“To Me, There’s Always a Bias”: Understanding the Public’s Folk Theories About Journalism

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how Americans conceive of journalistic processes and how their conceptions clash with the way journalists construct their profession. We do this by interpreting data from five focus groups to explore ways the public understands journalism, through what are called folk theories. We find that participants broadly interpreted what makes a story biased – seeing common journalistic practices, such as adding context to a story, as avenues of bias. We also found that the public’s understanding of common journalistic practices, such as eyewitness interviews and investigative work, is compatible with the journalistic self-conception, but the public may attribute negative intent if they see a story that lacks these characteristics. The data show participants hold high expectations for journalism that journalists may view as unattainable.

KEYWORDS:

• News
• journalism‌
• audience
• folk theories
• focus groups
• bias
• watchdog
• witnessing

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the focus group participants for sharing their thoughts and Literacy Instruction for Texas for allowing us to recruit study participants at their site. We also are grateful to Natalie J. (Talia) Stroud, director of the Center for Media Engagement, CME grants and business administrator Melody Avant, and the CME team for their advice and support of the project – especially Martin J. Riedl and Ori Tenenboim, who provided feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Institutional Review Board approval for this project was granted November 29, 2018, and five focus groups were conducted in Austin and Dallas, Texas between March 29 and July 6, 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Press Institute under Grant GR-2018-001.