Recently, the Northeaster ran an editorial focused on how readers can analyze the news they’re reading and check it for possible bias. This has always been important, but it feels especially pertinent now, in a time where news is frequently delivered in sound bites, short-form videos or snipped headlines — all formats susceptible to editorialization, oversimplification and ideological slant.
That piece explores a range of important ideas: identifying how money might impact journalism’s funding; checking if the headline, visuals and article are in conversation with other; looking for false equivalencies; spotting loaded language; and checking sources. These, to be clear, are all important and valuable ideas; keep these in mind and you’ll be well-equipped when you read the news.
But media bias doesn’t stop there. It’s worth turning the lens around and speaking to something that is, perhaps, even more basic: what media are you consuming in the first place?
When reading (or watching) the news, it may be tempting to look for information that adheres to worldviews you’re already familiar with. This is known as “confirmation bias,” and it is both insidious and dangerous. Most everyone has stories and ideas that they want to believe in, and there is plenty of media out there willing to confirm just about any of it, whether that’s newsrooms, forum pages, nightly news reports or group chats.
Of course, it isn’t inherently bad to believe things or to hold onto narratives. But clinging too tightly to one idea can be both alienating and misinformative. It is valuable to find things that challenge preconceived notions, given the counter-narrative is still factual.
To give a more specific example of this idea, it’s worth looking at crime. According to the City of Minneapolis, annual crime rates for assault, burglary, vandalism, homicide, larceny, motor-vehicle theft, robbery, sex offences, stolen property offences, weapon law violations, carjacking, gunshots and gunshot wounds have all dropped since last year. (It’s worth noting that it’s not all rosy; the rates of domestic aggravated assault have slightly ticked up in the same time frame.) You can see these statistics for yourself at https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/government-data/datasource/crime-dashboard/.
This is, to be blunt, unexceptional. According to the Pew Research Center, “crime rates have fallen by 49% between 1993 and 2002,” and the FBI shows a 59% reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022. To put it simply, crime in the United States is trending in the right direction — and it has been for a long time.
You wouldn’t know that from looking at public opinion, though. For roughly the past 25 years, Gallup polling has asked Americans the following question: “Is there more crime in your area than there was a year ago, or less?” 23 of the past 27 times they asked that, at least 60% of Americans have said crime is on the upswing.
This loops back around to media bias (and confirmation bias). Here, we have a bit of friction: first, many Americans believe crime is rising; and, during that same period, crime has been dropping year-over-year. Why the discrepancy?
It’s hard to give a one-and-done diagnosis here. It could be any number of things: it could be politicians using rising-crime narratives in their runs for office; it could be media coverage focusing on individual stories and rarely zooming out to trends; it could be individuals experiencing crime and extrapolating from there.
Just as there are many stories about individual crimes, there’s lots on the other side of the coin, too: stories about plunging crime rates, or stories about how COVID-19 reorganized which crimes had the highest frequency in the first place. (Homicides, for example, went up as the rate of burglary plummeted.)
In other words, there’s (almost) always another side to the coin, and it’s worth flipping it over from time to time. Media bias is real and important, but being honest about your own media diet is just as critical. All the vetting and cross-checking in the world will only get you so far if you only read or watch things you already agree with. In looking for more opinions, ideas and worldviews, you can both strengthen and diversify your own.