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Media bias in student life Grace aigner and Bella Nordman

When the internet entered the public sphere in 1993, many believed it would create an information utopia — convenient, transformational and reliable. This was largely true; the Internet revolutionized the sharing of information and ideas, making it readily accessible to broader audiences. News of astonishing depth is available to almost anyone who wants it.

So is the DuPage Policy Journal. In August 2022, the DuPage Policy Journal published an article claiming that a third-grade teacher in District 203 had instructed his male students to act and dress in a feminine manner. Members of the D203 community began questioning the article on social media.

District 203 Superintendent Dan Bridges sent an email on inclusivity to the District 203 community soon after the article was published.

Lacking a specific byline, quotes from the former teacher, further sourcing and later critiques from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, the article contains journalistic flaws. (The North Star reached out to the DuPage Policy Journal without success.)

Local residents have long turned to local news sources for reliable information. In Naperville, publications like Patch, The Naperville Sun and NCTV-17 are all sources of local news that are considered intimately connected to the daily ongoings of Naperville. Reports regularly consist of high school sports games, local events and pertinent community news. An article by Penny Muse Abernathy from the New York State Bar Association writes that local news remains an important pillar of community education and connectivity.

“In an age of economic and technological disruption, the fate of thousands of communities – and our democracy – is at stake. Through their journalism, strong local news organizations have the ability to not only educate us as citizens but also show us how we’re connected to people we may not know we’re connected to,” Abernathy wrote.

So what happens when local news becomes an unreliable source? How can community members navigate bias in their media consumption? How can Naperville students detect bias, from the left, right or center, in the media they consume? From social media to news broadcasts, how do we discern whether our information is reliable or not?

The DuPage Policy Journal is merely one publication among a widespread collection of local news outlets being owned by partisan corporations and in turn, reflecting bias. According to MediaBiasFactCheck.com, the DuPage Policy Journal is a conservative-leaning source and is published by Local Government Information Services (LGIS), an Illinois-based organization that, while not disclosing ownership, is funded by The Metric Media Foundation, another historically controversial organization.

Metric Media operates over 1,200 local news websites across the United States, including the DuPage Policy Journal, and owns multiple corporate entities and non-profits, as reported by the Columbia Journalism Review. The two primary managers of Metric Media are Bradley Cameron and Brian Timpone. Timpone’s involvement raises concerns due to multiple past allegations against him regarding unreliable journalism, having been accused of faking bylines, quotes, outsourcing content and plagiarism with his previous journalism company, Journatic. The Journatic website is blocked on District 203 devices.

Finally, the Metric Media network is reportedly connected to the Tea Party Movement, a conservative organization against government regulation, and CatholicVote, a religious organization that set up a $9.7 million campaign against Joe Biden before the 2020 presidential election in attempts to persuade swing state voters to vote against him.

Experts say that Metric Media is undeniably a partisan corporation with a history of biased, low-quality journalism. In the case of the Elmwood elementary school teacher, many community members found it not just unreliable but offensive.

This line of reasoning may not be a given for many students. To no fault of their own, identifying bias has become increasingly difficult over the past few years largely due to the pervasive presence of social media and the overwhelming, constant feed of content teenagers consume regularly. NNHS junior Cally Navarro says she relates to this because of the plethora of news she has available at her fingertips.

“Snapchat has the Daily Mail story, which is a bunch of crap. But it's funny to see because the other day there were three different articles and it was all about Meghan and Harry and I read the different articles back to back and they said completely different things, using the same quotes just twisting it in completely different ways,” Navarro said.

In a survey conducted by The North Star, 40 Naperville North students were asked whether or not they had seen a social media post they believed to be untrue or biased in the last month. 75% of respondents said they had and 15% were unsure.

The average Naperville North student is not likely to cross-reference every Instagram post or TikTok they see, so developing simple, intuitive habits to know whether the media they consume is biased or inaccurate is crucial to media literacy. Jill Geisler, the Bill Plante Chair in Leadership and Media Integrity at Loyola University Chicago, said that a surefire way to notice media bias is being conscious of your emotional reaction to it.

“The most important thing that I would tell high school students, when you get that article that makes claims about [the Elmwood] teacher…the more a story touches your emotions, makes you angry, or the more it agrees with a position you have, automatically check to see what more you need to know about the source,” Geisler said.

For the majority of North students surveyed, their primary news source is social media. Seventy percent of the same 40 NNHS students said they receive most of their news from social media. The most used apps are TikTok (50%) and Instagram (22.5%). Senior Zach Wu says he feels students have been taught to be aware of possible bias in sources and media they consume.

“I think we've been taught from a pretty young age to be aware of the sources where we pull data from and just being aware that different sources may not always be presenting the truth from all angles…It’s definitely been encouraged to get a diversity of perspectives on different issues, knowing that different sources may lean different ways,” Wu said.

Results from the survey conducted by the North Star

Beyond an academic knowledge of bias, some NNHS students say they don’t care or notice when the media they consume may be biased. 73.7% of students surveyed said they know media they consume is often biased but are unconcerned (50%) or they do not know when media is biased but would like to know how to detect it (23.7%). This lack of attention could be due to the sheer amount of media students consume on a regular basis. Adelyn Mui, a senior at NNHS, says the amount of content on social media can be overwhelming and seemingly endless.

“Once I got a phone, I got Instagram and Tiktok and I feel like I fell into the rabbit hole of social media. I find myself just scrolling mindlessly every time I complete the littlest task,” Mui said.

Geisler adds that being conscious of social media algorithms and how content is filtered is also vital in recognizing bias and inaccuracy. Popular apps like Instagram, TikTok and Youtube all have algorithms meant to show a user more of what they want to see based on what they have liked, searched or shared. Geisler says that having a healthy media diet means being able to take a step back and consider if social media content is warping one’s perspectives.

“Unless you, as an individual, understand the need to have a healthy media diet, which means the minute I start to believe that there are too many things I’m seeing that I agree with, I just need to take a step back and say ‘Am I actually being manipulated?’” Geisler said.

Created By
Grace Aigner
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Bella Nordman