Jennings Takes Snide Shot Over Difficulty to Improve View of U.S.

March 16, 2005   —   Wednesday's Biased Item

Directions

-Read the excerpt below from MRC.org's March 15 CyberAlert.
-Read "Types of Media Bias" in the right column. Then answer the questions.

Question(s)

What type of bias is the excerpt below an example of?

Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the answers.

Excerpt

Peter Jennings on Monday night uttered one of the kind of remarks which earn him his smug image as one eager to denigrate the U.S.   Following a soundbite on World News Tonight of Karen Hughes, the Bush administration’s new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, saying “perceptions” of America “do not change quickly or easily. This is a struggle for ideas,” Jennings snidely interjected: “In some parts of the world, that will be taken as an understatement.”

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Answer(s)

The excerpt is an example of bias by spin.


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To accurately identify different types of bias, you should be aware of the issues of the day, and the liberal and conservative perspectives on each issue. (See our chart “Conservative vs. Liberal Beliefs”)

Types of Media Bias:

Omission – leaving one side out of an article or a series of articles over a period of time... (read more)

Selection of Sources – including more sources that support one view over another... (read more)

Story Selection – a pattern of highlighting news stories that support one side of an issue over another... (read more)

Placement – the location in the paper or article where a story or event is printed; a pattern of placing news stories so as to downplay information supportive of one side... (read more)

Labeling – comes in two forms: 1. Tagging of person from one party or group with extreme labels while leaving the other side unlabeled or with more mild labels. 2. A reporter not only fails to identify a liberal or conservative as such, but also describes the person or group with positive labels, such as “an expert” or “independent consumer group”... (read more)

Spin – occurs when the story has only one interpretation of an event or policy, to the exclusion of the other. Spin involves tone- a reporter’s subjective comments about objective facts... (read more)

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