Call a Ph.D….
Here’s a perfect example of the fairness bias at work and the trouble such a bias can cause.
Reporters are required to balance their articles. Professors of journalism teach them to do it as students. Ill-tempered editors insist they do it as professionals. What this balancing often boils down to in the heat of deadline pressure is making easy phone calls to sources you can rely on to take a certain stand.
So, doing an article about NASA? Need a negative point of view from an “expert” (def.: someone with a Ph.D.)? Then call Dr. Alex Roland. He, like many professors, is apparently a news hound willing to spout off. We professors get academic brownie points for being expert sources. I’m a big news hound. But I refuse to say anything just to be quoted, and I refuse to speak outside my areas of expertise.
Roland may or may not know much of anything about NASA or spaceflight. But he has those three little letters after his name and is willing to talk.
And it’s NOT that reporters who use him are trying to trash NASA, although such quoting may seem like anti-NASA bias. What’s going on here is the fairness bias–the professional ethic of making sure that each article is balanced, i.e. quotes both or multiple sides. It doesn’t matter that one or more of the sides may be complete poppycock. You’ve been taught to put it in the story. Your editor wants it in the story. So guess what you do?
This is why I say that understanding the structural biases is much more important and instructive than asserting simplistic political bias. Much of what passes for political bias is actually caused by one or more of the structural biases and not a conscious or unconscious effort on the part of journalists to slant the news. (Thanks to Jay Manifold for the tip.)
This doesn’t have anything to do with Ph.D’s, but it does have something to do with the he said/ he said bias in the news. I don’t watch network news as a rule, but it seems everytime I do, it just reinforces my opinion that cluelessness is a requirement to be a journalist. This was when Ghaddafi (sp?) of Lybia renounces all WMD and asked to be returned to the community of nations in good standing. Now any reasonable person would think that a former bad actor on the terrorism stage renouncing his evil ways would be good news for the whole world. But no. I don’t remember if it was CBS, NBC or ABC, but one of these leading lights of information looked far and wide to find an opposing view of “Ghaddifi renounces terrorism is good”. They finally found the mother of a person who had been killed in the airplane shot down by Lybian terrorists (was it Lockerbie?) and she said GWB was WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! to lift sanctions against Lybia. That this lady should have a voice in shaping foreign policy is just strange, but I suppose it is not more strange than allowing the 9/11 Families (mostly those opposed by GWB) to determine what changes should be made in the intelligence community. Besides being related to the victims of 9/11 or Lockerbie or whatever, what expertise do these people have? MSM doesn’t care, it’s all about being a victim and shaping policy and bashing GWB.
PhDs are just an example. And the he-said/she-said format is one of the odd things that happen when we operate with a fairness bias and a narrative bias. Your example is a good one.