Decoding the News

With news, more than perhaps any other kind of source, it’s important follow both steps in the information sorting process: companion reading first, to find out if a source is worth paying attention to, then close reading to make sure you’re getting the whole story.

Once you’ve used MediaSmarts’ Break the Fake companion reading tips to make sure a source is basically reliable, use these close reading steps to read between the lines of news:

• Ask: Is this news or opinion? As noted above, this can be hard to tell sometimes, and news stories sometimes mix the two. While reliable news stories may sometimes include analysis (the reporter’s interpretation of what the facts mean), they should always consist mostly of verifiable facts – preferably with the sources given, so you can check them out yourself. Learn about how news is made. Research has shown that the more people understand how the news industry works, the better they are at distinguishing false news and accounting for bias.
  
  Some journalistic terms you should be familiar with:
  • Anonymous sources: These sources are not anonymous to the reporter or the editor - they’re individuals whose identity the editor has agreed to protect because it would be dangerous for them to speak on the Some information will usually be given about why they are a reliable source (such as where they work or what their general connection is to the story).
    • Editors usually only agree to use anonymous sources if what they’re saying can be corroborated against at least one other source.
  • Background: Like an anonymous source, except that no identifying information is given at all. A source that is used on background usually can’t be quoted directly.
  • Off the record: A source whose information can’t be used for publication.
  • On the record: A source that can be identified and quoted directly.[1]

To find out how well you understand the news, try our News Quiz.

• Pay attention to framing. While most legitimate news outlets aren’t biased in a political sense, every news story is influenced by the attitudes, assumptions and background of its interviewers, writers, photographers and editors. All of those things affect how a story is framed: the same story, with the same basic facts, can be framed in totally opposite ways, based on what’s included or left out, what’s emphasized or minimized, and how things are described. A headline saying that deaths of police and law enforcement officers rose by 55 percent in 2021, for instance, will likely be interpreted very differently if it leaves out the fact that the majority of those extra deaths were due to COVID-related illness.[2]
  
  How an issue is framed gives us a shortcut to deciding how to think about it: readers responded very differently to a news story about a march by a hate group when it was framed as a free speech issue than when it was framed as being about public order.[3] Changes in how an issue is framed can affect how society addresses them: the shift in viewing smoking as an individual health issue, for instance, to seeing it as a public health one completely changed our society’s sense of how to deal with it. Framing can also be used to provoke our emotions or appeal to our values, such as by framing a public health measure as an attack on freedom.[4]
  
  For example, a study comparing coverage of trans people in the Washington Post and the New York Times found that while the Post ran more stories on the topic and were more likely to put them on the front page, theirs were more likely to be news stories about trans people and to quote trans people in them – while the Times was more likely to run stories that framed trans issues as controversial, in which no trans people were quoted.[5]
  
  The same story, with the same basic facts, can be framed in totally opposite ways. For example, one headline following a hurricane stated that power has been restored to 90 percent of Louisiana, while another said that 10 percent of the state was still without power. Both headlines – and stories – are accurate. Whether this is a good or a bad news story depends on how each outlet frames it.
  
  Just seeing a frame repeatedly also makes us more likely to see things in terms of that frame. The more news stories we see about crime, for instance, or the most opinion articles that frame issues as us-versus-them conflicts, the more likely we are to see stories that don’t explicitly use those frames in those ways. Framing can affect whether we assimilate new information or change our beliefs in response to it: we’re much more likely to discount information that doesn’t fit our current frame. We’re also less likely to see things that don’t fit our broader cultural frames at all, because they are less likely to be seen as newsworthy. “Not because [they] are exactly suppressed, but because [they don’t] go with the cultural grain.”[6]
  
  Some framing choices may be the result of journalistic norms and values such as objectivity. The use of the passive voice and the omission of the subject of a sentence – phrasing a headline as “Ten killed in blast,” for instance – may reflect the fact that it has not yet been established who or what caused the blast.[7] There is evidence, though, that headlines are more likely to be written this way when the story is about violence committed by police.[8]
  
  One big part of framing is where and when a story appears. Readers of papers judge first page stories to be more significant than those buried in the back. Television and radio newscasts run the most important stories first and leave the less significant for later. Online news puts the most important stories on the home page, and people tend to believe that if news comes to us through our social media channels it must be important. Bias through placement can also happen when a story is placed near something else. Putting a news story next to an opinion article on the same topic, or a political cartoon about the subject of the story, changes how we read it.
  
  How the story is organized is also significant. Most news stories are written in what is called “inverted pyramid” style, beginning with what is considered the most newsworthy facts, followed by the important details relating to those facts, then finally background information to provide context. The last part of the story contains information that readers are least likely to read and editors are most likely to cut. 
  
  The choice of words to describe an action affects what we think about it. Compare “Police confiscate gun collection,” “Police seize gun collection” and “Police grab gun collection.” Was something a “death,” a “killing” or a “murder”? Did a politician “state” something, “claim” it or “allege” it? Similarly, how a person or group is described affects how we see them. Is a candidate an experienced politician, a long-serving politician or an old politician? (This is why responsible news sources avoid using strongly inflected words like “terrorist” except when directly quoting sources.)[9] In extreme cases, word choice can essentially turn a news story into an opinion piece. For instance, this article in the Ottawa Sun, which is labeled as a news article, leaves no doubt how we are to feel about its subject:

Encouraged by her mother, Bailey Lashells, little Fiona refuses to comply with mask mandates and is ‘on a mission to take back, not only her rights but every American child’s constitutional rights from the tyrant school board,’ the proud mom [said].[10]

• Pay attention to what (and who) makes the news and what doesn’t. Within a given story, some details can be ignored, and others included, to give readers or viewers a different opinion about the events reported. For instance, in this headline, we’re given the name of the elephant and the place where this event took place, but the man whom the elephant tickled is just “a Kenyan journalist” (his name is Alvin Kaunda).
  
  The biggest bias is always towards what journalists see as being “newsworthy”: basically, things that are recent, unusual and seen to be important by the audience. But what is seen as newsworthy is itself a kind of framing. Stories about a single event are more likely to be seen as newsworthy than about something that’s ongoing, and stories about specific people are more newsworthy than stories about groups or systems. Research has also found that people are more likely to think an issue is important if they’ve seen it covered in the news, which can make the list of “newsworthy” things get smaller over time.

[1] (n.d.) Telling the Story. Associated Press. < https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and-principles/telling-the-story/>

[2] Mastrine, J. (2022) Media Bias Alert: Fox News, NPR Frame Same Story Differently. AllSides.

[3] Nelson, T. E., Clawson, R. A., & Oxley, Z. M. (1997). Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and its effect on tolerance. American Political Science Review, 91(3), 567-583.

[4] Scheibenzuber, C., Neagu, L. M., Ruseti, S., Artmann, B., Bartsch, C., Kubik, M., ... & Nistor, N. (2023). Dialog in the echo chamber: Fake news framing predicts emotion, argumentation and dialogic social knowledge building in subsequent online discussions. Computers in Human Behavior, 140, 107587.

[5] Hollar, J. (2023) NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias—by the Numbers. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

[6] Klein, E. (2020). Why we're polarized. Simon and Schuster.

[7] Matuskura, N. (2005) On Passives Occurring in Newspaper Headlines.

[8] Moreno-Medina, J., Ouss, A., Bayer, P., & Ba, B. A. (2022). Officer-involved: The media language of police killings (No. w30209). National Bureau of Economic Research.

[9] Martin, S. (2023) Understanding the guidance behind the Globe’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The Globe and Mail.

[10] Wilford, D. (2021) Florida girl, 7, suspended for 36th time for not wearing mask to school. The Ottawa Sun.