Excuse my absence yesterday. I was under the weather with some sort of pollen-related cold. But now I’m feeling better, and I want to talk about the notion of bias in the blogosphere. I read an interesting post by Matt Coddington, a fellow South Carolinian, over on his Net Business Blog talking about how subjectivity and bias are (or should be) natural aspects of the blogging medium. And I tend to agree. But if blogs are biased, can they be a form of journalism, too?
As long as there have been newspapers, there have been writers using the medium as their platform to advance personal agendas. One of the first concepts I learned when I took an Intro to Journalism class in college was “agenda setting,” the theory that popular media can influence the masses by what stories they cover and how much coverage they give them. So, even if the writers try to be as objective as possible in their stories, their editors’ bias shows in the length and placement of their stories. Subjectivity is part of being human, and I think traditional media does itself a disservice by trying to hide it.
There have been those throughout the history of journalism who have embraced their subjectivity: satirists, political cartoonists, columnists, and now bloggers. And that is the beauty of blogging. Not that bloggers are subjective — everyone is subjective — but that they embrace their bias to provide their readers with content no one else can give them. Through the filter of the blogger’s bias, readers get a wholly unique perspective on words that would otherwise just lay on the page. Instead of “just the facts,” bloggers make the news more accessible by giving a face and a personality to what they report.
But do they get the facts right? Skewing the facts to suit your agenda can be a dangerous thing (Iraq war, anyone), but that’s why, if it’s important to you, you should get more than one opinion about a story. And goodness knows there are enough bloggers out there happy to oblige. On this recent fracas between Don Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team, I must have read at least 15 stories from all sorts of points of view before I formed my opinion.
In this growing world of subjective media, the onus is on the reader to sort it all out. And, while some folks don’t like to do their due diligence on any one story (the big reason why traditional media isn’t going anywhere, by the way), I’m of the opinion that the more points of view I read, the easier it is to make up my mind.
So, are bloggers biased? Sure. Is that wrong? I don’t think so.
