The Occupied Wall Street Journal recently published an opinion article by Andrew Gavin Marshall titled, “Biased? Damn Right I am,” where Marshall attempts to explain the increased reaction—negative and positive—to his ongoing coverage of the Quebec student strikes, and the claim that he is biased in his reporting.
“We are all biased for the simple fact that we view ourselves and the world from our own individual perspective,” he wrote. “When anyone or any information source claims to be ‘unbiased,’ that is when my internal alarm begins to ring. There are, arguably, unbiased ‘facts’ (as Einstein once said, ‘facts are stubborn things’), but there are not unbiased ‘views.’ Facts can help inform our views, and what facts we gather, how we gather them and from where can determine the view we take.”
Bias in journalism exists, and it is everywhere. It is in every choice of word in every sentence in every article, big or small, across the industry. There’s the bias of context: unless you’ve got a small battalion of reporters covering a single event, there’s no way that event is going to be covered without bias by the simple fact that one person cannot conceivably cover every angle, every nuance. Then there’s the bias of convenience: if a reporter has a story due at 5 p.m. and they need a specific quote from someone, they’re going to go with whoever they can get a hold of first or the fastest. If “the other side” of the story doesn’t get in contact with me before the deadline, then they can’t write about it, and the lack of that perspective creates bias.
Then there’s the bias of experience, and it is primarily what Marshall is talking about.
Last month, independent journalist Jeremy Scahill was lambasted on social media for calling the president’s drone strike policy “mass murder” during his appearance on liberal MSNBC talk show “Up With Chris Hayes.” Unique from the rest of the panel he was a part of, Scahill said he had actually been to Yemen, where U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, were assassinated by U.S. drones last year, and where drone strikes happen regularly.
“What I saw on the ground in Yemen, and I was not just in the capital, Sana’a, but I was in Abyan province,” he said on the show in late May. “People were saying to me, ‘We’ve seen (Nahir al-) Wuhayshi walking around in Shebwa, the leader of AQAP, and he’s perfectly safe. But you just bombed a Bedouin village, and you killed all of these women and children. America can’t seem to hit the people you claim to be fighting.’”
Journalists must not ignore their experiences for the sake of writing from a nowhere perspective, for the sake of staying within a designated safety zone. The idea that Scahill can be bitterly attacked for reaching an unorthodox opinion based off his experience in the Middle East, or that Marshall can be called biased for reporting what he has seen in the midst of the Quebec student strikes is ridiculous and particularly despicable. Journalism’s goal is not to simply shove opposing ideas out into the ether and say, “well, I guess we’ll never know who is right!” The goal is to come to what we can gather is the closest version of the truth to reality that we can.