How to Detect Bias in the News

     Football is one of the many things that keep me going in life, I am a big Arsenal fan, and as anyone who follows football will know how heated and competitive the transfer market is every year for the football players between the clubs. Here is where the media comes to play, especially as an Arsenal fan, you read stories everyday of how player X comes out to the media to talk about how desperate he is to leave his club for another one, only for the player to come later and completely defy what was said about him or what the newspapers claimed he said. Now there is a lot of reasons why newspapers would tweak ones words and make them look or feed into a certain direction, like was discussed before on this blog, they might be following a certain agenda, or for the simple sake of exposure and to sell more.

Calling a 1 - 1 draw a win... an extreme case of bias!

     A very simple example that I can call of the top of my head is how my uncle once told me about the time he was waiting in line for the counter desk in a supermarket, and a famous celebrity magazine cover caught his attention that had its main title saying "Shakira threatens to murder on of her fans!"... Upon further examination of this article, it was very clear that the title did not really reflect anything that happened in reality, the story was about how Shakira was heading out of some party and the paparazzi were following her and taking picture, she was really mad at them so she screamed at one of them saying "get out of my way or I will kill you!" she obviously did not plan to kill him. But titling this story with "Shakira gets mad at paparazzi" is Boooring, and would not really catch anyones attention, as opposed to what the other biased title did to my uncle who really would not even look twice at these type of articles!

     Now how can we check the credibility and the accuracy of something we read in a newspaper or a magazine... the following is a few simple steps that I believe might work:

1. Common sense: like give me one good reason Shakira would threaten one of her fans in broad day light ? who would actually buy something like that ?
2. Research: you can read more about the background of the author or the newspaper he is writing for, to have an idea about what might be his intentions or agendas.
3. Cross-checking:  next time you read about a certain number of causalities, the performance of a team or anything that you suspect might have been tweaked, look for other newspapers of different backgrounds and other news sources to confirm.

Finally, read this article by a media awareness website about the types of bias in the news, a very useful website too that might help in the MCM 102 course itself.

     Best regards,

            Ahmed Yosry Fouda