Bias What Bias?

Ever notice the tendency amongst some to dismiss everything reported in the media as inevitably split between a right-wing and left-wing bias? On the surface, it sounds like a neutralist shrug to avoid taking side. But in practice it is often used as a tactic to excuse highly damaging distortions sought by certain media owners, and at the same time discredit valid observations by genuinely impartial journalists.

Let’s look at a few examples.

A White man is found to have shot numerous people dead. Another one has murdered politicians who had a liberal outlook. Yet another one has killed Blacks and Latinos because he wanted to get rid of them. They are reported as acting alone, mentally disturbed, with no implications for any other White person, or connections to any extremist propaganda. Now a Black person is arrested for stabbing someone to death. A murderer is discovered to be an asylum seeker. Someone shouting out ‘Allah’ has set off a bomb. Suddenly there is even more coverage about the threats posed by immigrants, discussions proliferate about keeping refugees out, and all Muslims are suspects – not a word about mental illness. Bias is to always excuse those you favour and blame everyone you dislike by superficially linking them to some wrongdoer. Objectivity is to examine each case on its own merit, and not make unwarranted generalisations.

Then there is the matter of public revenue and collective expenditure. Tax in every form is reported as money being taken away from people. But where is the report that shows what tax revenue will buy for people individually and their country as a whole? The education of children, the healthcare, the policing, the defence of the realm, environmental protection, and countless other support and services that we all rely on. Imagine if the media were to report people losing billions every day to businesses that charge them for numerous items. The news keep adding up the costs from multiple bills, but never mention what is being bought – food, heating, electricity, transport, clothes, entertainment, furniture, decorations, and so on. Bias is to focus relentlessly on the costs of public support, and not connecting them with the benefits they bring. Of course it would be biased to dwell on the benefits of public services without looking closely at taxes too – but no mainstream media in the West has ever been guilty of that.

How about financial rule breakers? On the one hand we have ferocious attacks on those who commit benefit frauds and are rigorously prosecuted by the authority. On the other hand, we have a few reports on those who commit tax frauds who are rarely prosecuted. Is it because the problem is so much worse with benefit cheats than tax fraudsters? Actually, it’s the other way round. In the UK, tax frauds cost the country almost 10 times more than benefit frauds [Note 1]. There is also little coverage of people in need who underclaim the benefits they are entitled to. With other financial matters such as the managing of savers’ money, many in the banking sector acted so irresponsibly that it led to a meltdown. There was no widespread media demands for their prosecution and imprisonment, and after their banks were bailed out, many even received bonuses.

We can multiply our examples with the contrasts between the attacks on unions for trying to influence government policies to support workers, and the defence of corporations in donating to, lobbying, collaborating with allies in government to put their interests first; between the sympathetic reporting of anti-immigrant protestors who cannot stand the sight of refugees, and the negative reports of people gathered to protest against the killing of defenceless children in Gaza; or between supportive reports of corporations withholding their investment and threatening business closures when they can’t get the level of returns they want, and the critical reports of workers going on strike when they can’t get the level of pay they seek.

If we look at the main media outlets – press and broadcast – we will certainly find many lodged firmly on the Right, there are some that are still managing a fair balance (though for that very reason they are arbitrarily lambasted as “Left-leaning”), and very few that routinely frame their stories with a Left-bias. 

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[Note 1: See https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/the-real-cheats-are-in-tax-not-benefits; other estimates range from 6 to 15 times worse for tax frauds. This does not even include money siphoned away through tax avoidance loopholes.

The May Fourth Movement

"A long time ago, in a country, not that far away... There came a time of revolution, when rebels united to challenge a tyrannical culture." 

Long before May the Fourth was coopted by movie fans as Star Wars Day, that date was significant for marking the beginning of the historical May Fourth Movement in China in 1919.  

The May Fourth Movement began with 4,000 university students gathering at Tiananmen in protest against the Treaty of Versailles. China was an ally of Britain and the US in WW1 against Germany, but when the war was over, Britain and others decided that the territories Germany had taken from China would be handed, not back to China, but to Japan (which in WW1 allied itself with Britain). This led to outrage in China, and many felt that their government was being humiliated despite all the Chinese lives that had been sacrificed in fighting the Germans (not just in China but in Europe too). Soon the disillusionment went deeper and the young generation in particular felt that the old stagnant Confucian culture had left China weak and incapable of progressive development.

There were three particular messages to emerge from the May Fourth challenge. First of all, those in charge of society cannot refuse to examine flaws or explore improvements in the name of ‘preserving tradition’. The protest was not about the abstract sanctity or obsoleteness of every traditional practice. It was about the actual problems that people could experience themselves – military threats, hunger, technological deficiency, lack of capability in finding practical solutions – and why they were being held back compared with other countries that had made notable progress. Traditions must be adapted if people are not to suffer from social and intellectual stagnation.

Secondly, national pride and internationalist openness are not incompatible. The Chinese students did not want their country to be treated as a weakling, and their response was not to press for China to be closed off and reflect on its own past glory, but to look outwards to see what they could learn from others, work with them, and make improvements in the light of how other countries such as Britain, the US, Japan had increased in strength and prosperity.

Thirdly, blind adherence to traditional (Confucian or otherwise) rules and practices should give way to careful learning from two teachers – Science and Democracy [Note 1], which had proven to be major factors in enabling the winners in WW1 to advance substantially in economic, political, cultural and technological terms [Note 2]. Instead of top-down edicts dictating what was to be read or not, what was to be explored or not, how new expressions and experiments were to be tried out, the people themselves should innovate and test what improvements could be achieved in diverse aspects of life.

These messages from the May Fourth Movement remain relevant today – for all countries. The openness, objectivity, and responsiveness at the heart of scientific investigation and democratic governance are vital for any society to adapt to changing circumstances and strengthen its capacity for peace and prosperity. Alas, in the years that followed the May Fourth Movement, China became increasingly torn by the autocratic Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and the authoritarian leadership of Mao Zedong. A major figure of May Fourth, Hu Shi, criticised both sides for their rejection of democratic inclusion, and the tendency to impose their own ideas without allowing open examination of what solution would most likely work better. For him, we should always be steadfast in striving to be scientific in establishing what to believe, and democratic in reaching decisions that affect everyone.

If May Fourth should have a connection with popular culture, it is not with Star Wars’ mystical Jedi force, but with Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets, boldly advancing science and democracy across the final frontier.

Live long and prosper.

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Note 1: The students frequently spoke of the need for new teachers for their country in terms of bringing in ‘Mr. Science’ and ‘Mr. Democracy’. 

Note 2: For the students, the key allies China joined in defeating Germany in WW1 – Britain, France and the US, were all democracies that took scientific research seriously. Japan, which also joined the alliance in defeating Germany, Austria and Turkey, was in the 1910s also developing as a parliamentary democracy with extensive engagement with the development of science and technology.