Readers' daily viewing habits can shape the news that they see, as well as their perceived bias the news they encounter.

Newspapers around the world mourn
attacks in Paris. Source: ABC

More American adults than ever before get their news from social media, in part because they don't trust the news they receive from traditional mass media outlets.  But checking your feed instead of the morning paper can make for a less informed society, and one that perpetuates the problems it sees with mainstream information sources.


Take, for example, the heartbreaking attacks in Paris earlier this fall. Terror attacks that killed more than 120 people on Nov. 13 shocked the world and unleashed an outpouring of grief, support and anger that flooded both traditional and social media outlets.

News stations such as CNN canceled programming to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the tragic events and the following manhunt for the ISIL affiliated-militants responsible.  Record numbers of viewers tuned in, followed tweets, and legions of Facebook users painting their profiles with the French flag.

But the more media outlets covered the Paris attacks, globally conscious readers began to question why the same stations and websites ignored a bombing that killed more than 40 in Beirut the day before and an attack that claimed the lives of 32 in Nigeria just days after.

Courtesy of Twitter.  This photo is
of a 2006 explosion in Iraq. 

The short answer is they didn't.

In an age where more news is increasingly shared over social media, many readers only see the news that crosses their feeds.  As some stories go viral while others remain on website pages, this can create the illusion of biased news coverage.

Many of the readers and viewers who protested the devaluation of minority lives with tweets criticizing media coverage may not understand how their own readership habits, known as metrics to news editors, shape both the news they see and the stories news outlets are willing to cover.


Readers and viewers, especially young adults, get more of their news from social networking sites than any other medium. 

If you're between the ages of 18 and 24, you were probably surfing through social media when you found out about the terror attacks in Paris, or the rallies on your college campus, or even who won the World Series.

Source: Pew Research Center

This study from the Pew Research Center describes in detail how social networking sites, specifically Facebook and Twitter, have developed a second role as primary news sources for American adults.
About 64% of U.S. adults are on Facebook, the study found, and of that group more than 30% get news from the site regularly.

Given that Facebook in particular is such a large driver of online news traffic, the breakdown of what types of news users view on the site is especially important.

After analyzing which links users clicked on on their profiles, the Center found that 73 percent of users viewed content about entertainment while only 39 percent viewed stories about international news - the category that would refer to all three of the previously mentioned attacks unless the user's friends shared the information as a post.

This finding is important, because it shows that stories about the attacks in Beirut or Nigeria may have been available on social media but users didn't see them.

Monica Sheffo, a junior public relations major at Towson University, said that she frequently gets her news from Facebook, although she also likes to read hard copies of papers when she can.

Sheffo said that while social sites are good for keeping up with local news, they lack varied coverage of international news, something that she feels all news outlets struggle to do well.

Sheffo isn't alone in feeling that mass media outlets are unable to report issues of public importance fairly and accurately.

A Gallup Poll from September 2015 found that only 40 percent of American adults trust the media "a great deal or a fair amount." The remaining 60 percent of respondents said that they have "little to no trust in the mass media," a record low within the last 20 years that Gallup has conducted the survey.  To be fair, the national high for media trust was only ever at 55 percent, but dropping beneath a majority of readers and viewers is certainly alarming, especially considering that young adults are responded least favorably to traditional news.


That statistics of what people read and watched, called metrics, help news editors make decisions on what to cover. 

It's no secret that budgets for media outlets are on a decline that seems to have no end.  Owners and editors across the country are making increasingly tough decisions about which stories to cover, where to send their reporters, and how much of a monetary loss they're willing to bear to bring diverse news to consumers.

To make these decisions, analysts at news websites track the number of views stories receive, the average time readers spend on a story, and how far down into the story a reader goes, among several other metrics.  These statistics provide concrete proof of what content readers truly connect with, regardless of what they say in surveys.

James Hill, digital strategist for TV One and former producer for BET.com, said that teams at both networks use social media metrics to give viewers more of the content they're looking for.

Facebook provides similar tools to its business users, which include news outlets with their own pages (separate from people sharing individual stories).  This guide from Facebook explains an update to the program that businesses like CNN or The Washington Post use to track the popularity of their stories on the site, and is another good example of a slightly different kind of metrics.

Facebook also uses its metrics to make its own decisions as to what posts and news it shows its users. A set of algorithms on the site analyze the posts and links that users click on and spend time viewing, and use this information to predict other posts they think they'll enjoy.  Much of this is based on "likes," as this article from The Independent explains.

News organizations must prove readership to stay in business, so they heavily promote content that they know consumers will read and view. 

As both an editorial strategist and content producer, Hill has seen first hand the pressure that metrics can put on a news channel to change direction, whether it be for better or worse.  He gave the example of Fatal Attraction, a TV show that TV One tried to promote using Facebook.  While large numbers of viewers tuned in regularly to watch the show, they didn't respond favorable to social media posts.  He also said that social media in particular has had a significant effect on what news organizations choose to cover. 

"Everything that hits a website, news or entertainment, doesn't migrate well to social media," he said. "When you're a media company on social media you'e intruding on people ... and the only way to not be an intruder is to give people what they like." 

Many times these adjustments aren't harmful to public knowledge, but other times news outlets end up telling people only what they want to hear or risk going out of business, he added. 

"You can continue to scream down the hallway if you don't care who's listening," he said. But this is a luxury only guaranteed to the largest of news companies.  

Data from Facebook Pages

After the Lebanon, Paris and Nigeria terrorist attacks, major news outlets published significantly more tweets and posts about the attacks in Paris than the other two combined.  

Facebook in particular deletes unpopular posts as time goes on, so the graph to the right shows the most popular posts from each of three major news networks during the week of the attacks (Wednesday to Tuesday).  As the bar graph shows, no posts about the attacks in Lebanon and Nigeria drew enough likes and shares to remain on the site after a few days. 

Consumers who want to see more, varied international news have several options, mainly reading more international news. 

While there are certainly varying opinions as to how to break the intellectually damaging cycle caused by a struggling, for-profit media,  commenting over social media is only one way that readers can work to reduce media bias.

Readers who want to see more international news on their Facebook and Twitter feeds can start by sharing stories that they think are important and "liking" pieces that they feel are well written and fair.

Letters to the editor are often reserved for an older generation, but a strong way to make a statement is to call or email an editor to praise a good story or period of coverage or ask for more content on a specific area.  In an age where most interactions with readers come packaged as analytics, a human voice attached to an opinion means a lot.

Modern news is in no way innocent of biased coverage, which stems from years of normalizing war and poverty in the developing world while decrying the same problems in first-world countries. But as consumers we should think carefully about the role our own behavior plays, and vote with our views, likes and ultimately dollars to get more of the product we think we should see.