Everyday decision making is affected by unconscious biases, requiring journalists to re-examine how they do their work to maintain public confidence in reporting.
From coverage plans to the sources used to gather information, journalism is not immune from the biases embedded since birth, said Derek Mosley, director of Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
“From the time you are small to the time you are the age you are right now, you are constantly being bombarded by all this information,” Mosley told the National Press Foundation’s Statehouse Reporting fellows, adding that the brain can only process a fraction of 11 million bits of information that cross per minute. “It gets logged away in your subconscious brain that we access in the form of mental shortcuts.”
“I’m going to tell you this right now, I’ll say it again a million times, you did not stand a chance,” Mosley said.
Referring to results from Harvard University’s Implicit Association Test, Mosley said 83% of white people show an unconscious bias against black people, while 70% of black individuals also show an unconscious bias against other black people.
“I have to come clean with everybody here, and I hate doing this, but I have to do it for purposes of this lecture,” Mosley said. “I have an unconscious bias against black people. No one was more surprised to learn this than me because, well, hell, I’m a black person. My mom’s black, my dad’s black, my sister’s black. Most of my aunts and uncles are black. But despite that fact, I have an unconscious bias against black people.”
The biases have been embedded during a lifetime of exposure to language and images that have reinforced, at times unwittingly, those views.
In his own words:
“I’ve gone to Catholic school my entire life, so I’m talking kindergarten, grade school, high school, all the way up to law school and Marquette. So pray for me on all that. But that being said, in my entire Catholic education, I have never seen angels represented as anything other than white. Whether it’s the illustrated bibles you read, it has the pictures of the angels, or if you walk into a church, the stained-glass windows, every angel is white. We can’t get one black angel? Not one?
“I was giving this lecture about four hours north of here. It was to a bunch of teachers before school started. I got to this very part and I was like, we can’t get one black angel? Then (someone said), ‘Wait a minute. There’s a black angel.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He’s like, ‘Lucifer.’ Oh my God, Jesus. I’m like, the prosecution rests.”
“Now, in the criminal justice system, and every time I say that I sound like Law and Order, but in the criminal justice system, we have a thing that we refer to as the narrative. Here’s the narrative: 92% of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. Now, I was a judge and I was a prosecutor, and I will tell you that that statistic is a hundred percent accurate, 100% accurate, but there’s a term for it. What’s the term? Anybody know? Black on black crime. Absolutely right. Black on black crime. But were you aware that 84% of homicide victims are killed by other whites? Can someone tell me that term?
“Yeah, because you ain’t never heard white on white crime. You ain’t never heard that.”
Access the full transcript here.
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