The Vocabulary of Bias part 3

[Man, I’m sure this is going to do wonders for my reader base. “Hurrah! More wordy pseudo-intellectual wank from morgue!” Oh well, tough. I blogged about the etch-a-sketch pen, didn’t I?]
As always, read the comments. Matt’s response to my post was longer than my post 🙂 The main point to come out of that discussion, to my mind, is this quote from Matt:
I suppose a part of Morgues new vocab could be a way of referring to news media without referring to each individual company or without referring to them all as media as whole. The first is too fine grained and the second not granular enough.
This is one important axis in which the vocabulary is limited. We talk about a biased media, but both of those words get loaded with meanings that suit whoever is deploying them. This is how language is meant to work, after all – flexibility of meaning is an incredibly handy thing.
In this kind of battleground of ideas and propaganda, however, terminology as loose as that can cause major problems. It’s too important an area to allow these problems to remain.
(It’s important to recognise, too, that the looseness of definition serves both ‘sides’ of the debate, as it allows both of them to sustain their mythologies of victimisation. If the vocabulary is to grow, and meanings are to become more useful, we who aren’t directly involved in spinning the argument will have to do it from out here. We’d be doing the reverse of Syme’s Newspeak – adding new words to express gradations and meanings that currently obscured. Allowing new consciousness and new understanding.)
So. More process thinking… how can we think about ‘media bias’? What questions could this new vocabulary address?
Media:

• What media are we talking about?
• What form of outlet (print, radio, etc)?
• What organisation (NBC, Instapundit, The Guardian)?
• To what extent can we group different media forms and organisations together?

Bias:

• What sources of bias are there? (Author’s or publisher’s opinion, structural effects, deliberate strategic misrepresentation, genuine error or foolish interpretation…)
• How sensible is it to talk about bias, singular? How can we tell how many different influences are at work? Do conflicting influences cancel each other out or make an item more biased? Does it make a difference to the consumer of information where the bias comes from?
• How informed is the consumer as to the potential for bias? How powerful is the consumer in filtering out that bias?
• Is it ever possible to have reporting without bias? If there is always some bias, at what point do we start worrying about it? Is there an ‘acceptable bias threshold’?

Let’s connect this to a real-world example, too.
During the attack on Iraq, the BBC was seen as carrying a pro-American bias by the UK left. The very same service was seen as carrying an anti-American bias by the US right. (Granted, the definitions of left and right differ from UK to US, but that alone can’t account for the difference.)
So. Was the BBC biased pro-USA or anti-USA? How can we tell?
I don’t know. I just wish I had something good to say to those morons on the internet who still call it the Ba’athist Broadcasting Corporation.
(And lets not forget, as no doubt everyone reading this realises, that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are themselves little more than useful labels that have been calcified through spin and overuse to the point where they obscure the reality of political thought and activity.)