Media Bias Indicators

The staff of Chronically Biased finds the following Media
Bias Indicators adapted from Texas
Media Watch to be useful for judging bias:

Embedded opinion -- doses of editorial opinion woven in with
facts, cueing the reader on how he should feel about the issue.

Expert selection -- substituting issue advocates for
“experts” in news stories without noting their bias.

Expert “anointing” -- creating an “expert” by attributing
authority to an academic or community leader who actually has no
particular knowledge of a topic.

Selective skepticism -- reporters are appropriately skeptical
about some information but ignore the dubious nature of other data. The
same reporters who question a government budget projection will not
challenge an estimate of the homeless population provided by a service
provider.

Airbrushing -- making a non-credible source credible by
cleaning up a quote or failing to disclose relevant associations.

Name calling and stereotyping -- choosing words that
prejudice readers against the participants in a political or policy
debate.

Bias stylebook -- telegraphing bias with word selection.
Supporters of legal abortion are “abortion rights” advocates but
supporters of school vouchers are not “voucher rights” advocates.

Copycat Bias -- adopting loaded terms used by other news
sources without examining them for bias.

Quote tilting -- using a strong quote to demonstrate one side
of an argument and countering it with a weak quote from the other side.
This creates the illusion of a balanced report, but does not give the
reader equal information about the debate.

Orchestrated bias -- when a newspaper targets an individual,
ideas or policy and uses both news pages and editorial views to
campaign for their view. An outline of this practice works was
demonstrated in the Houston Chronicle memo on light-rail that was
inadvertently leaked to the Internet on November 20. The memo is preserved
on the Houston Review website.

Unchallenged assumption -- Writing a news story from a point
of view or an assumption that is not challenged in the story or
analyzed for accuracy.

Projection -- Reporters sometimes use a non-specific source
to give credence to an idea that may only be circulating in the press
corps. Terms like “many believe” or “some fear” are most often a
reflection of who the reporter is speaking with – not of public
sentiment.

Overuse of unnamed sources -- Reporters sometimes gives legs
to stories that have little merit by repeating an unnamed source in
many news stories without making an effort to find an on-the-record
source to corroborate the information.

Guilt by association and conspiracy theories -- Reporters
sometimes attach guilt to individuals or organizations because of their
connections to other individuals or organizations. Conservatives
frequently are victim to this technique in which a link to an abortion
opponent group or school voucher advocates is flatly reported as an
indictment. Frequently, reporters fail to explain the connection to
readers, writing only that the individual received a campaign
contribution from a school voucher advocate – so he or she is suspect.

Demonizing and “sinisterizing” -- Reporters sometimes create
the impression of illegality or at least impropriety through tone, word
choice and sentence construction. For example, “trial attorneys openly
funnel money into Democratic campaigns in order to assure the election
of lawmakers who will support their agenda. Use of words like “openly”
and “funnel” create the impression that it is somehow wrong for
attorneys to contribute to the candidates of their choice.

Unbalanced labeling -- reporters have begun to use terms like
“Christian” or “social conservative” to label some GOP activists while
leaving their ideological opponents unidentified. If the religion or
ideology of one individual in a story is relevant – the religion and
ideology of all the protagonists in the news story are relevant.

News judgment and story choice -- The most prevalent evidence
of press bias can be found in the stories reporters choose to write and
the ones they ignore.

Selective Placement -- Where a newspaper decides to place a
story can reflect a bias. As a reader points out, whether a newspaper
places a story on Page One or in the lawn mower ads can be reflective
of the importance editors want readers to assign to the story, and it
may reflect their beliefs rather than newsworthiness.

Insufficient attribution -- While not a form of bias per se,
it most certainly is a poor journalistic practice (verging on
plagiarism) for columnists simply to rewrite the columns from another
newspaper, using entire quotes and, in some cases, whole phrases,
without even identifying the author of the original article. One of our
editors caught Chronicle columnist Rick Casey in such a
practice, forcing a "clarification" that was still an insufficient
explanation.

What a bunch of macaca's! What a riot! This must be a joke. Nobody is really taking this seriously are they?

Washington Post has one agenda and everyone with an IQ over room temperature knows it.

Btw...their agenda seems to be working quite well so far, why mess with perfection?

Just ask George Allen, or getting a Pulitzer for releasing classified info. about secret prisons during a time of war, that puts other countries in danger, let alone our military, our country...Priest and ilk are the enemy and gets a Pulitzer...pathetic.

My daughter sagely noted that after looking at the answers to her SATs,  answers to ambiguous questions that favor liberal or leftish or relativist tropes are graded correct and answers to ambiguous questions that favor a conservative or traditional viewpoint are graded wrong, even though they are technically correct [just as the liberal answers can be construed to be "correct." 

Could the Washington Post be winnowing out reporters who do not achieve a politically correct  stance often enough on th Post ADA scale, which the UCLA/U of Missouri journalism school three-year study graded the WaPo at 70%, or close to Teddy Kennedy's 100%?

Inquiring minds would love to know.