Accurate news coverage is on the brink of its extinction. Journalism is, even in its finest form, often very partisan, with numerous newspapers and websites offering their viewpoints on a news story. When you flip through the news sources, one thing becomes clear: the majority of media is biased. In February 2019, an AllSides blog reported on how the media portrays hate crimes in USA as either normal or uncommon, based on their bias. In 2017, Law enforcement reported more hate crimes to the FBI than in 2016. The number of agencies submitting hate crime data increased over the year, with more than 1,000 agencies providing information. However, both left and right media outlets omitted the fact that more agencies were reporting in order to present a perception that hate crimes were on the rise (left outlets) or a view that allegations of increasing hate crimes were exaggerated (right outlets).These media outlets peddle feelings and emotions instead of providing reliable facts and information.
Indian news media in recent years has been deteriorating with clickbait headlines, cheap enticement strategies and prejudiced reports to please specific political parties, as highlighted in this report. More corporations with strong political connections have now entered newsrooms than ever before. It is infuriating to see the media not doing its job of bringing accurate news to the table. Instead, they curate news based on how many clicks it could garner, and a majority of the population is falling into this rat trap. The main grievance is, of course, how biased and unfair those news sources are in comparison to reliable and fact-based alternatives.
This is the crux of the issue with biased and misinformed reporting- no matter how noble the intention of media outlets, presenting favouritism and prejudice in an editorial format gives out a false perception. Fabricated stories with non-factual and single-sided theories posing as serious journalism have become a means for some writers to make money and influence public opinion. Worse again, it gives free rein for dubious conspiracies to masquerade as logical opinion.
Media outlets play an important part in conveying vital information and points of view, setting a precedent for quality and accuracy that could be missing in more fragmented modern media. Biased news, on the other hand, contradicts this power by giving discredited views credibility and publicity. Reports suggest that sensationalist stories form 95% of media headlines these days, and media reports with negative news catch 30% more attention. The news media taking advantage of this so-called bad news bias to attract more viewers can do more harm than good. Ultimately, such sophism leaves us all more divided and less informed.
To make sound social choices, we need a consensus of truth, and factual news is one of the gatekeepers to the information needed to create that consensus. We need to avoid news coverage that particularly prioritises a single perspective favouritism above journalistic ethics, clouds the entire media landscape with suspicion, deepens political polarisation, and encourages readers to avoid inconvenient facts of alternate explanations. The dissemination of unreliable information can be particularly lethal in times of the coronavirus pandemic.
As we head into a world that is divided by strong opinions, the news media must play a critical role as an enabler rather than a storyteller who favours one side over the other. While we cannot start pulling the puppet strings of clickbait news outlets at will, there are a few measures we can take to restore the strength of accurate news that’s free from prejudice. It’s important to know what’s going on in the world—but it’s also important to understand these events from multiple perspectives, especially if you tend to favor news sources that support your own points of view. Start following reports from all ideologies and perspectives — that is, people with whom you agree and those with whom you disagree. News isn't meant to be juicy or agreeable; it's supposed to educate people of problems that affect them.
A small step towards a balanced news media ecosystem would be for us to encourage news platforms that don’t get swayed by fake news and share important and unbiased news. Unbiased news serves a balanced diet of opinions from multiple sources, and allows readers to access different perspectives of the same story.
News aggregators are a novel approach for news exploration that help users gain a broad and diverse news understanding from multiple sources. They can capably handle a large amount of news that is published nowadays by revealing different perspectives on the same topic. This can help eliminate bias and provide readers with a unique opportunity to make up their mind about a story, rather than relying on a single source of news.
Unbiased news can help provide high-impactful reporting that can counter misinformation and offer trustworthy news that’s free from commercial and political influence. People deserve to read accurate news that offers readers multiple perspectives on critical events that shape our world. It is important for news organizations to produce in-depth investigative stories by uncovering information from a variety of sources in order to provide deeper context for the story and more insightful public understanding of the news. By striving for equality in information, unbiased news that’s free from the shackles of fear or favour will help create a truth-focused and bias-free information ecosystem.