Does unbiased journalism exist? It is possible to present a story without imposing your personal opinions? As I asked the question in the first paragraph instead of the headline, let’s forego Betteridge and appease the Facebook generation by jumping straight to the conclusion: no. I do not believe so, and I think it is a problem.
This morning I fell over this (Danish) news article. The contents are exactly as you’d expect from the headline: “Danskere over 70 år har svært ved at købe en rejseforsikring” (Danes over the age of 70 having difficulty purchasing a travel insurance).
Context for foreigners: Denmark has an extremely generous health insurance scheme where (almost) all costs are hidden from those paying. Health premiums are paid entirely over the tax and as Denmark employs taxation at the source, to most this seems like the health system is “free.” Additionally, Denmark has had an extremely generous travel insurance built into the standard health insurance. This goes above the already quite comfortable EU travel insurance, and allows everybody with a Danish insurance card free treatment for almost anything showing up during travels. This includes treatment from naturally occurring illnesses due to skiing down a piste while piss-drunk as well as surprising ailments due to chronic diseases. All regarded as “free” to everybody. Unsurprisingly, this is ridiculously expensive. In a rare bout of sanity, the travel insurance was reduced, so now danes have to make do with the normal EU insurance. This is of course completely intolerable especially to the groups who stands to lose the most: those who traditionally put the greatest burden on the common “free” system.
Unbiased Headlines
Anyway, the health system is not at focus here, but rather the biased presentation. When you see the aforementioned headline, it is obvious that we are supposed to be left with the feeling of pity for the poor old people who no longer can afford a travel insurance. Clicking thru on the article, unsurprisingly reveals it is propaganda from the Danish lobby group “Ældresagen,” who furthers an agenda benefiting old people. Most danes will dislike me calling them a lobby group, because lobby groups are something only occurring in mean imperialist US, but that is exactly what they are whether agree or disagree with their cause.
The thing is that the article mostly presents all facts (except it as always forgets that the alternative – the “free” insurance – isn’t free), but the presentation is very biased. With a title like that there is not much room for feeling that it is ok that elderly people pay more, and the insurance companies are completely within their rights of demanding more money for a most likely more expensive customer group.
A lot of politics is putting people into groups. Socialism wants to put everybody into the same group, and anarchism wants to put everybody in their own group. Policies in-between, like liberalism and social democrats, put people in larger or smaller groups between the two extremes.
Insurance companies basically make a bet with customer groups: you pay a premium – your side of the bet – that you get injured, and the insurance bets you don’t. If you do, they pay the bill. Any insurance company will ensure that the amount they pay out is smaller than the amount they get in. If there is no competition, they can increase that difference by increasing premiums. If there is competition, they will need to lower the span so the bets don’t go to other companies. They will never lower the premium below cost, though, because that means that it is better if the business goes elsewhere as doing business then means losing money.
The previous Danish system was leaning towards socialism with everybody in a big insurance group, and the new system towards smaller groups. In addition, the old system had the disadvantage of no competition; everybody was in one group and only the state was negotiating the contract with one company. Hence, the company could in principle increase premiums making it more expensive for everybody. By removing the state-sanctioned insurance, people can chose their insurance at will in free competition, leading to lower overall costs. This means that to stay profitable insurance companies will have to reduce costs. This can be done by changing the bet or changing the groups considered. As people like the old protection, they normally don’t want to change the bet, which means people are put into groups more reflective of their individual risks.
People going on a ski-vacation are more liable to have an accident than people going to the beach. Old people are more likely to have a bout of chronic disease than younger people. Thus, young people who go to the beach are less of a risk and can get a better bet and hence cheaper insurance (here we are not talking about people going on a drinking vacation to Sunny Beach but young families with kids at a non-annoying age). This also means that old people have to pay more. But guess what? They do cost more.
This brings us back to the presentation before. I could have sold the exact same article with the headline “Single mothers no longer have to pay for rich elderlies Mallorca trips,” which is exactly as true but shifts the sympathy significantly. The article would also have been exactly as true had it been talking about skiers having a hard time getting insurance. All of these headlines are equally true and descriptive, even though they seem to tell wildly varying stories. They just put the focus in different places on what is the same story about people having to pay according to cost.
Unbiased Presentation
I am obviously against the common insurance scheme; I don’t think it is a necessary good to force everybody to chip in to pay for travel insurance for everybody. If you want to go on a trip, you damn well also pay for the insurance yourself. Vacation on the beach or ski piste is no human right, and I see no reason other (specifically: I) should support your vacation. I am not trying to be unbiased here, or – even worse – to pass off a biased presentation as unbiased.
The article about insurance starts by presenting how the insurance companies won’t insure old people, implicitly saying they are evil even though it is simple math as explained above. The article is mostly presenting all facts, but the order in which it does so is not unbiased. If you start with presenting the evil companies as being against the old people, the scene is set and you are biased while reading the remainder. The text could easily have started with the insurance companies explaining why they do not offer old people the same insurance (some don’t want to discriminate and hence don’t take old people who are more expensive, and some have to charge more for old people as they cost more). It is a simple fact that old people got off cheaper before because somebody else was footing the bill, but that it not the focus; the article starts out with the disadvantages for the elderly, setting the stage that it is the fault of the insurance companies/government/somebody else.
Aside from the ordering of arguments, also the wording is important. In a lot of media in Denmark there’s reports of fights between “young people” and “radicals” even though it is really a fight between left-wing nuts and right-wing nuts. In the US the pro-life people are fighting the pro-choice people despite the case being for or against abortion (or planned pregnancy or whatever other more or less positive words are being used). 5 years ago or so, Denmark was in trouble with the Cartoon Crisis or the Muhammed Crisis depending on who was reporting (were the cartoons or Muhammed the cause of the crisis?) Words matter because they evoke emotions, and very rarely is a journalist able to distance themselves from that. Heck, most of the time they shouldn’t because an academic article without any emotions can be extremely dry to read.
The article could have been slightly reworded to present the exact same case in either of the two explained orders for skiers instead of old people. This would have been a completely different story as skiers arguably endanger themselves more than the old people (arguably because maybe it is not the best of ideas to go hiking in the mountains if your bones are made of very brittle glass and wet paper). They could have made a story about single mothers paying for old peoples christmas vacation for a different bias. Heck, they could even have added a personal sob-angle by having a concrete single mother “Mette,” with hungry-looking dirty children “Jens” and “Mathilde” who are both fat and have a Playstation, but who can’t afford to go on vacation because Mette has to fund her abuse of cigarettes and the Mallorca trip of “Gerda” and “Eyvind,” who are both 70 and made a killing on the house market in the 70s. Same story, different bias. Throw in a picture of Mette and her offspring and throw in a picture of a sad looking puppy for a kick-in-the-groin bias from the get-go.
Finally, what you present is just as important as what you don’t present. No article can present everything, especially in these “5 reasons you should hate <group>; number 2 will shock you” times, nor should they. It is important to be aware of this fact, though. Even if an article seems fairly balanced, chances are it has cherry-picked the facts that best support the narrative or position of the author.
The article above doesn’t mention that the old insurance plan was most likely more expensive due to lack of competition. It is very brief on the fact that old people probably costs more (it mentions that people think so and hints it is not so without backing it up). It doesn’t mention others getting off cheaper. It doesn’t mention people not traveling not having to pay. The average of wealth of old people is also left untouched (though indirectly it indicates old people travel “a lot,” maybe it is because they can afford it and have the time?).
The Fourth Power
Why is it so important to be aware of this bias? Well, if you noticed the big letters just above, you would know that I believe that the answer is that media is often regarded as the fourth power, supporting the legislature (people making laws to benefit themselves), executive (those beating suspicious (= black) people) and judiciary (those taking bribes to rule in favor of the rich) powers of the trias politica system. To give media a sufficiently douchebaggy fancy-sounding name and quaint toungue-in-cheek explanation, we could call media the informational power (those imposing their bias on others as fact).
I’m sure most journalists don’t do this on purpose to misinform people, but unless you are extremely conscious of the fact, it tends to slip in – and you have to go against your own conviction to pick the neutral ground instead of your own biased angle when describing something you actually feel about. Add to that the fact that modern journalism is under a huge pressure to deliver news as they happen online, and you get newspapers verbatim publishing articles from news agencies, written on a pay-per-word basis by journalists-in-training, and you get “in-depth” articles that are really just reformatted press-release advertorials written by agencies paid to deceive.
Even knowing all of this, sometimes I still read known biased articles, both from people I agree with and from people I disagree with. It gives a better balance. Knowing the bias makes it easier to judge the facts and arrive at your own opinion, and reading people whose bias you disagree with makes it easier to be conscious of the fact that the presentation isn’t unbiased.
The problem is, even knowing the bias of the author is not necessarily always easy. If you know the author, you know their normal bias, and even without that it is often easy to infer the bias from just reading a few sentences. Much of the time, however, the headline and abstract are not written by the article author themself, but instead by an editor (to give it more punch), by the layouter (to fit it in two lines) or somebody else. This is most obvious when you see the same AP telegram arrive within 15 minutes in three different newspapers with two identical and one different headline. Typically, these gems of journalism use the first paragraph as the abstract. As the headline comes before even the first paragraph of the body (amazing but true!) this means even before you get to the named journalist, whose bias you may be aware of, your impression is colored by a headline finally decided upon by somebody else who remains entirely unnamed.
The trend of writing catchy headlines have become so bad, I’ve stopped reading several papers I used to like and who still produce mostly decent content. This is truly the age when Upworthy, Huffington Post and equally shitty click-bait sites compete with the attention against legitimate outlets to the point where even real papers provide stories like “Shooting at local school blahblah” (I only care about which school, don’t try and hide it your jerk) and Financial Times (I think; something that sounds like a real paper with Financial in the name) publishing so many click-bait articles I removed it within 3 days.
Un
UnWhen media won’t challenge you, when journalists won’t fact-check, when you don’t have the time to do either or both, at least be aware of this. Try formulating alternative headlines for stories. Try reading a story out-of-order. Try guessing the bias from the headline/abstract/first paragraph and notice how the bias is stressed thru-out the story. If you are aware of the bias, that’s at least half of the way to ignoring it and forming your own opinion.
I’m obviously biased here, making sure everybody knows how I feel about the insurance deal, but did you also think about the fact that I am obviously presenting a biased view that people are not critical enough about what they read? That I believe that journalists are for a large part at fault but not solely? Or did the obvious bias hide that…
I genuinely think the world need people to be more critical and naturally that shines thru my writing. My first paragraph should have alerted you of that.
