Gene Demby, lead blogger on NPR, teaches students about bias

Professor Barry Gordemer (right) asks NPR lead blogger Gene Demby (left) about biased writing and 
Demby shares his answer with a class at American University last Thursday (Photo by Rebeca Berger). 

Gene Demby, the lead blogger for National Public Radio’s Code Switch team, spoke about avoiding bias to a Writing for Communication class on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014. Professor Barry Gordemer teaches this 200-level Communications class, offered at American University in Washington, District of Columbia. Gordemer is the senior producer at NPR and Demby is one of his close colleagues.

Demby started off his discussion with a question, followed by a story. He asked the class, “How come there aren’t many Asian-American basketball players in the NBA?” The students sat in silence and looked awkwardly at each other to see if anyone else raised their hand. It seemed as if no one wanted to be rude by not answering, but no one wanted to say the wrong thing either.

Demby then started his story to answer his question. He talked about Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks point-guard who became a star after subbing in when Carmelo Anthony got hurt. As he spoke, he made sure to emphasize certain words or phrases he was using, specifically to avoid bias. “I give out facts to defy stereotypes,” Demby said. Demby talked about some of the stereotypes as to why there aren’t many Asian Americans in the NBA, such as height and cultural aversion to sports. He pointed out that Lin is 6-foot-3-inches tall, his father loved basketball, his mother went to all of his games, and both of his brothers played basketball too. He also talked about how Nigerian players, who account for a good portion of the players in the NBA, don’t even fit the size of a stereotypical basketball player. In other words, “anyone who plays basketball is going to be something of a physical outlier,” Demby said. The rest of Demby’s article can be read here. In closing, Demby said, “Objectivity is a lie. We all bring our own bias to things.” His advice? “You should surround yourself with a bunch of different perspectives and court them.”

This bias that Demby was talking about can be seen in the article “Oregon ‘first lady’ cops togreen-card ‘marriage of convenience’ in exchange for $5G”. This article uses very obvious biased language such as “immigrant” and “green-card marriage” as well as more subtle phrases that still lead you to believe a certain thing. These include “tearfully admitted,” “sham marriage,” “stunning admission,” and “marriage of convenience”. By using language such as “undocumented citizen” as well as taking out the opinions of the author, the writing could be better.

Also, the article “On theMedia: What went wrong with Katie Couric and 'CBS Evening News'?” starts of with a whole bunch of bias. It says, “Katie Couric has poise, good looks, smarts and the kind of warmth on camera that a lot of other news people would love to duplicate.” This goes back to the gender stereotype that questions why women in the news are always praised (or ridiculed) for their looks before their accomplishments are even mentioned. To make this article better, this whole sentence could be taken out and just focus on her accomplishments and the main point.