NPR Blogger Shows Students Importance of Challenging Bias

Lead Blogger, Gene Demby, answers questions from students after his lecture on uncovering 

bias in writing at American University on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014. Demby, now at NPR, 

has previously worked at The New York Times and The Huffington Post. (Photo by Rahi Patel)

The lead blogger of National Public Radio’s Code Switch team gave a lecture on bias writing to a class at American University. Gene Demby visited the Writing for Communications class on Thursday, Oct. 9, and his main message was to challenge assumptions when writing.

Demby delivered that message by telling a story. After noticing the recent success of the basketball player Jeremy Lin, Demby asked himself “why so few Asian-Americans played professional basketball?” He did some research and found answers that went against what most people thought. Asian-Americans were not too short, they weren’t too busy studying, and didn’t have culture differences with the sport. Demby said that the real problem is that we just aren’t looking in the right places to recruit Asian-American players. He also mentioned that this was not the first time a group of basketball players was stereotyped. Demby found that there were misconceptions in the 1920s of why there were so many Jewish players. “It was fun to write this story and see how complex our history was,” Demby said. In his experience, good stories come from “going against the assumptions.”

By using Demby's mindset of “going against the assumptions,” biases can often be found in news stories. For example, in an article on Alaska’s ban on same-sex marriage, Emma Margoline wrote, “The nation’s oldest voter-approved amendment banning same-sex nuptials has fallen. On Sunday afternoon, a federal judge struck down Alaska’s 1998 amendment defining marriage as an institution between one man and one woman.” This article's word choice of "oldest," and "fallen," shows a liberal political bias. To make it more objective and less opinionated, Margoline could have written, “The nation’s first voter-approved amendment which made same-sex marriage illegal has been removed. On Sunday afternoon, a federal judge overruled Alaska’s 1998 amendment…”

Another article in the Huffington Post contained bias when describing a document from the Vatican. “…Vatican document said on Monday that homosexuals had 'gifts and qualities to offer' and asked if Catholicism could accept gays and recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples,” Philip Pullella wrote. To be less biased against sexual orientation, Pullella could have written, “…Vatican document said Monday that gay people had 'gifts and qualities to offer' and asked if Catholicism could accept people of different sexual orientations and recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples.”