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In most any endeavor, it is difficult to be fair. For journalists, the challenge is both profound and public. A journalist's work product inherently depends on a series of subjective judgments. In short order, that work is scrutinized by leaders and readers and often by the very people mentioned in the story. In this article, reflecting on one year spent reporting the news, I make the case that partisan and ideological balance predominate in the mainstream media not because of exceptional training or perpetual hand-wringing over objectivity. Rather, balance is an accidental consequence of the journalist's true quest: to be interesting.
Dating back at least to the 1930s academics have shown that journalists tend to support liberal and Democratic causes (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter Reference Lichter, Rothman and Lichter1986; Patterson and Donsbach Reference Patterson and Donsbach1996; Rosten Reference Rosten1937). Nevertheless, the preponderance of available scholarly evidence from large-scale studies of political news coverage suggests no consistent ideological or partisan bias in the American news media (for example, Eisinger, Veenstra, and Koehn Reference Eisinger, Veenstra and Koehn2007; Niven Reference Niven2002). That meta-analysis does not find bias (D'Alessio and Allen Reference D'Alessio and Allen2000) adds further credence to this conclusion, as does the recent work of researchers who have peered into the construction of news coverage with innovative techniques. Clayman and his coauthors (Reference Clayman, Elliott, Heritage and Beckett2010), for example, scrutinized five decades of presidential press conferences. They found no partisan or ideological pattern in the aggressiveness of reporters' questions. Groeling and Baum (Reference Groeling and Baum2009) considered which of the numerous statements uttered by members of Congress on televised Sunday morning political talk shows were chosen by reporters as sound bites to be repeated in other venues. Over a two-decade period, they too found no partisan or ideological pattern. When belief in a biased media is nearly an article of faith (for example, Eveland and Shah Reference Eveland and Shah2003; Morris Reference Morris2007), how can that be true?
One explanation for this lack of bias is that the preponderance of the evidence, nevertheless, is wrong. To be sure, a handful of broad-based studies consider multiple media sources over many years and find evidence of partisan or ideological bias. One prominent example is Groseclose and Milyo (Reference Groseclose and Milyo2005).
The authors use the citation of think tanks and political advocacy organizations as a barometer of ideology. A news source that predominantly cites the conclusions of liberal groups is considered a liberal news source, whereas the predominant citation of conservative sources earns a conservative label.
When they tally the tendencies of various print and electronic outlets, Groseclose and Milyo “find a systematic tendency for the United States media outlets to slant the news to the left” (Reference Groseclose and Milyo2005, 1226). Although they boast that their method “does not require us to make a subjective assessment” (1192), that hardly assures the reader that their process was logical. Indeed, a curious aspect of their scoring system leaves them assigning approximately the same ideological value to the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association. Furthermore, their “systematic” bias is typified not by NPR, CBS, the New York Times, or any of the usual suspects. Rather, according to their data, the most liberal major news outlet in the United States is the Wall Street Journal. Logical incongruity aside, by failing to establish a meaningful baseline for comparison, this study and others that find a pronounced partisan or ideological bias have difficulty demonstrating what balance would look like, much less measuring its presence (Niven Reference Niven2002).
Another possible explanation for the pattern of partisan balance is that the training of journalists successfully inculcates a commitment to objectivity. Reading the work of academics who have watched the news being made (for example, Gans Reference Gans1979; Tuchman Reference Tuchman1978), however, leaves one to question the practical applicability of an objectivity code applied to an endless series of subjective judgments.
BALANCE AS A BY-PRODUCT
After first writing academic papers on media coverage of politics (Niven Reference Niven1999; Reference Niven2001; Reference Niven2003; Reference Niven2004; Reference Niven2005), I had the opportunity to examine journalism not just as an observer but as a participant. In the midterm election year of 2006 I was a reporter for a Columbus, Ohio, newspaper. I covered a wide array of political topics including officeholders and candidates at the county, state, and federal levels.
In the main, what I saw during my year in journalism was comforting. My colleagues took their work seriously and held themselves to a high standard of fairness and accuracy. Editors were ever vigilant for any kind of skewed information or reportage. Nevertheless, I found that it is not a commitment to professionalism, nor any exceptional journalistic ability to identify and erase personal bias, that keeps a journalist's work balanced. Instead, balance is a by-product of the fact that the first question journalists ask is not “How can I serve a political position?” but “How can I make this interesting?”
Interesting means getting a better position in the paper, perhaps the front page. Interesting means getting more column inches for your article. Interesting means the editor down the hall, who issues a series of audible exclamations when he reads, will put forth a few “humphs” and perhaps a chuckle. Interesting means people will start reading your piece and might even finish it. Interesting means walking into a coffee shop and overhearing someone discussing your article and seeing bloggers praise or attack you. Without interesting, you're not in the paper. You're not read. Nothing you write matters.
This is not to say that trying to be interesting makes the process inherently fair. Rather, the process is skewed in ways that are not constrained by partisanship or ideology. Because interesting is found on both the left and the right, any journalist who values what all journalists value makes a poor vessel for ideological or partisan bias. As I found the job of reporting, the task at hand was to find interesting sources, or alternatively, to get the sources you had to say interesting things.
The fact that the default position for any political actor is to be uninteresting is hardly in dispute. As numerous academic studies make clear, most of what is said and done in politics is not news, regardless of who is saying or doing it. Barrett (Reference Barrett2007) points out that most presidential appeals for legislative action fail to make news; nine out of 10 fall short of attracting full articles in the Washington Post and New York Times. In Groeling and Baum's (Reference Groeling and Baum2009) examination of members of Congress on Sunday morning talk shows, they calculate that 99% of what is said does not make news. Across several European parliaments (Van Aelst, Sehata, and Van Dalen Reference Van Aelst, Sehata and Van Dalen2010) and the US House of Representatives (Niven and Zilber Reference Niven and Zilber1998), studies find that most members are seldom of interest to journalists.
INTERESTING SOURCES
At the beginning of the reporting process, the pages of your spiral notebook are blank. The computer screen on your desk is an open white space. Filling that space, and ultimately filling the assigned column inches on deadline, concentrates the mind on sources. “Who has something interesting to say about this topic?” was the first question I asked myself every time I worked on a story.
Scholars, including Sigal (Reference Sigal1973), have suggested that the role of sources tends to limit the significance of a journalist's personal views in their published work. “Even when a journalist is in a position to observe an event directly, he remains reluctant to offer interpretations of his own,” Sigal (Reference Sigal1973, 69) wrote, “preferring instead to rely on his news sources. For the reporter, in short, most news is not what has happened, but what someone says has happened.”
Superficially, such a source-driven process would limit or eliminate the effects of a reporter's personal bias. However, the choice and use of sources still could be heavily slanted to benefit the left or right in support of a reporter's politics. That is, the use of sources could be slanted if reporters were in the business of advocacy. In the business of being interesting, by contrast, whether I agreed with a source or not was irrelevant.
Protecting English Speakers
State Representative Courtney Combs, a Republican from the Cincinnati area, introduced legislation in the Ohio House to establish English as the official language of Ohio and limit the ability of state and local governments to use any other language. Although similar legislation had been introduced unsuccessfully in previous legislative sessions, a unique provision of the new proposal caught my attention and made the bill more newsworthy. Combs' bill was the first in the nation to include explicit protection from discrimination for those who speak English.
If I were assembling an opinion piece to put forth my thoughts on the legislation, I would have spent my time talking to liberal groups and even several business groups that came out against the bill. As a reporter, however, what I wanted most was an authoritative and opinionated voice who could explain the premise of the bill. My first call was to Representative Combs. I suspect that, regardless of one's personal opinion, all journalists would have started their reporting process with the same call.
I left a message (in English, I might add) seeking Combs' comments on the bill. I wanted to know the purpose and effects of the bill. More than anything, I wanted to know about the English speakers who were being discriminated against and needed this protection.
Had Combs responded to any of my messages, his words and perspective would have likely formed the foundation of the article. When he didn't respond, however, the space his comments would have otherwise received still had to be filled. Without Combs, I needed some other voice to provide some perspective on what this type of legislation is meant to accomplish. I turned to two advocacy groups that support “English Only” efforts.
The executive director of ProEnglish, K.C. McAlpin, was effusive in his praise of Combs' bill and particularly impressed with the discrimination provision. He said that most states' English Only legislation lacked discrimination protection because “the laws were enacted before people realized the scope of this problem.” McAlpin added that victims of anti-English speaker discrimination were suffering outside the spotlight because, “thus far it's been a beneath the headlines kind of problem.”
Tim Schultz, director of government relations for US English, echoed McAlpin's perspective, calling discrimination against those who speak English a problem “equally pernicious as any racist policy of the 1960s.”
Depending on the reader, these comments could be taken as establishing the moral imperative to pass Combs' bill or, perhaps, as a demonstration of the paranoid hyperbole of these activists. Yet as a journalist, leaders of these two groups were enormously attractive sources who were both extensively quoted in the final published article because they were interesting.
Indeed, a distinctive response jumps out when you are conducting an interview. Generally I could pinpoint the quotes that were likely to make my final article even as the words were being spoken by the source. Such was the case when I asked Schulz whether angry, anti-immigrant sentiment was what fueled his group. He responded with this gem: “A lot of our members have a lot of vowels in their names,” he said. “That's something we're proud of.”
Other than a brief quote from a state civil rights commission spokesperson saying that Ohio had yet to receive its first complaint about English-speaker discrimination, contrary voices were limited in the article. This focus on proponents was sufficient for the article because the editor and I thought that the advocates for the bill were not only interesting, they were simultaneously supporting their position and making the case against it with their hysteria.
Although this was a story on a very ideologically charged subject, ideology did not guide the reporting process. The story began because Representative Combs committed news, something any member of the legislature of any ideology could have done.
The story was shaped by who decided to speak on the issue and what they had to say. Combs' refusal to talk meant that his personal perspective would be missing and that advocates who may or may not have been as effective as Combs were given the opportunity to make the case. Again, willingness and effectiveness with the media are not bound by ideology. This is not to say the article was inherently fair, whatever that might entail. When sources are given wide berth to make their case, however, it certainly looks, and in fact may be, fair.
In reporting on the English Only legislation, the bill's sponsor was an obvious first choice for an interview. Indeed, the sponsor would have been the first person I turned to even if this legislation had exactly the opposite intent (say, for example, if it was a bill establishing Quebec-style official bilingualism).
To be sure, the source selection process is subjective. Nevertheless, to a large extent, the best and most interesting sources seemed obvious and inevitable. For stories about campaign finance and campaign laws, I immediately called the very conservative local law professor who at one time headed the Federal Election Commission. For a story about an Ohio law that requires state employees to affirm that they are not personally a terrorist and do not associate with terrorists, I immediately called the very liberal local law professor known nationally for his First Amendment expertise.
Although collectively this process may provide an outlet for voices from the left and right, individual stories obviously can skew to one side. Hewitt (Reference Hewitt1996) criticized media coverage of homelessness for relying on liberal homeless advocates to provide estimates of the number of homeless. Of course, it would be the rare political group uninterested in homelessness that spent its resources counting the homeless and providing population estimates to the media.
Scholars have noted, sometimes with concern, the outsize attention paid to experts, insiders, and elites in much of the contemporary media (for example, Steele Reference Steele1995; Sumpter and Garner Reference Sumpter and Garner2007). Yet the reality from a journalist's perspective is that regular people with mild views don't have very much to say. And they're boring. And they're hard to find. And, they don't want to talk to you.
With the liberal Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics, coming to Columbus to debate a prominent local Christian conservative leader—and with a group of area liberal pastors bringing federal tax evasion charges against a group of area conservative pastors—my editor was interested in what life was like in the midst of all this conflict for religious leaders who avoided politics altogether. My task then was to find people who had something interesting to say about something they did not do. It turned out, those were people who were very hard to find. Everyone I spoke to was either political or so nonpolitical that talking about being nonpolitical struck them as being a little too political.
With a deadline looming and endless calls leading nowhere, I was staring at total journalistic failure when a Methodist minister returned my call and started saying things like, “Take the fight over intelligent design versus evolution. The God I serve doesn't care.” With that, I had a front-page story.
Ultimately, the availability of interesting Republican sources and interesting Democratic sources, interesting liberal sources and interesting conservative sources, allows a reporter, a news outlet, or the media at-large to create balanced coverage. However, the absence of an aggregate slant does not mean the absence of strong personal slants. There is no doubt that accessible and interesting sources are easier to cover and get more engaging portrayals. Barker and Lawrence (Reference Barker and Lawrence2006) found that John McCain received more favorable coverage than George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primary. McCain's willingness to bring reporters on his bus and speak candidly no doubt fueled that imbalance.
In my case, coverage of county issues led me to call the three county commissioners in Columbus. The two Democrats generally dodged my calls. The one Republican answered all my calls, spoke directly to the questions asked, and had a folksiness that came through well in print. Although I voted against him, the Republican was a highly valued source who received more attention in my articles than his colleagues. Before I submitted an article to my editor, I asked myself whether anything in my writing might cause the Republican commissioner to stop answering my calls. This was a question I never asked when writing about his Democratic colleagues on the board. Of course, deference to a source can produce not only favoritism but shallow reporting. Pfau and his colleagues (Reference Pfau, Haigh, Gettle, Donnelly, Scott, Warr and Wittenberg2004) find that journalists embedded in military units can grow so close to their sources that their willingness or ability to provide context about the war they are covering suffers.
GETTING SOURCES TO SAY INTERESTING THINGS
Although the inherently interesting source is a highly valued entity, much of the task of interviewing sources is trying to coax “interesting” out of them. Some individuals are highly resistant to the effort.
For a story on Senator Mike DeWine's campaign advertising, I called, among many others, the spokesperson for DeWine's opponent, then-Representative Sherrod Brown. Brown's spokesperson had message discipline to a degree that rendered him useless to me. Regardless of the question I asked, Brown's spokesperson told me how Brown fights for the middle class, and how DeWine was out of touch with the middle class.
Brown's spokesperson was speaking from a basic script, repeating one and only one talking point. If I wanted to include a Brown comment, which I obviously did or I wouldn't have called him, then effectively the spokesperson had picked the comment for me. Instead, I did not use a word of the 20-minute interview in my article.
What's in a Name
Sources who speak from a script, whose comments could have been anticipated word for word before the interview, are, at best, boring and, at worst, useless. By contrast, sources who say something unexpected, something that perhaps they would later wish they hadn't, can count on their words showing up in print. In pursuit of the quote that will render serious damage to the speaker, one can't help but worry that Janet Malcolm (Reference Malcolm1990, 3) was right when she wrote of the profession: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
With a number of Ohio cities having passed limitations on smoking in restaurants, a coalition of tobacco companies, tobacco trade associations, and the restaurant industry joined together to fund an effort to place a constitutional amendment on the Ohio ballot. If passed by the voters, the amendment would nullify any local smoking limits. In making their pitch to voters, the coalition named itself “Smoke Less Ohio.”
It was a curious name for a group that wanted to expand smoking. It struck me as even more curious given that funding for the group was coming from tobacco companies.
I knew that typical questions about the issue itself would produce rote answers. But what, I wondered, would the backers of the group say if I just asked about their group's name?
A call to coalition member Lorillard Tobacco resulted in me being connected to one of the company's senior vice presidents. Asked about the name of this group his company was helping to pay for, he said incredulously, “I don't know why they call themselves that.”
A spokesman for a tobacco trade association in the coalition was similarly at a loss to explain the Smoke Less Ohio name. “I'd hate to say ‘no comment,’” he said, “That would make it look like we couldn't defend our own name.”
These two men had no incentive to say these things. It wasn't in the interest of their campaign, and that's what made it great. In contrast to Brown's spokesperson saying Brown was for the middle class, these comments came close to what I would consider the very definition of news. Here we have the backers of a group with a misleading name saying, in effect, that they can't support their own group's name. (The ballot issue was ultimately rejected by Ohio voters.)
Shoot First
The more typical path to eliciting interesting responses, however, is simply to give sources a chance to speak to each other. Get a statement from one side. Get a response. Get a counter to that. And so on. This technique takes longer, but it has the benefit of potentially producing copy that is interesting and inherently balanced.
Such was my strategy in covering a bill in the Ohio legislature that would dramatically expand the ability of Ohioans to use deadly force without fear of prosecution or civil penalty. In essence, the bill established that anyone who entered a home or vehicle without permission could be presumed to intend bodily harm. Anyone using force against such a person would now enjoy legal immunity. The bill would also eliminate the duty to retreat, permitting the use of force even if the threat could be neutralized by merely walking away.
Although I have a very strong personal opinion on the legislation, the resulting article gave both sides a chance to speak quite powerfully to their position. By engaging each other's arguments, I thought the individual comments were not only interesting in isolation, but combined to form a cohesive and interesting whole.
“It's a public safety kind of bill,” said state rep. Stephen Buehrer, the primary sponsor of the legislation.
“It's a very ancient premise in human history that a man's house is his castle,” the Delta Republican added. “If an intruder or an invader enters your castle you've got the right to repulse that intruder from your home. My bill returns us to what the law has been, probably since the Middle Ages.”
But John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, sees the legislation as Medieval.
“It's a license to blast away,” he said.
“You could have a neighbor who thinks he has an informal privilege to enter your home. He takes one step inside, and you blow him away,” Murphy said. “Under the bill, you're immune from murder charges.”
…For state rep. Keith Faber, a co-sponsor of the bill, eliminating the duty to retreat is crucial.
“If there's a home invasion, what are my obligations? Do I have to run to my safe room, and cower behind the door?” asked Faber, a Republican from Celina. “Do I have a right to defend myself? Some would say ‘No. Wait until they break in, rape and molest your children, and then ask them to stop.’”
But opponents of the bill question when, if ever, a homeowner has been prosecuted in the kind of scenario Faber envisions.
“There's nothing here, no case, no story that would justify this bill,” said Zack Ragbourn, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “We don't have people lined up to go to prison for defending their home. And if there aren't any now, it's hard to see how there will be any less if the bill passes.”
It is difficult to imagine a more stark contrast of views. For the advocates of the bill, this is about a fundamental right of self-defense. For the opponents, the bill creates a lawless and deadly free-for-all.
For the last word in the article, I turned to a pro-gun voice who offered one of the most memorable quotes of my year in reporting.
When I was working on the story, a recent incident occurred in the Columbus area that might have altered debate on the issue. A high school cheerleader, dared by friends to walk through a spooky, overgrown yard leading to a dark, dilapidated house, had been shot in the head by the home's reclusive owner.
Asked if he was concerned that this shooting might dampen support for the bill, Ken Hanson, legislative chair of the Buckeye Firearms Association, spoke with disdain.
“We have to manage the public relations, so the anti's don't get to run away with every single incident,” he said. “The anti's are never squeamish about dancing in a pool of blood.”
To my personal politics, that quote is repulsive. But the quote struck me as very interesting, and interesting does not have anything to do with which side you're on.
INTERESTING, UNBIASED, AND STILL SKEWED
A year as a reporter renewed the conclusion I had made as an academic (Niven Reference Niven2002) that mainstream journalism is not a bastion of partisan or ideological bias. That year, however, changed my understanding of why there isn't more bias. In my own reporting I found fairness was less the result of my effort to be fair than the result of my effort to be interesting.
All this should not be read as a character defense of the media or an argument that all is well. Although the search for interesting tends to balance coverage of the left and right, coverage is by no means fair to all (see, for example, Entman and Gross Reference Entman and Gross2008). If your perspective is too far outside the mainstream, nothing you say is interesting (even if, as a rule, you say interesting things) because you will be viewed as lacking credibility. In a year of political reporting, not a single third-party candidate or distinctly nonmainstream political voice wound up quoted in my writing. Van Aelst, Sehata, and Van Dalen (Reference Van Aelst, Sehata and Van Dalen2010) confirm that trend as they show extremity of political views is associated with less media attention among members of parliament.
Meanwhile, the pursuit of interesting carries with it the tendency to inflate aspects of a story that are surprising, new, or edgy. It was surprising when the leaders of the Smoke Less Ohio team could not defend their own name, and that immediately became the central narrative of my story. (It is surprising when members of the president's party criticize him, and consequently those handful of critics are wildly over-represented in news coverage [Groeling and Baum Reference Groeling and Baum2009]). The English Only legislation had numerous sections and subsections that had been introduced before, but the discrimination clause was new in Ohio, and new nationally, and a central reason why I was reporting on the bill. (Barrett [Reference Barrett2007] found new presidential appeals are more likely to be covered regardless of the significance of the policy.) In seeking the edge that comes with conflicts and disappointments, a year covering politics resulted in not a single hagiographic piece celebrating a political figure's achievements or, frankly, anything. (Indeed, a slant toward negative news pervades in coverage of politics, as Farnsworth and Lichter (Reference Farnsworth and Lichter2005) and others have found.)
Clearly, interesting is the not the same as important and the resulting coverage leaves out too much of what citizens should know. But it was this reporter's fear, and I suspect every reporter's fear, that a newspaper exclusively built to cover the important might well be the most important thing no one reads.Footnote 1
Of course, my conclusions are just one journalist's perspective (and a temporary journalist at that). But, to ever be a reporter is to want to see your byline. To ever be a reporter is to want to be read. To be a reporter is to want to be on the front page. To be a reporter is to want to hear those audible sounds of interest from your editor, the only person you can actually watch while he reads your article. To be a reporter is to want to have your articles talked and blogged about. To be a reporter is to want to be interesting, because from that flows everything a reporter wants in the job.
In the academic world, calling work “interesting” might be seen as an insult, akin to calling it trivial. To a reporter, however, interesting is the currency of the realm.
Even as I posit that the desire to be interesting is universal among reporters, I readily admit that no other reporter would have produced any of my articles exactly as I reported and wrote them. Nevertheless, all journalists would have faced a similar set of real world constraints that would guide their coverage (Schiffer Reference Schiffer2008). Indeed, virtually any reporter would have spoken to the sponsors of the bills I covered. They would have interviewed the leaders who were speaking out for or against these proposals. And they would have put a star next to quotes about how many vowels the US English membership has in their names and the pro-gun lobbyist's belief that his opponents love to dance in a pool of blood. In so doing, the powerful, magnetic pull of what's interesting would have once again overwhelmed the writer's politics and contributed to the balance in American media coverage.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author appreciates the insightful feedback provided by Adam Schiffer on a previous version of this paper.
