For those unaware, or perhaps all too aware if you’ve picked up most any copy of the Wheel in the past year, my chief profession is as a film critic and, as of late, we film critics seem to have gotten quite a bit of negative attention from certain fan-based corners of the internet, mostly thanks to a recent blockbuster film that I pledge will go unnamed throughout this piece.
But the aforementioned recent blockbuster displayed a rather wide disparity between the audience and critical reactions, and that disparity seemed to inspire all manner of reaction. Dispensing first with the ridiculous notion that critics were paid off by rival companies to hate it, because critics are rarely paid for anything by anyone, this still lets us see plenty of accusations of bias. That critics are actively furthering a conspiracy against said blockbuster to say bad things about it is a little ridiculous.
What specifically disturbs me is that a group of critics are being accused of holding biases — in a negative way. Critics are being told they’re biased against a company or a director or a property, and I feel the urge to make a statement that I thought was obvious:
It’s absolutely okay for a critic to be biased.
Really. It is. Let’s remove the stigma from that word by understanding the actual implications of what it means to be biased.
First, we must understand what bias is fundamentally. Bias, as the word is often used, seems to be a pejorative against the idea of having some partiality towards one idea or another. If it’s clear that, as just one example, I as a film critic have never liked the work of Tom Hooper (the overrated hack that brought us Les Miserables and The Danish Girl), then it’s very unlikely I’m going to come into any of his films with any particular warmth, and I could therefore be said to hold bias against him and his œuvre.
This natural tendency enters into every form of writing that requires someone to share their personal experiences in not-so-insidious ways. A food critic’s hatred of fried foods means that he or she is much less likely to get along all that well with Guy Fieri. A liberal political commentator is much less likely to give a positive spin on something the Republican Party did. It’s the subjectivity of experience that makes giving those opinions valuable it’s getting a chance to see the reflection of someone’s internal thoughts.
The key word in all this is subjectivity. When we think about journalism, we should think about it in terms of both objective and subjective journalism. What I’ve mostly discussed until now is subjective journalism, or a presentation of the world influenced by the person who is presenting, filtered through their lifestyle, philosophy or experiences. Objective journalism is that of which we think when we discuss things like news coverage; it is a presentation of factual information uninfluenced by personal thought or desire to the best of that writer’s ability.
Now you’re starting to get the idea. When we’re presenting some unique experience, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with presenting it through your own filter because that’s just how it works. Of course a review is biased — reviews by their very nature are biased. An unbiased review is a listing of facts about something, and who the hell wants to read that?
As humans, understand that subjectivity and bias is our default state. Bias is part of what makes us special, that we have a unique experience of the world that we understand. Objectivity is something that we have to strive towards, and isn’t even fully possible in our most objective moments.
Objective reporting is certainly a reporter’s goal, but understand that the simple act of choosing to report on a story or even the facts that you include in a story is subjective or biased. What we deem important is just as much a biased choice as what we personally think about something.
So, how do we reconcile that notion? We believe that there should be some form of objectivity in the way people present things to us, so that we can decide the validity for ourselves. But if there is no way to ever truly be objective, how can someone reconcile that fundamental fact of life?
By getting over it.
Bias is immensely vital to our experience of the world, and understanding bias is understanding that world. We shouldn’t try to stop it, because we can never really get rid of it. As long as we are human, we are biased.
Brandon Wagner is a College senior from Huntsville, Alabama
