Making a case for biased news reporting
While we grapple with teaching our parents to decipher fake-news on Whatsapp, I am making the case for biased reporting.
It has been some time since I came out with an article. I wish I could say I was deep in research about next piece but truth is, I was drowned in work. You know, the part of my life which ensures I have a roof, food etc. Nevertheless, this article has been in works for quite some time now. It took few conversations for some of the pieces to fall in place. Hope you like it.
August 5th was a moment to reckon with, considering our bloodied communal past. The Prime Minister inaugurated the Ramjanmabhoomi (birth place of Ram, a hindu god) which is the Somnath temple, once the Babri Masjid. It is a significant event in India’s history and as the PM rightly pointed out, August 5th marks the beginning of a new history. For the better or worse, it is true. We still don’t know how our future will be and what this means for us as a country.
What struck me was the way it was reported. And I don’t mean the niche blogs, magazines that the elite have access to like Caravan, Politico etc. The way this was reported in major English and vernacular newspapers like Hindu, Dainik Jagran, which are read by millions. The headlines were neutral, highly informative, decorated with colorful pictures and some infographics for the skim-through busy reader.
One could say the reporting had a certain dehumanized quality to it. There was even some AI feel to it. The papers were trying to be cautious and as neutral as possible. It felt that even a hint of partisanship was immediately hunted and put down. To me, that was weird. Here is a day that marks a new beginning after a bloodied communal history, millions of lives were unnecessarily slayed. And most of the largest media houses published pictures and report about attendees, brief summary of PM’s speech and some pictures.
Such reporting is part of a broader process underplay. It might be argued that such instances stem from suppression of freedom of press. But I think that is not the case. We have had the same newspapers earlier criticizing the government, covering anti-CAA protests in great detail. This seemed a lot more deliberate, excepting The Telegraph which ran a pretty scathing front-page.
From a reader-lens, the first trend I want to explore is the growing need for unbiased objective news. Ones not given into political favoritism, nepotism and the likes. You know when someone says Financial Times is too right, Jacobin is too left. Republic is just too Arnab. But there is a second-order effect to this as well.
As the demand for objective news increases, we are increasingly hit with data-points and information than actual news. Headlines often resemble the summaries we send to our bosses on Friday night. I think objectivity is often information masquerading as news. Say when headlines read “200 people fled their houses in recent floods”. It is information and that is what we need. However, it would not be prudent to put all events across the globe in the information bucket. I argue that such ‘objectivizing’ of news-reporting leads to a certain de-humanisation, when we reduce negative impacts, deaths etc. to mere numbers. Without an insight, an opinion, we often ignore the plight of others or just fail to fathom the true nature of the event because it is not being told. Humans at the core react to stories. Not graphs, infographics or numbers. But of late media has taken the task of objectifying to the very limits and what this has led to is slow corrosion of insights, leaving us only with mere information. And without tools to help us assess, analyze and fathom what we read, we end up treating our brains like mere hard-disk storage.
It is completely valid for you to think, “Yeah but is this is SO important?”. My argument is Yes, because we have to pay a lot more attention to what we are consuming as much as how we are consuming it. In his fictional work 1984, Orwell introduces a concept called Newspeak. For the uninitiated, 1984 is a dystopian novel where there exists a complete totalitarian government in the country called Oceania. The government came up with Newspeak, essentially dictating what words can be used. They did this by:
Complicating unnecessary words - For e.g. the ice cream was not very cold. It was pluscold & doublepluscold
Usage of contradictory words to blindside the true meaning. For e.g. Ministry of Peace was the department running the wars
Over time, these can have powerful effects as we lose the ability to communicate. In Orwell’s words - If thought can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought as well. While the world we live in might not be 1984 or Oceania, the headlines we read seems to be from that world. Stripped away from meaning, piece-meal serving of raw data only in so far as you to make a conversation about it without fodder for the brain.
The image above was on Hindu today (18th August, 2020) Link for the article. Can you see how low-key this news has been published? If you read the article, you can notice how it is littered with irrelevant information while all the time masquerading as an unbiased objective article. It surely is. But it is also useless. Once I told you about Orwell, 1984 etc. suddenly you are able to assess the same information in a much different light. What essentially got you thinking about the consequences of such a move. A hint of contrarian view as well which the reporter can bring to the table.
This idea was also echoed by one of the most profound comedians - George Carlin in his set Soft Language. Carlin argues that over time English has become this soft language devoid of any truth over time. It keeps getting worse. He quotes the condition of a soldier in battle when he is pushed to highest stress limits and his nervous system snaps. In world war 1, this condition was called Shell Shock. The same condition in World War 2 was called Battle Fatigue. And over time, after Cold war, Korean war, Vietnam War, it was now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Carlin jokes this sounds like something that could happen to your car. And he is right.
As we aim to get to more ‘objective’ news, we are in effect going towards information or data. We are tracking Covid growth rates or doubling rates now. And yet we are getting further away from ground reality. The problem with data is once you have it, you know something but you don’t necessarily understand what you know. And to understand what you know, it needs biases. At the core, we all have biases. We look at reality through those biases and it helps us make sense of the world. The news we get is not manipulated, not fake, not throttled. Instead it is stripped away of any humanity. And that I think is the biggest crisis we are facing. Ramjanmabhumi reporting is an example of that. Here we have the leader of a democratic secular country attending a hindu festival on the lands where lives have been slayed over communal tension. I think that needs to be addressed. It might just be a cosmetic appearance, yet it is critical. Where can we have this conversation when all the reporting has been around the decorations, summary of his speech?
There is no unbiased news. We all have biases and what would be beneficial is if we bring them to the table. Because biases are essentially different weights we give to various information and that tells us a new way to look at what happens around. What we have is not biased news but news where they don’t tell us the biases always.
Can we keep the press accountable to give us accurate fact based news? But more importantly, are they giving us the right tools to understand the news we read?
Fantastic piece. Well written. Your point about there being no unbiased news because of humans needing stories to make sense of the world is bang on the money. And you're also right that there is no unbiased news, not even if we resort to just sharing information snippets. Because the concept of cognitive capacity comes in. And the very act of picking and choosing what to represent is the foundation of bias.
Thought provoking read. Keep writing.