Complex Numbers

On the Bias

A prompt for "JAFBG"  [XGC]...

What's your opinion on bias in the media?

There's not enough of it.

Allow me to explain before jumping on me:

Every media outlet, indeed, every individual, has bias. Some of it is conscious; some of it isn't. With media outlets, some of them have an obvious slant in one direction or another. Others attempt to be neutral, though even choosing which stories to run shows some bias.

And it's in that attempt to be neutral that, sometimes, you run into problems.

Let's take a possibly extreme, fictional example. I'm totally cribbing this from Superman:

Say there's an independent scientist who discovers that the planet's about to blow up. He brings this to the planetary council. The planetary council, who all have a vested interest in the planet not blowing up, ignore his findings despite overwhelming evidence. So he takes it to a nice, objective, attempts-to-be-unbiased news distributor, presenting all of his scientific evidence and his argument for why the planet is going to explode.

The media outlet promptly checks his story with the council, which scoffs at the very idea. So the journal, in an attempt to cover "both sides of the debate," meticulously prints the opinions of the independent scientist, who had evidence, and the council, who basically just don't want the planet to blow up (not that I blame the council for that).

This gets out to the average Kryptonianmedia consumer, who probably doesn't understand all the science involved, and pretty soon the planet's divided in two parts (for a few days before being divided into a billion parts): one, we trust the scientist because he presented decent evidence, and two, we trust the council because, well, because they're the council, I guess.

There are the inevitable follow-up stories, interviews with the folks on the street. "What do you think of the claims that the planet's about to blow up?" "I think we should take this seriously." Or, "I think it's a load of hogwash" (Or whatever the inhabitants of that planet used to clean their equivalent of pigs.) (Yes, I know that's not where "hogwash" comes from.)

So, here's the problem with those media outlets: they're treating informed, scientific findings with the same weight as uninformed, wishful thinking, which in turn acquires the same weight as the blithering of anyone who has a vested interest in the matter.

Now that I think of it, maybe this was the real reason Clark Kent became a reporter.

But I digress. The point is that, in their attempt to be perfectly fair and unbiased, the news outlets did their planet a disservice, resulting in the planet blowing up and there being only one survivor (or two, or a whole bunch, depending on which timeline we're talking about... sorry, digressing again).

Now, sure, you get some old bearded guy with signs off the street who keeps proclaiming, "The world's about to end," and clearly, you either a) want to see his evidence or b) want to get as far from him as physically possible. But someone who researches this sort of thing? Maybe they have a point. Maybe ask other people who research these things, and not Bil-Bob in front of the weed dispensary. Sure, scientists can be wrong, but the ones to make that assessment are... other scientists, not politicians or social workers. Or, for that matter, journalists.

All of which is to say that if you have an article about how the Spring Solstice happens because of axial tilt, don't think you have to interview a flat-earther for an "alternative viewpoint."