Structural Bias

Structural Bias

Structural Bias

As scholars have engaged in an ongoing search through media content for bias, they have observed several trends in news reports that have no apparent connection to partisanship; these patterns do not favor either political party. However, these trends do constitute a form of bias because they provide the media audience with an inaccurate and distorted view of the world around them. This form of media bias is commonly known as “structural bias,” because it stems from certain “structural” features of the news industry. Such structures include everything from reporting routines to newsroom practices to industry incentives. Within any given industry, individuals face certain pressures and incentives. As individuals within the news industry act on these pressures and incentives, they develop a particular way of doing things, such as a way of writing political news stories. When reporters put a certain slant on their stories to adhere to industry pressures and incentives, these stories reflect the industry’s structural bias.

In terms of industry pressures, the structural bias in the U.S. media has primarily been associated with the strong profit motive that drives commercial media organizations. In the United States, the news primarily comes from profit-driven media corporations. In contrast to other advanced democracies, the United States has a far more competitive and far more commercial media marketplace. Hence, the structural bias that emerges in the U.S. media market is unique in comparison to other modern democratic nations.

Since the late 1970s, the profit motive has become increasingly important in newsrooms throughout the U.S. media marketplace. Over the past several decades, this marketplace has experienced an increasing number of news sources fighting over an everdecreasing news audience. These market trends have resulted in fierce competition in the news industry, and in this intensely competitive environment news organizations have had to focus more and more on producing profits. As media corporations place greater emphasis on profits, the media’s structural bias, which emerges from the industry’s profit motive, has played an increasingly important role in shaping news coverage.

Political communication scholars have identified a myriad of elements that make up the media’s structural bias. The sections following discuss some of the more significant aspects of this structural bias. The elements have been divided into the two central components (revenues and costs) involved in turning a profit.

Lowering Costs and Structural Bias

As commercial enterprises, media companies can increase profits by lowering the costs involved in news production. Such cost-cutting decisions generate certain similarities across news stories.

For example, reporters can lower costs (the time and effort involved in news gathering) by developing relationships with and by relying upon individuals in positions of authority. This helps to explain why government officials serve as the primary sources in most political news stories. For instance, when reporters cover a story on U.S. defense policy, they are likely to contact Defense Department officials or members of Congress serving on defense-related committees. Over time, political reporters build and maintain relationships with politicians and government administrators. Contacting such individuals then becomes an efficient and inexpensive way to obtain content for a news story. As news reporters rely heavily on official government sources, their news stories create a biased (i.e., skewed) picture of the political environment. By depending so heavily on official government sources, news stories become slanted in the direction of the dominant political parties. Most government officials are either Democrats or Republicans. News stories built on commentary from such sources favor the views of the dominant political parties at the expense of less prominent political organizations, such as the Green Party or the Libertarian Party.

Reporters can also lower the cost of news gathering by relying on “news subsidies” (also referred to as “news handouts”). A news subsidy refers to materials that essentially subsidize or economically assist a reporter’s effort in putting together a news story. Such subsidies often come from government authorities or public relations practitioners who send out press releases, hold press conferences, or often simply make phone calls in order to provide reporters with story ideas and content. As the news industry has become increasingly focused on profits, its newsrooms have grown increasingly reliant on news subsidies. Recent research suggests that such subsidies account for more than half of all of the content contained in both print and electronic news stories. With their heavy reliance on news subsidies, the media provide news consumers with a biased depiction of the world around them. Many media critics have argued that the press favors the voices of the powerful over the powerless. News subsidies play an important role in this pattern of favoritism because such subsidies are likely to come from individuals and organizations in positions of power. An affluent corporation with highly paid public relations professionals is better able to provide news subsidies than organizations without such financial resources.

Increasing Audience Size and Structural Bias

Another way for news organizations to increase profits is by raising the revenues that flow from advertisers. Advertisers are willing to pay more for a larger audience. Thus, news organizations face strong structural pressures to increase the size of their reading/viewing/listening audience. As newsrooms produce stories designed to attract a larger audience, the stories they air and print come to exhibit several tendencies.

In one such tendency, news stories often emphasize negative news. Psychologists have long recognized that human attention favors negative information over positive information. Taking advantage of this pattern in human attention, the press gravitates toward negative news and away from positive news. A news story about a failed government program is likely to receive more media attention than a news piece on a government program that has achieved great success. The media also devote excessive attention to negative events such as disasters and crimes. This trend in negative news reporting has been steadily on the rise. Content analysis studies of news stories (generally from the 1980s through to the present day) have found that press coverage of the president, Congress, and even government agencies has taken on an increasingly negative tone. By favoring negative news over positive news, the media present the news audience with a distorted image of political reality. For instance, as a result of all of the media attention given to negative crime stories, individuals tend to overestimate the level of crime in their communities; they perceive that crime is more prevalent than it actually is.

The media’s structural bias not only favors negative news, it also favors conflict. Just as human attention is naturally drawn toward negative information, it also naturally turns toward conflict. Consequently, the media are partial to stories that portray individuals in a state of conflict. Illustrating the media’s fondness for featuring conflict, political news stories often follow a “Democrat said/Republican said” pattern. In this pattern, the news story presents an argument from a member of one major political party followed by a counterargument offered by a member of the opposing party. The media’s bias toward highlighting conflict is also evident in coverage of political campaigns. On the campaign trail, candidates spend far more time promoting their political views than on attacking the views of their opponents. However, candidate attacks disproportionately find their way into campaign coverage. By favoring areas of conflict over areas of agreement, the press again provides its audience with a biased (distorted) representation of politics. In this representation, politics becomes an arena for battle rather than a domain for moderation and compromise.

The media’s structural bias also favors known political personalities. Humans tend to pay more interest to information about known personalities than to information about unknown individuals. Capitalizing on this pattern of human interest, political news coverage is skewed toward known political personalities. In U.S. politics, the public is more familiar with the president than with any other politician. In part, the president has attained such familiarity because the president receives far more news coverage than any other politician. When the news media turn their attention to members of Congress, they tend to focus on a handful of prominent leaders or personalities, such as the Senate majority leader or the speaker of the House. By focusing in on these well-known politicians, the media produce a self-reinforcing cycle of political prominence; as prominent politicians receive an undue amount of press coverage, they become even more prominent. By highlighting the voices of well-known politicians, the press provides its audience with a partial picture of politics. In this partial view of the political environment, the audience is exposed to the views of the few (prominent politicians) but does not see the views of the many (the multitude of less prominent political actors).

In terms of its structural bias, the media are also partial to new and novel topics. Since new information attracts more attention than old information, today’s newsrooms tend to operate on the belief that only new news counts as news at all. As a result of their continual search for novel news subjects, media coverage typically ebbs and flows in waves. Like an ocean wave, media coverage on any given subject rapidly forms, builds, reaches a peak, and then quickly dissipates. Usually, media coverage begins and builds on a particular subject (such as the subject of Social Security reform) based on some key event (such as a president proposing a major change to the Social Security program). This media coverage rapidly builds to a peak. At this peak point, story after story on Social Security reform appear in newspapers and on news programs throughout the nation. When coverage on the topic of Social Security reform reaches this peak saturation point, news directors and assignment editors start to fear that any additional airtime or print space devoted to this subject will bore the news audience. Consequently, news stories on the subject of Social Security reform rapidly disappear. When acting on this bias favoring new and novel topics, the media once again create a skewed image of politics. This skewed image tends to underrepresent long-running political issues and debates. Many media scholars have argued that this aspect of the media’s structural bias (a preference for new and novel subjects) makes it difficult for American democracy to grapple with long-lasting political problems.

As a final element in its structural bias, the media gravitate toward stories with dramatic elements. A dramatic narrative features interesting characters engaged in intriguing actions (usually actions that center on struggle or conflict) that rise to a climax point. A news story on the ramifications of a proposed modification to tax policy does not have the components to build a dramatic narrative. On the other hand, a story about a president having a secretive, ongoing affair with a much younger White House intern, such as the scandal involving President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky, has all of the elements of good drama. This helps to explain why the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal received more news coverage than any other story in 1998. By highlighting such dramatic stories, the media once again construct a skewed image of political reality. Social psychologists have recognized that individuals often assign too much weight to vivid narratives. That is, when individuals view a compelling dramatic story, they often assume that this unrepresentative story accurately represents the world around them.

The Effects of the Media’s Structural Bias

The various elements that make up the media’s structural bias, ranging from the media’s fondness for negative news to their preference for good drama, push media coverage in an increasingly sensationalized direction. This shift in press coverage to more sensational news content has often been described as the shift from “hard news” (stories about key political events and issues) to “soft news” (dramatic human interest stories that generally lack any public policy component). Political communication studies over the past few decades have consistently charted the growth of soft news and the coinciding decline of hard news. For example, a report issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the number of news stories about foreign affairs dropped by 25% between 1977 and 1997. During that same time period, the number of entertainment or celebrity stories nearly tripled. Such findings show that hard news topics, such as foreign affairs stories, are being driven out by soft news subjects, such as stories about Hollywood movie stars.

This growth in soft news has fueled an active debate among political communication scholars over how this softening of news coverage impacts American democracy. On one side of this debate, most scholars view this growth of soft news as a damaging media trend. Such scholars have connected this growth in soft news to everything from an uninformed electorate to a cynical citizenry to a politically apathetic public. On the other side of this debate, some political communication authorities view the rise of soft news as a helpful media trend. Such authorities argue that citizens today have more hard news options than ever before. Through the virtual explosion of news content on cable television and on the Internet, citizens who want hard news can get hard news. As the reasoning on this side of the debate continues, the growth of soft news helps to satisfy the needs of news consumers who prefer softer news products. In short, soft news helps to diversify the media marketplace by providing a broader range of news products to satisfy the needs of various news consumers.

Source: part of an entry in Levasseur, D. G. (2008). Media bias. In L. L. Kaid, Encyclopedia of political communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Resources

See also

Hard News; Hostile Media Effect; Party Press; Soft News

Further Readings

Alterman, E. (2003). What liberal media? The truth about bias and the news. New York: Basic Books.
D’Alession, D.; Allen, M. Media bias in presidential elections: A meta-analysis. Journal of Communication, 50, (2000). 133-156.
Friedman, J. The bias issue. Critical Review, 17, (2005). 221-236.
Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Pantheon.
Hofstetter, C. R. (1976). Bias in the news: Network television coverage of the 1972 election. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Schiffer, A. J. Assessing partisan bias in political news: The case(s) of local Senate election coverage. Political Communication, 23, (2006). 23-39.
Starkey, G. (2006). Balance and bias in journalism: Representation, regulation, and democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.


Posted

in

,

by

Comments

3 responses to “Structural Bias”

  1. international

    The term “structural bias” refers to the form in which information is presented through the media– I suggest, it is presented in the form of dramatic narratives. Disproportionately and absurdly so. Playing on our inherent partiality to oral traditions, and stories, both liberal and conservative news manipulates stories to be more entertaining. In a television context, the news networks do this to compete with the entertainment networks, to get people to view the news instead of the thousands of other channels available. In turn, news focuses on horror, scandal, misfortune, and memorable pieces of witty dialogue. The media’s insistence on choosing “captivating” but petty stories along with casting stories in an entertaining light compromises the quality of the information that we receive. (Though it admittedly makes for good, spirited coffee shop conversations). I’m a sucker for entertainment just as much as the next person is, but priority and factuality should not be put on the back burner. This phenomenon creates a context of constraint for the public. When media culture focuses on what is entertaining, more important issues, or more important parts of issues all have the tendency to be overlooked.

  2. international

    Structural bias is just as exploitative as ideological bias, and I implore you to be aware of it. It is evident in both the choice, and the articulation of stories in the media. Be not afraid to cock your eyebrow. This dominant code of media form dictates the way through which we approach and understand popular culture! And, let’s be honest– the principle of entertainment does not serve as an instructive or an elucidative form. Structural bias of the media is dangerous not just through negligence of fact and priority, but in that it may contribute to improper mobilization of people, resulting in faction or in violence.

  3. international

    Popular phrases and expresions related to structural bias in media: structural bias theory, structural bias psychology, media bias, commercial bias in media definition, types of media bias, structural bias in research and expediency or media bias examples.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *