“In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions, at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail—not the tail that wags the dog.” ~ Lewis Carroll
A few weeks back I asked our newsletter readers to participate in a survey for my Applied Research Methods class. I’ve compiled the results and presented my findings this week in class, and as promised, I’m sharing them here with all of you with a big thanks to everyone who took the survey!
My research question had to do with the impact of our “news diets” on worldview. I hypothesized that consumption of heavily biased news would have a detrimental effect on our worldview, using a six question Primal World Beliefs validated measure to identify whether we perceive the world as good or bad overall. Respondents were asked to identify one of four groups that best represents the majority of their news coverage, based on bias ratings provided by Ad Fontes Media. Ad Fontes also ranks content providers on accuracy, but I left that out for my survey. I also threw in a quantity question to see if the amount of news we consume changes anything.
Bias isn’t good or bad, it just is. It’s like having brown hair or blond hair, or short toes or long toes. We all have bias and it’s around us all the time. Have you ever heard someone say (or caught yourself saying) “the music from my generation was the best music ever.” That’s bias. Totally normal, very human, and at the same time, an opinion, not a fact.
News bias isn’t new, either. From the king’s crier in medieval times, spreading the king’s announcements on command, to the “yellow journalism” of the Gilded Age, to the differences in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, to the hours upon hours of podcasts and cable news commentators vs. actual reporting of information. The trick, for us, is to recognize our own bias both in our news consumption and, perhaps more importantly, in ourselves.
The results were interesting. Quantity of news consumption had absolutely no bearing on any of the other variables.
I expected the results to indicate that both the far left and far right leaning news diets would have a negative impact on worldview, but that wasn’t the case. The people who indicated far right leaning bias in their news consumption had a higher “good” score. Not dramatically higher, but enough to have statistical significance.
Because math is not my friend, I was relieved to have the college’s statistics professor show us how to run the data and crunch the numbers. She took a look at my scatterplot, nodded, and said succinctly, “That makes perfect sense. They have the party in power right now.”
Since we’ve turned politics into a team sport, complete with overpriced fan club merchandise, it does make sense. We’re all happier about everything when our “team” is winning, and we gravitate toward information that validates our choices and perceptions. Validation makes us feel like we’re right, and who doesn’t like that? The problem is that we get hooked on the validation, and then the outlet (or the leader, or the organization, or the influencer) has to keep stroking our egos by feeding us more and more biased information, lest we get mad and unfollow, so we stop hearing anything that doesn’t comply with the party line.
There are a dozen things I’d change or add if I had unlimited time and resources to replicate the study. Alas, the semester is over, so I’m left with the following: the results of my small study do indicate that our news diets have an impact on how we feel about the world in general. That means we all need to be watching what we “eat.” If something can get a hook into our emotions, it has the power to manipulate us. That’s not what news is supposed to do. The opinion page, maybe, but it’s harder and harder these days to discern that dividing line between opinion and fact, interpretation and truth.