Types of Information Bias

Many people believe that the only kind of bias in the news is that of conservative verse liberal media. I disagree. All newscasters of political ideas and it is hard for them to be completely neutral, but that isn’t a problem in my mind, it is human nature to have opinions. My problem is in how and what the news covers that provides information bias.

There are four different kinds of information bias: personalization, dramatization, fragmentation, and authority-disorder bias. Each is its own specific bias, but all are interconnected with the others making the news a faulty system, and disconnecting their audience from the larger picture of our complex world.

Personalization is the most harmful of the biases. A news organization will make a decision to cover the person rather than the real story that they are a part of. This coverage eclipses the context of a multifaceted issue in favor of “human interest stories.” These stories tug on a person’s pathos rather than giving them a chance to think logically about issues.

Personalization can make politics something that used to be about issue–broad social and economic issue–an image game. Instead of examining a political players stance or voting record, reporters will look at if they seemed angry, bypassing why they could have been angry. Personalization helps fuel the other information biases by bringing them down on an emotional level, leaving intellectual facilities dormant when the news comes on.

This is not saying that an emotional plea would be a bad thing every so often, but because of the format and news story selection, emotions are all that dictate the news. This is very true with our second information bias, dramatization. Dramatization is the soap opera view of the news, believing that crisis over continuity is better than issues-driven reporting. Dramatization of the news also goes hand in hand with personalization in the fact that is a cheap emotional device.

This is where the crisis cycle