Bias & Narrative

Bias is unavoidable in nearly every field. However, even today it is treated as something that can be dismissed. It is another part of writing that can be improved on, an ambiguous version of diction. Major news outlets proclaim their stories as “free from bias” and deride competing networks for their biases. This claim simply isn’t true. Bias is an irremovable fact of life, definitionally part of the models we construct to tell stories as long as storage remains limited.

Bias is a prejudice, both conscious and unconscious, that imparts a specific perspective on a story. It need not be intentional, nor malicious. It is not lying about something, which is a different and much worse problem.

The only time something can truly be unbiased is when it is definitionally so. For example: it is 9 degrees Celsius outside. This is a single data point, an abstraction that does require context, but a finite and knowable amount, a self-contained human-defined attribute. All context which is required to understand that information, like what temperature is a measure of, is a knowable and communicable amount of data. Unfortunately, stories are not single data points, but a combination, and shaped by an amount of data which is not communicable. This is what makes a story, the combination of data points which form a narrative.

Narratives, understood here as a sequence of events retold to convey meaning, as much as they appear to be so by humans, do not form naturally. While events might happen in a sequential order regardless of human existence, it is humans that ultimately derive meaning from these stories. We define who the heroes and villains are, whether a victory was a glorious win for all things good, or the ultimate triumph of evil.

A story is shaped by what is included but is defined by what is not. Bias stems from this fact. As long as storage space and recording techniques remain unable to exactly replicate a given situation, bias will creep in. We cannot include all relevant details in any story we tell, as a complete recreation would involve extreme space to record the most minute details, people must leave some details out. This contextual information shapes the story in immutable ways, subtly shaping perception. People must make subjective decisions on what to not include, and this is the origin of bias.

This is exemplified best by newspaper stories. Newspaper stories, since they are stories, must always omit something. Take someone covering a murder scene. They go to the scene of the crime, and record details they believe are relevant. Say these are the estimated time of the murder, the suspects, what could have been used as the murder weapon, and a brief description of the scene of the crime. While this seems unbiased, and the information that is included is not necessarily biased, the story remains biased. This is because the writer had to leave details out of the story. These details, whether they were the murder victim’s economic situation or the fact they owed someone $50 000, form some part of the story. Ultimately, the devil is in the details.

Some would say that none of it matters. If everything is subjective it ceases to be a useful category, and we should simply redefine it. This is not the case. Individual, and even a collection, of data points can be objective as long as they lack a narrative, so there remains a useful distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. Even within the dimensions of subjectivity, however, there is still meaning, and important distinctions can be made. Subjectivity is not a monolith, but a continuum.

As such, subjectivity must be acknowledged to preserve the integrity and truthfulness of media. This can be done in the form of positionality statements; instead of acknowledging privilege, storytellers who seek to keep bias from their work could acknowledge potential sources of bias. With bias acknowledged consumers can move past the currently meaningless objective versus subjective distinction. If a news network lies, it will not be able to hide behind the label of “bias” or partisanship but instead be forced to acknowledge what is subjective interpretation and what is a lie.

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