You may never have heard of Straight Arrow News, but you have undoubtedly heard of media bias, and you certainly have heard of the storybook hero Robin Hood. The “King of Outlaws and prince of good fellows!” was known for his marksmanship with the longbow – his precise shot that was sure to whistle straight into the heart of the target. Straight Arrow News aims to hit an unbiased center while still providing engaging coverage, a journalistic trait that is hard to find today. But do most media outlets shoot straight without taking “left” or “right” turns? Many are more like “echo chambers,” as an environment where individuals can eagerly consume content reinforcing their own inflexible opinions. Mainstream media has practiced this type of “playing to a captive audience” for ages, dating back to the years of the American Revolution.
As British troops occupied the American colonies in 1770, an incident occurred that resulted in a handful of colonists’ deaths. The American newspapers were quick to label the incident as a massacre. According to Merriam Webster, a massacre is “an act of killing a number of helpless…human beings under circumstances of…cruelty.”
The British insisted that the Americans were taunting them, throwing rocks and chunks of ice at them. They argued that they fired at the colonists out of self-defense rather than a desire to eliminate their enemies. From the viewpoint of the American media, it was a deadly massacre, yet the British insisted they acted for their own safety rather than out of hatred. Who could have known that hundreds of years later, our generation would be witness to commonplace “character assassination” on Facebook news feeds? The metaverse allows us to surround ourselves with what gratifies us and lets us saturate our environment with affirmations that we are 100 percent right, regardless of the evidence.
The fact is, bias is a part of human nature, as well as a way to see our own views confirmed, promoted, and acted upon. We have a bias, or rather an opinion on everything from the best restaurant to who should be president. And those views matter! God created everyone to be unique, have different preferences, and agree with others. Our views define who we are, and that is a good thing. But we must realize that news outlets also employ biased humans who have their own viewpoints, and use science and advanced marketing technologies to promote them. We must be careful as to what we choose to trust, and not naively accept every news source as reliable.
The Bible offers good counsel in Jeremiah 17:9 – “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
While we exist in this broken world, nothing can be perfect, and that includes news reports and heroes like Robin Hood.
Legend holds that our champion Robin Hood was full of bravery and goodness. But he was human, a man who unrepentantly stole from Norman lords and plundered the homes of those he could not agree with. The romantic in us chooses to see the glory of the antihero and ignore the common thief. If we take a moment to drop our bias, we realize that even the story of the do-gooding warrior who shot straight arrows is not an impartial one.