News media have always been biased and occasionally misreport things, and with monumental issues up for consideration today like health care, global warming, gun control and the like, it is more important than ever that we are able to critique their work.
For a recent example, MSNBC reported that a white man carried an AR-15 rifle to a protest about health care and government spending, and the news analysts went on to say the protesters were part of a racist hate group that wanted to kill our president. It turned out that MSNBC had edited the video by cutting and pasting it to conceal his race, and the man was actually black, and his carrying of the firearm was both legal and peaceful.
When we see and hear lies like this, it can skew our opinion of issues and make us discredit those who are on one side of an issue if the lie is not caught. Worse, when information comes from a news source that generally agrees with our view on things, it is even easier to overlook a lie as we tend to take it as truth without question - this is called confirmation bias. These things, however, can be overcome with some simple analytical techniques.
While it would be very useful to know about structures like Toulmin's Model of Argumentation, types of logical fallacies and the rules of Oxford-style debate, I'm going to focus on one technique from my studies that is simple and easy to implement called triangulation.
Generally, in social science research, triangulation means that a research result is confirmed by approaching the same question from other angles to "triangulate" in on the truth as much as possible. That is, if one interviewer concluded that a person liked a new product, a second or third researcher would review the interview to see if they had a different interpretation. The outcome is often that these multiple views produce a set of points that all three agree on and another set of points that they do not agree on.
When it comes to news media, I've found this technique to be helpful in evaluating any given news story. Take the example of the protester above. Having viewed the same video on another news station or online, the unedited version would have clearly shown the man to be black. This investigation would allow you to find a few simple truths: people gathered at an event, some people were carrying firearms openly, one man carried an AR-15 and that man was black. You would also be able to declare other statements as questionable or false: the armed people posed a threat, people were protesting the president himself and they object to the president's race.
While generally quite effective, approaching media this way won't always be easy, as different news sources sometimes skew the same facts. For example, there was much discussion about the number of people who attended a protest in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12. Most major news outlets reported an attendance of fewer than 100,000 attendees, but those supporting the rally claimed there were over two million attendees.
To use triangulation to help here, you would need to review many different sources. After doing so, you wouldn't find a consensus since they are all estimates, but you would find a lot of sources that approximated just under one million in attendance. This would at least help to discredit the outliers on the high and low ends in order to help get a better estimate of the real numbers.
In the two examples presented, the topics were relatively simple to approach. However, many issues, such as health care reform and climate change action, have complex solutions embedded in congressional bills that necessitate much deeper investigation.
This requires both the issue and the proposed solutions to be broken down and evaluated as parts before triangulation can be used on any one of those parts. What's also helpful and exciting in issues like this is to engage in debate, especially with friends who have different views. Working from a friendly relationship, it's great to learn more about how others view the issue and how to disagree civilly with someone who respects you, all the while getting to the bottom of the issues at hand.
Overall, the point of this article was to encourage people to consider the effect of bias in news, to never trust any single source for anything, and to present one simple way to start addressing these problems. The outcome of applying critical thinking techniques is not only to improve the skill for use in all of life, but also to help see through media bias in the things we hear and read every day. This bias often serves as propaganda, pitting one side against another when, in fact, there are common grounds and truths from which both sides can work. Getting past the fight and to the facts is what will truly move us forward once again.