NPR Journalist Gives Lecture on Bias to Students

NPR Blogger Gene Demby discussing bias
with American University students in Washington D.C.
October 9th, 2014 (Photo by Tori Tropiano)

"Objectivity is a lie,” said Gene Demby.  Demby, the lead blogger for NPR's Code Switch team, said this last Thursday during a class to American University students.  There is no such thing as a completely objective news piece, though sometimes this is not on purpose.  Many common phrases from issues today have a lot of history.  One example is the use of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" both have a history behind making them unusable in unbiased writing.. 

Demby came to speak to students at American University on the subject of bias.  He said that all media is biased, but that bias is a complicated issue.  NPR is often thought of as a very liberal radio program, however, nearly all of the people they invite to speak are old, white and male.  Most would think that a show that had only white males would be more conservative and republican.  Professor Barry Gordemer said that people should “challenge their assumptions."  

The story that Demby finished working on recently, which can be read here, was about why there were so few Asian American basketball players.  There are many stereotypes about why Asian Americans don’t play basketball, such as that they are too short and are too busy studying.  Neither of those turned out to be true.  Nigeria has far more basketball players and yet they are one of the shortest countries overall.  Another stereotype is that Asians are the best students, however as it turns out Asians have the second highest high school dropout rate.  In reality Asian Americans do play basketball as it gives them a way to acclimate to American culture.  This is the same as what Jewish people were doing in the 1920s.  They too played a lot of basketball so that they could fit in better in America and most of the top players at that time were Jewish. The problem is that recruiters are not looking for them due to their assumptions and bias.  There are many Asian-American basketball leagues but recruiters do not look for NBA players because of their misconceptions.

Bias is incredibly common in the media, purposeful or not, and examples can be found all over such as this story.  This is a story where the bias is far from subtle as it spends the entire story generalising and attacking gun owners.  The title of the piece starts with “gun worshipper” and the prejudice does not get any less obvious from there.  The appropriate title should have just been “Man wins semiautomatic weapon…” not “Gun worshipper wins…” Another story with bias is this one where the bias is more subtle.  In this story the bias is that there is only a brief report given by anyone on a different side. To make the article better would require more statements from other sides.