Victim of Culture

Lying to ourselves: the truth about bias in reviews

Fox News is biased, right?  NPR?  Sure.  Wall Street Journal?  Okay.  The Huffington Post?  Obviously.  So, what isn’t biased?  Of course, this answer varies from person to person, because there are plenty who think the above aren’t biased.  Why?  Because they agree with them.  But cries of bias filter into everything we see these days.

Over the past two days I published my yearly E3 press conference reviews for the big three console manufacturers.  Every year I get cries of bias, and this despite the fact that I rate the conferences differently each year.  For example, this year the grades went Microsoft (B+), Nintendo (B), and Sony (B-).  Last year, the grades went Microsoft (B-), Nintendo (C-), and Sony (B).  A pretty good reshuffling of high to low, right?  Yet I still got comments about my personal bias for or against one particular console.  Isn’t it possible that I just felt that way?

Grading, whether you ever realized it or not in school, is a highly subjective task.  If a student writes a paper I can evaluate it to some degree on if they have included all the required sections, count up the number of grammatical errors, etc.  But at some point I have to evaluate the content itself and that becomes largely subjective.  I am judging them based on how well they explained their point and present an understanding of the material.  They’re doing their best to convey these two things through the written word, which is subject to a number of factors not least of all being personal style.

Media, such as video games, are also subject to such subjectivity.  For example, I am a huge fan of Roger Ebert.  His writing on film is some of the best I’ve ever read, and his reviews are so much more eloquent than the average dreg you read online.  That being said, I often disagree with him.  Most recently, I disagreed with his review of Night At the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.  He didn’t care for the film, while I found it to be quite fun and enjoyable.  This put me at odds with many film critics who agreed with Ebert and hated the film.  Fair enough.

A few weeks earlier, however, I had very much sided with Ebert on his review of Star Trek.  I found the new film to be mindlessly entertaining to a degree, but a let down overall.  This put us both at odds with most critics.  It would be easy for me to label Ebert as biased against Ben Stiller or Amy Adams, but then he also loves many of their films.  It would be easy for me to cry bias against the nation’s film critics when I’m in the minority, but what about when I’m in the majority?  I loved Pixar’s Up.

Bias is the fallback cry of anyone who doesn’t get their way.  It gets hurled against The New York Times, which at times is indeed biased, but also one of the best papers in the country.  Far more often than not the cries of bias against it are people who simply disagree with the facts presented.  Do a piece covering Obama’s achievements in his first few months in office and you’ll get conservatives screaming liberal media bias!  And they’re right at times, but far more often they’re wrong.  Same for liberals.

The truth is that I have no particular allegiance to any console or any corporate brand.  Why would I?  None of them pay me and I enjoy games for all systems.  Do particular biases exist within me?  Sure.  I like certain game types more than others.  For that reason certain franchises excite me more than others.  We use to call that a preference, but now we disparage it as a bias.  It’s really playing a game of semantics, and that’s a game we all lose for playing.

The next time you read a review you disagree with, just consider for a moment that the person may simply have different preferences.  Those preferences are not inherently wrong or right, but the person’s preferences will very much come into stark contrast with your own at some point.  If that weren’t the case, we would only need one media reviewer and then what would Gene Shalit do?

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