Bias or political slant in individual news stories and within entire news organizations has long been talked about and mulled over amongst those on the inside and outside of the journalistic community. Ashley Morse, a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, decided to research into how much water these speculations actually held. Her team's research eventually suggested that news organizations commonly perceived to be "neutral" showed the most traditional signs of bias in their stories.
Morse, 20, a senior Broadcast Journalism major from Mitchellville, Md. decided, along with two other team members, to take a closer look at news bias by utilizing the ground-breaking website NewsTrust.com to take a closer look at various news stories that were perceived to be biased by readers. According to Morse, “Newstrust is a website that rates stories on a scale of 1 to 5 and viewers ratings are then reviewed and rated to have a system of checks and balances.” On its website NewsTrust.com claims it “helps people find and share good journalism online, so they can make more informed decisions as citizens.”
The research team put out a pre-survey to check which news organizations participants would perceive as biased or neutral. The pre-survey results showed that FOX news was considered a conservatively biased news source, MSNBC was considered a liberally biased news source an CNN was considered to be a (relatively) neutral news source. Morse then went to NewsTrust.com to gather a sample of those organizations' worst rated stories, meaning the news stories the analysts thought were very biased, one way or another. Morse then read the stories herself, looking for bias. Morse said examples of a bias in news story's were “having one side to the story, using only company representatives as sources, or having a largely disproportionate number of paragraphs contributed to one side”.
When the results came back, Morse said she was surprised. The results suggested that out of the three news organizations’ stories Morse looked at, CNN had the most typical expressions of bias that she was looking for. “I expected to find that FOX and MSNBC, especially FOX, would have very apparent bias in their reporting, but it wasn’t like that at all,” Morse said. “I feel that if the names of the news organizations were removed from these stories, and audiences were asked to connect stories to the news outlet, they would not be able to match the stories with the news outlet it came from.”
When the results came back, Morse said she was surprised. The results suggested that out of the three news organizations’ stories Morse looked at, CNN had the most typical expressions of bias that she was looking for. “I expected to find that FOX and MSNBC, especially FOX, would have very apparent bias in their reporting, but it wasn’t like that at all,” Morse said. “I feel that if the names of the news organizations were removed from these stories, and audiences were asked to connect stories to the news outlet, they would not be able to match the stories with the news outlet it came from.”
According to Morse, the main limitation to using NewsTrust.com was the variety of critics. “The members of Newstrust, who analyze the stories, are made up of liberal males, therefore the system in which they selected the most biased stories is limited,” said Morse. Other than the political limitations, Morse had good things to say about NewsTrust.com. “I like the way that the website works and how they are trying to merge journalism and social media into one,” Morse said. “I think it is a great idea to have comments actually contribute to the story and having the commentators verify their identities really helps facilitate insightful thought.”
In preparation for their independent research, Morse, along with the other members of her team, reviewed previous research studies that touched on the research topics they planned to look into. In 2009, a presentation entitled “The Origins of Media Perceptions: Judgements of News Accuracy and Bias Among Adolescents”, was made in the Journalism studies division of the International Communication Association. According to Morse, the 2009 study “aimed to analyze the affects of news bias on adolescents” which is a group that is still creating their idea of what is and isn’t accurate in the daily news. The results from the 2009 study had a strength from its sample size, since it was based on a questionnaire distributed by mail to around 500,000 people, aiming specifically at households with adolescents aged 12-17.
Researchers in the 2009 study hypothesized that “news media accuracy and bias would be negatively correlated among adolescents”, Morse said, but in reality discovered that those two variables were not related at all.
This was Morse’s first research project. “Overall, it was a learning experience to say the least,” Morse said with a smile. “ And I thought what I found was different from what I expected to find.”
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