How much gamma radiates from the media?
You recognise left-wing and right-wing bias, but do you know how ‘gamma bias' functions?
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln
A while back, I was reading a news item when I started to feel strangely irritated. It was a stomach-turning story – a girl around the same age as my daughter had been brutally stabbed to death by a man on a Swedish railway platform. (This isn’t the article, but I believe it’s about the same event. However, given there have been several such events in recent years, I can’t be entirely sure this is the incident in question.)
As I scrolled down the article, I realised the cause of my disquiet. The killer kept being referred to as a “Swedish man” or “Swedish citizen”. I couldn’t help thinking that Swedes weren’t previously known for brutally stabbing people to death during their commutes. Long before I reached the final paragraphs – where more context was belatedly provided – I twigged that the “Swedish” stabber was unlikely to have a name like Björn Carlsson.
You’ve probably been a victim of ‘gamma bias’ yourself enough times to know how the story turned out. While it may have been true the attacker possessed Swedish citizenship or was in the process of applying for it, the journalist who wrote the article was, shall we say, de-emphasising specific facts.
Unless you were paying attention, you might have been left with the impression that “Swedish” men were randomly and summarily executing children. In reality, the girl was murdered by an Iranian migrant who was, according to some bystanders, screaming “Allahu Akbar” at the time. The assailant had reportedly already notched up 52 convictions for offences including assault, drug offences and theft before graduating to murder.
But, yes, he was just another run-of-the-mill “Swedish” citizen – a ‘pale, stale male’ perhaps – who inexplicably descended into a homicidal frenzy while waiting for the train to get to his job at the Volvo factory.
A thumb on the scale for some
I assume the Swedish Union of Journalists (the Journalistförbundet) has a Code of Ethics similar to the one the MEAA implores Australian journalists to follow. (If you speak Swedish, please let me know.)
The Australian code and I assume the Swedish one, urges hacks not to “put unnecessary emphasis on personal characteristics, including race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, sexual orientation, family relationships, religious belief, or physical or intellectual disability”.
If I could question the author of the article I read, they would probably say they were acting ethically by playing down the ethnicity, nationality and religious beliefs of the assailant. I’d have more sympathy for this argument if the background of migrants was also de-emphasised when they did admirable things. Imagine what would have happened if a recently arrived migrant – in Sweden or any other Western European or Anglosphere nation – had jumped onto the tracks to rescue a young child from an oncoming train. Do you really think there would be so little attention paid to their ethnicity, nationality or religious beliefs?
As it happens, you don’t have to imagine because I can point to a real-life example. Not so long before the gruesome Swedish stabbing, Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year-old illegal migrant from Mali, rescued a young child dangling from the fourth-floor balcony of a building in Paris. Anyone who read about this event or watched the video on YouTube was immediately made aware of the child-rescuer’s race, nationality and (non-Gallic-sounding) name. If it wasn’t in the headline, it was definitely in the first paragraph.
Gamma bias 101
From what I can ascertain, the concept of ‘gamma bias’ emerged three years ago in academia. I gather it was initially just about gender. Specifically the media’s habit of sexing women whenever they did anything admirable and desexing them when they did anything contemptible – and doing the reverse for men. So, you might see a story about a “female firefighter” heroically running into a burning building, but only reference to a “firefighter” otherwise.
At some point, the concept of gamma bias jumped the fence and escaped into Podcastistan. I first became aware of it a few weeks ago when I heard podcasters such as Chris Williamson and
(check out his Substack here) explaining the term to their guests.I am not sure how much ‘bro sciencing’ the concept of gamma bias – so named because alpha and beta bias were taken, apparently – underwent after leaving the universities. But I gather it’s now increasingly used to name the phenomenon of the (socially liberal) legacy media defaulting to writing nice things about certain sacralised victim groups – women, migrants, LGB and especially T individuals, non-white-adjacent ethnic groups and some (but definitely not all) religious minorities – while rarely having a good word to say about other demographics – men, non-migrants, heterosexuals, members of ethnic and religious majorities.
I’m no gamma bias expert, but I presume it goes both ways. Most of the mainstream media leans Left (on social issues, at least) and therefore talks up groups the Left lionises. However, I suspect you’d find just as much gamma bias running in the other direction with the conservative media lionising farmers, soldiers, police officers, small businesspeople, etc and offering much briefer and more one-dimensional portrayals of public servants, anti-war demonstrators, protesters, striking workers, etc.
The gamma bias imperative
I don’t have time to search for any evidence for this proposition. Still, I suspect gamma bias has become much worse in recent years as content creators – of all political persuasions – have fallen victim to audience capture. For getting captured by your audience is near inevitable once they are paying your salary.
I’m guessing it was easier to report the news straight when the likes of Coca-Cola, Harvey Norman and McDonald’s bankrolled the media. Now that media outlets are highly incentivised to confirm their audience’s prejudices and preconceptions, there’s little room for shades of grey.
Your audience almost certainly long ago decided that migrants were either good or evil. Accordingly, they tune in expecting a steady diet of stories showing migrants in either a heroic or despicable light. If you can’t reliably serve up such fare, there’s no shortage of other reporters, op-ed writers, podcasters, YouTubers and Instagram influencers who won’t share your scruples.
Short-term subscription boost, long-term disrespect
I have no easy solutions to offer about gamma bias. If you don’t give the punters what they want, they will decamp to ideologically greener pastures in an eye blink. If you do give the punters what they want, at some level they will recognise you are pandering to them and slowly lose respect for you.
Gamma bias isn’t quite lying, but it is disingenuous and cynical. There are a range of reasons for the collapse of trust in media institutions. But an important one is that media consumers don’t think they are getting accurate information anymore. Granted, at least in the short term, they prefer easy-to-digest half-truths to chewy and nutritious full-truths. But I suspect they feel a little like they’ve pigged out on junk food after consuming media that does nothing but serve up “red meat for the base”.
Things tend to go better for both individuals and societies if they acknowledge usually complicated and often unpleasant truths rather than seeking solace in comforting fairytales. So, I’ll end by quoting the first two sentences in the MEAA’s Code of Conduct, which I unreservedly endorse: Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Do not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis.