The News Is Never Just Facts
The news has been full of big things this week. Afghanistan, the Delta Variant, Haiti. There’s this strange thing that happens with news, where we hear it or we read one piece of coverage and we fell like we know everything there is to know. This is becomes news coverage is a story, and stories by nature are something that feel whole and complete.
It is an old talking point that the news is biased and we chose which outlets give us news based on our ideologies. But I wonder if this thinking about bias limits our understanding of just how powerfully the news we read influences our understanding of the topics that are covered. Writing stories is the act of framing something in a particular way to create meaning for a reader. Facts on their own rarely do this work, they must be contextualized and written into a broader body of meaning for us to see why they matter.
So, it is not so simple to say, ‘I read this news because its less biased.’ Or ‘I read that news because it reflects stories that match my world view.’ All news is curated and each outlet on its own gives us an incomplete picture. I’ve found this particularly true as I’ve looked for coverage on fires and heat on the west coast this summer. I’m interested in climate change and it’s been surprisingly difficult to collect a comprehensive conversation about the fires, water, drought, and trends.
As of this writing, I have found it much more productive to subscribe to newsletters specifically interested in climate change, than to hang out on news websites. Because the fact of the news in its current relationship to climate change is that the vast majority of stories do not have the scope to tell us the whole story. The majority report on events. And they pick and chose what events are noteworthy, and their value to an audience relative to the number of words assigned.
I say all this because we live in a world where understanding the full story is becoming more and more important. It is no longer enough to say, ‘there are fires in California.’ To report on the event of fires leaves out so many layers of understanding. Similarly, to understand Afghanistan, and Delta, and Haiti, the stories go far beyond the facts of the event. And they definitely go beyond a question of bias from the outlet reporting them.
All this and I haven’t even gotten into the way word choice and tone influence how we ascribe value or significance to these stories.
Exploration Exercise: Story Tone and Implication
As an exercise, chose an event that is of interest to you that is big enough and recent enough that it feels ‘everyone’ is talking about it. (Like the ones I’ve mentioned, or perhaps Simone Biles at the Olympics.) Dedicate yourself to reading ten different accounts of the event. And take notes on words used to characterize the event, the headline used to draw your attention, and any moments where the writer interprets the event. What is the meaning the author constructs from those techniques? How do they change from article to article? What is left out or included? What broader context/significance does the author place around the event?
I like this exercise because it is easy to forget that we do not live in a black and white world. Yes, those two are the loudest voices telling us their points of view, but there’s a world of in-betweens that also reflect and give meaning to the way we understand events. They are working under the radar to shape how we understand our world, which makes them even more important than those two very loud diametrically opposed voices.
