Introduction to Media Bias

There is a natural link between the work of Accuracy in Media, our older sister organization, and Accuracy in Academia. To a large degree, the slanting of the news is more a case of nurture than nature, and there is no better place to nurture it than in college journalism.

Take the campus media bias one of our readers apprises us of. “The University of California Davis newspaper, The California Aggie, just published an article about proposition 85,” an undergraduate there informs us. “Prop 85 is a California proposition that would require a doctor to wait 48 hours to perform an abortion on a minor after notifying her parents.”

“The title was: ‘Voters to decide on abortion consent.’ They changed the wording from notification to consent. I emailed the author of the article twice and the editor once and asked for a correction. I also called the editor and left a message. Two days later I found a correction on a different article from the previous day (in other words, they do make corrections). Still I have not seen a correction on this prop 85 article nor have I been contacted.”

Student journalists are not the only scribes so linguistically challenged. The treatment given the ballot proposition by those apprentice journalists bears a marked similarity to the coverage of the initiative by more journeymen reporters.

“California voters appeared to be narrowly rejecting a proposed constitutional amendment that would make it harder for teenage girls to get abortions, early election returns showed Tuesday,” Rachel Gordon and Carrie Sturrock wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle of November 8th. “Similar to a measure on the fall 2005 ballot, Proposition 85 would have required physicians to notify a parent or guardian when an unmarried girl younger than 18 sought an abortion and would have imposed a 48-hour waiting period before the procedure could be performed.”

“The law would not have required a parent or guardian to consent to the abortion.” Could the narrow vote have anything to do with the word change?

On the other hand, we have to note when corrections are made. Recently, AIM editor Cliff Kincaid wrote of a standard journalism text that incorrectly ran the date of AIM’s founding. A research assistant to the professor who authored the book, Dr. Doris Graber, promised Cliff a correction in the next edition of the tome.

“It now mentions the decades in which Accuracy in Media and similar groups were formed,” the researcher writes. “The changes will be reflected in the next printing of the book.” We will be on the lookout for them.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.