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November 10, 2003
Bias and knowledge...
Geoffrey Nunberg is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. You gotta love a guy who can popularize linguistics. Check out his column in The New York Times this week. He writes about the shifting definition of the word "bias" in regard to its use in describing the press.
I use "bias" in exactly the shifted sense he describes. Nunberg writes:
Conservatives may have made adroit use of the new sense of the word, but it was basically a liberal creation, like the celebration of diversity that accompanies it. The idea that bias can work on us unconsciously is lodged in the American psyche by now, but it is easy to exploit in a selectively self-serving way.If objectivity is an illusion, we are free to disbelieve any report we find inconvenient or uncongenial on the grounds that it is colored by a hidden agenda (an expression that entered the vocabulary about the time "media bias" began its recent tear).
I would add this to Nunberg's assertion: Objectivity, illusory or otherwise, never stopped anyone from disbelieving inconvenient or uncongenial reports. Bias, as in an ideological filter (that we apparently are unable to thwart), now offers us a decidedly convenient excuse to fail to deal with "reports," or, rather, it offers us a decidedly convenient excuse to fail to deal with knowledge and any wisdom following from it (re: information theory). This explains why so many people still bicker about political bias in the news media despite the predictive power of the structural biases. One is mere information, i.e. easily digestible (and disconnected) anecdotes. The other is something quite different.
Posted by acline at November 10, 2003 5:06 PM | | Spotlight