provisions, shoplifting merchandise worth $950 or less generally became a misdemeanor rather than an offense that could be prosecuted as a felony.
In the years that followed, San Francisco became known nationally for retail thefts, including groups entering stores and rapidly carrying off merchandise. Businesses complained about theft, repeat offenders, and employee safety, while major retailers closed downtown locations. Prosecutors and policing practices changed as the city debated how aggressively lower-level crimes should be handled.
Then California changed its theft laws again.
What actually happened, and how much can we reliably determine about what caused it?
Can we report this story without media bias?
Let’s try.
Imagine that we are part of a news team at a national print and online media outlet. We’ve been given an unusual assignment: produce an in-depth feature series on what happened to retail crime and businesses in San Francisco over the past decade. When the series is finished, it will also be syndicated to news outlets across the country.
We have something journalists rarely have enough of: time. We’re not racing to publish the story tomorrow. We can sift through laws, crime statistics, prosecution records, and economic data. We can track down what business owners actually said when they closed stores. We can interview locals who were personally impacted by the events. And because we’re looking back over more than a decade, we can compare what people said would happen with what actually happened.
We also have an old-school editor who will hold us accountable for adhering to the highest journalistic standards. He demands rigorous objectivity. Conclusions built on a bedrock of evidence. Personal opinions checked at the door. Follow the evidence where it leads, not where we might believe it leads.
And hanging over every assertion we make is our editor’s favorite question: “How do you know that?”
Our goal is to see how close we can come to transcending media bias. Our daunting first step is to gather evidence, much as detectives build an evidence book containing every potentially relevant fact or clue before deciding where they lead.
Our roadmap to gathering evidence
First, we exhaustively list what information we need to establish as facts. These are not conclusions. Those come later. These are pieces of the puzzle, including secondary parts. For our San Francisco theft story, this includes the following steps:
- Establish the law before and after Proposition 47 passed. We need to determine what California law was before 2014, what Proposition 47 actually changed, and what police and prosecutors could and could not do afterward.
- Establish what happened to crime after Proposition 47 passed. We need to follow the crime statistics over enough years, in San Francisco and statewide for comparison, to see what changed—without choosing start or end dates that favor a conclusion.
- Determine how trustworthy those numbers are. Reported crime is not necessarily actual crime, legal definitions can change, and businesses may change how often they report theft.
- Reconstruct what actually happened in San Francisco. Our team needs to examine policing, arrests, prosecutions, and the highly publicized group thefts to find out how widespread they actually were.
- Find out what happened to local businesses. Store by store, we need to examine why retailers closed or stayed open. We also need to separate documented effects of theft and safety concerns from declining sales, remote work, online competition, and other factors.
- Account for the pandemic and downtown San Francisco’s economic disruption. We have to determine which trends began before 2020, which appeared during the pandemic-driven upheaval, and which continued afterward.
- Learn what happened when California again revised its laws. We need to trace the steps between Proposition 47 and Proposition 36 and then zero in on what happened to area crime, enforcement, and businesses after these later changes.
What can we reasonably conclude?
Finally, we need to test every apparent explanation against the alternatives. Before saying one event caused another, we need to look for competing explanations and compare San Francisco with places operating under the same state laws but experiencing different results.
Throughout the investigation, we keep returning to three story-anchoring questions:
- What do we know?
- What does the evidence suggest?
- What can’t we establish?
The cost of getting a news story right
There is another reality worth acknowledging. Reporting a series this comprehensively would take a huge amount of time, money, and manpower. Reporters would spend weeks examining records, analyzing data, conducting interviews, checking competing claims, and then writing and editing the series with equal care.
Most newsrooms don’t have those resources. Deadlines are real, staff and budgets have limits, and audiences increasingly expect information quickly. Those pressures don’t excuse media bias, but they help explain why even conscientious journalism sometimes falls short of the high standards our hypothetical editor above has set.
But there’s another confounding factor—because getting the story right is only part of the challenge.
What happens to that careful reporting after it leaves its writer’s and editor’s hands?
The next chapter: the competing soundbites
Now imagine our feature series has been published, syndicated, and read nationwide. This took months of reporting, thousands of words, competing evidence carefully weighed, and conclusions drawn only as far as the evidence allows.
Then a media outlet or online commentator finds it and decides to turn our investigation into a 45-second YouTube Short. This creator doesn’t invent anything. Every fact comes from our reporting.
Soundbite #1
Her video opens with surveillance footage of people rushing from a ransacked San Francisco store, their arms loaded with stolen merchandise.
Story chyron: California voters reduced penalties for theft.
The narrator explains that Proposition 47 made several property crimes misdemeanors rather than felonies and notes that theft increased during part of the decade that followed.
Cut to a retailer describing repeated thefts and employees expressing fear for their safety. More surveillance footage follows. Then shuttered storefronts. The narrator tells viewers that major retailers closed downtown locations while California and San Francisco struggled with retail theft in the wake of Prop 47’s passage.
Then comes the reaction. Ten years after Proposition 47, California voters approved Proposition 36, which allowed some repeat offenders to again face felony charges for stealing less than $950 and increasing penalties for certain other theft crimes.
The closing image returns to the empty storefronts, followed by the report’s bottom line:
After an epidemic of retail theft that helped drive businesses out of downtown San Francisco, public outcry finally pushed California to change course.
Soundbite #2
Now imagine a second creator getting hold of exactly the same feature series.
His video opens with images of deserted San Francisco streets and empty office buildings during the pandemic.
Story chyron: COVID transformed downtown San Francisco.
The narrator explains how office workers disappeared, tourism and foot traffic collapsed, and downtown businesses lost customers in the wake of the pandemic. Retailers already facing online competition and companywide restructuring closed stores as the downtown economy struggled to recover.
Cut to one of the widely circulated retail-theft videos.
He notes that dramatic incidents like these received enormous national attention, which created the impression of a city overwhelmed by retail crime. But California does not even have a crime statistic that captures everything commonly described as retail theft, he says, adding that changes in reporting also make long-term comparisons difficult.
The narrator then turns to Proposition 47. Critics blamed the 2014 law for weakening penalties and helping fuel retail theft, he notes. But while some property crime increased after its passage, researchers could not establish that Prop 47 caused San Francisco’s later retail-theft problems.
Cut back to deserted downtown streets and office towers.
The narrator reminds viewers that retailers need customers to survive. With office workers gone, foot traffic down, and shopping habits changing, downtown San Francisco suffered an economic upheaval that reached far beyond crime.
The closing images show empty office towers and sparsely traveled downtown streets, followed by the report’s bottom line:
San Francisco’s retail crisis wasn’t primarily a crime story. It was a story of a downtown economy transformed by the pandemic.
Learning to see the spin
So which of our two soundbites is biased?
Both are, yet neither needed to lie. Each drew its facts from the same deeply researched series. What changed was which facts were selected, which were emphasized, what images accompanied them, what language described them, and just as importantly, what was left out.
That lands us back on media literacy, on the value of becoming media literate. What does that mean?
It is true that we cannot reasonably investigate every story we encounter as thoroughly as our hypothetical news team investigated San Francisco’s retail problem. But we can become more alert to the ways information is presented to us.
When a news story leaves us with a strong impression, we can ask a few simple questions.
- Where did its essential claims come from?
- Am I being shown evidence or mainly being told what it means?
- Does the language simply describe events or also subtly judge them?
- Are other plausible explanations being considered?
- What relevant information might be missing?
- And perhaps most useful of all: How do the story’s creators know that?
The same questions apply whether a story confirms what we already believe or challenges it. In fact, the stories that most readily confirm our existing views may deserve our closest attention.
Counteracting media bias with media literacy
Media literacy doesn’t require us to become suspicious of everything we read, watch, or hear. It simply suggests that we become active participants in deciding what the information in front of us actually establishes.
Perhaps that is one way to transcend media bias. We won’t ever be without the human judgments that shape the news. But we can learn to recognize them, look beyond them, do our own research, if need be, and make up our own minds about where the evidence leads.Cut back to deserted downtown streets and office towers.
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