Your Campus Rag: A Waste of Paper, or . . .

CARSON JEREMA STAFF

In a moment of reflection and clarity, Thomas Jefferson once said, “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.” Jefferson, who was scorched and sullied by the press in his day, understood the importance of a free press to political freedom.

And important to political freedom is that not only are governments, corporations and other bodies held to account, but that citizens are able to engage each other within the public sphere. Playwright Arthur Miller acknowledged the importance of newspapers in this engagement when he said in 1961, “a good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

Like democracy however, newspapers and the press in general, are not without their flaws. Still, without a free press many abuses of public power would go unreported. The uncovering of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon remains the iconic example of this.

The model newspaper is something that many university papers, like the Manitoban, also strive for. A good example of the Manitoban seeking to serve its purpose was in 2004 when differential fees for international students were being raised from 75 to 100 per cent. The Manitoban played an integral role in bringing this issue to light.

Student papers attempt to be a microcosm of the national debate — a campus talking to itself. The Manitoban is open to participation from all and encourages feedback. We print most letters to the editor from students, and last year as in other years we printed a reader survey that dozens of readers filled out.

Most readers who addressed the issue of balance in the paper complimented the Manitoban for offering a variety of opinions and perspectives on topics of relevance and interest to students, along with helpful comments of how the paper could be improved.

There were of course a handful of vitriolic comments made. The Manitoban often receives, as most publications do, acidic censures from readers who believe we give their views short shrift or that our news coverage is biased or that our comment section is bracketed to fit some pre-conceived agenda. Interestingly though, the paper has been accused of having opposing agendas.

A few readers who filled out the survey accused the paper of being fanatically left wing and implied that the Manitoban is a waste of paper — essentially the standard criticism of student papers.

Other readers have accused the paper of also having a “reactionary” or “conservative” agenda. In other words, a bias against the very left-wing politics that others have complained we follow so religiously.

Apparently, the Manitoban is at the same time an exclusive venue for cuckoo banana conspiracy theorists, and an ardent and slavish supporter of the most vile of right-wing agendas. Who knew!

Media bias might be defined as the conscious or unconscious distortion of the facts to pursue an agenda. Often, partisans who levy epithets like “left-wing fanatic” and “reactionary” are so convinced that their worldview is the correct one that any information coming from a publication that does not appear to accept it wholesale, must be a hostile entity to be exposed.

A number of recent studies have sought to illustrate and explain perception of bias in the media. The Washington Post, in late July, covered one of these studies which addressed perception of media bias from “pro-Israeli” and “pro-Arab” partisans. The architects of this study showed several television news stories covering the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon to 144 participants.

The pro-Arab viewers condemned the news coverage for being bias against the Arab side and favourable to Israel. Pro-Israeli viewers had exactly the opposite perception. Essentially as Stanford psychologist Lee D. Ross puts it in the Post article, “If I think the world is black and you think the world is white, and someone comes along and says it is gray, we will both think that person is biased.”

Another study led by Emory University researcher Drew Westen, performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on Democratic and Republican partisans. The study found that when coming to conclusions, the part of the brain responsible for reason showed no increased activity among participants. The parts of the brain that did show increased activity, however, were those responsible for emotion and pleasure.

In other words, while the study is far from concrete, it offers an explanation for what is often called the confirmation bias, whereby individuals hold beliefs so strongly that they seek information to support their own bias while ignoring what might be overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

None of this is to suggest that newspapers, including the Manitoban, are above criticism. They are not. Or that media bias is never a problem. It often is. But, within the pages of your campus rag, there should be something for everyone to agree with and disagree with, and hopefully plenty to talk about. A good newspaper tries to avoid pandering to one view or another. If there is truly going to be a campus conversation, students must be skeptical of not only what they perceive to be a manipulation of facts, but of what they believe to be true.