Every news story is biased. The only question is how

Generation after generation, people around the world return to the same uneasy question:  can the news be trusted? Coverage feels biased. Tone sounds partisan. Facts seem bent  to fit a narrative. Trust erodes, audiences fragment, and the familiar plea resurfaces:  please, just be neutral.

But neutrality has never really been journalism’s default setting — or any form of human  communication, for that matter. Bias is not a recent infection in the media ecosystem. It is  built into how information is selected, framed, published, and consumed.

For a long time, media bias was treated as meaningful only when it was intentional. If  journalists were consciously trying to influence audiences, bias mattered. If they were not,  bias was dismissed as background noise. Some went further, arguing that bias is largely  strategic: a deliberate tool used to shape beliefs, mobilize voters, or maximize  engagement.

That framing, however, is too narrow. It misunderstands how news is actually produced.

A growing body of research shows that much media bias is neither malicious nor  strategic. It is structural, cognitive, and often invisible even to those producing it. 

Journalists do not stop being human when they enter a newsroom. They bring with them  their backgrounds, assumptions, professional norms, incentives, and time pressures. Bias  comes along for the ride.

Even when bias is unintentional at the level of individual journalists, it does not disappear  at the institutional level. Editorial hierarchies, ownership structures, commercial  incentives, and publishing routines continue to shape content long after reporting is  complete. As Sutter (2001) points out, bias can be introduced or reinforced during  selection, editing, and placement. A story does not need biased language to become  biased in publication.

If we strip away political rhetoric, research converges on a few recurring patterns. 

First, slant: information is presented in ways that nudge interpretation in a particular  direction, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly.

Second, consistency: bias is not random. It repeats across stories, topics, and time,  both within and across outlets.

Third, narrative pressure: journalists are storytellers operating in a crowded attention  economy. Complexity is costly. Drama is efficient. Bias often enters through the demand  for clarity, conflict, and memorability.

Taken together, media bias can be understood as a systematic tendency to frame  information in ways that influence how audiences perceive reality, whether or not that  influence is intentional.

Of course, some bias is deliberate.

Spin bias appears when impact is prioritized over precision. Loaded language,  exaggerated metaphors, selective facts, and emotionally charged headlines are used to make stories travel faster and hit harder. 

Ideological bias tends to be quieter but more durable. It works through framing rather  than volume, shaping which arguments feel reasonable, which actors appear legitimate,  and which trade-offs are treated as inevitable. And ideology here is not just left versus  right. It includes deeper divides – elitist versus populist, globalist versus localist,  progressive versus traditionalist. These lenses shape not only the answers journalism  offers, but the questions it asks in the first place. 

Still, focusing solely on intention misses where much bias actually enters. Some of the most powerful forms of media bias occur before a single sentence is written.

Coverage bias determines what becomes visible. News outlets systematically  overrepresent conflict, negativity, and deviation. Over time, this skews public perception,  making the world appear more unstable and threatening than it actually is, while  cooperation, continuity, and incremental progress fade into the background.

Gatekeeping bias sets the agenda. Different outlets covering the same moment often  choose entirely different stories. What one audience debates intensely, another never  encounters. Absence is not neutral; it is editorial power exercised quietly.

Statement bias shapes interpretation through language. Labels, metaphors, and implied  intent matter. Calling migrants “illegal,” protests “riots,” or a virus “foreign” is not neutral  description – it is framing. 

Bias rarely announces itself. It accumulates. 

It appears in omission as much as commission: in which sources are quoted and which  are missing; in headlines that oversimplify and paragraphs that hedge; in weak causal  claims, false balance, and forced binaries; in story placement, article length, image  selection, and what a caption quietly implies. 

Images matter. Captions matter. Silence matters. 

None of this requires fabrication. Much of it occurs while remaining factually accurate.

Information science distinguishes between misinformation (false but unintentional) and  disinformation (false and intentional). Media bias often sits in between. It relies on true  facts but arranges them selectively. It informs, but incompletely. It is accurate, but  directional. 

That is why the traditional distinction between information and disinformation is no longer  sufficient. We need another category: slanted information — content that is factually  correct but systematically partial. Slanted information can mislead without lying. It can  polarize without inventing facts.

The most persistent illusion in media criticism is the belief that bias can be eliminated. It cannot.

Bias can be identified, compared, contextualized, and counterbalanced, but not erased.

Journalism is an exercise in selection under constraint. Every choice creates emphasis.  Every emphasis introduces distortion

The task, then, isn’t to demand an impossible neutrality. It’s to demand transparency.  Pluralism. Visible perspective. To make bias legible instead of hidden, and to give  audiences the tools to see how different outlets frame the same reality.

• Sutter, D. (2001). Can the media be so liberal? The economics of media bias. Cato Journal, 20(3), 431–451.