You may have been told that, but it’s impossible to do that.
A “non-bias” is automatically privileged towards the status quo. It creates default assumptions. Things we’ve been steeped in since childhood, through school, things we’re so familiar with we don’t even recognize it as bias.
Think about a common “neutral” reporting sentence. “The suspect was shot by police, while attempting to flee the scene.”
First, most glaringly, it’s accepting one account as fact. It’s painting the police in favorable terms by using their version. The injured (or dead) victim is assumed to have caused their own demise. The passive “was shot by” makes it seem like police were acted upon by “the suspect” and thus the shooting naturally occured. It takes the blame for the act of shooting away from the police and places it on the person who was shot.
Second, the choice of words: suspect? Suspected by who? The people who shot them and therefore need a justification for doing so? Fleeing the scene, or attempting to hide from / escape aggressive armed persons who showed up and started screaming at them? Maybe they were walking past, going to meet a friend. Maybe they are from a culture that doesn’t trust police, maybe for very good reason. Maybe they don’t speak English. But that sentence biases us towards thinking that they’re involved and must be a criminal, and didn’t follow police commands, and that they would have been fine if they had (spoiler alert, maybe they did, we’ve already established this is taking the police version at face value).
Further, what images came to your mind when you read? Did you see a man as the person who got shot? What about the police? What color were the respective players? All of those unconscious things effect even reporters and editors and their word choice. That’s why Trayvon Martin was no angel and Brock Turner was a bright young man and an athlete. That’s why you’ll get an intimidating photo or a mug shot of a black person but a grad photo of a white person. Entire histories of association and affinities for Nazi ideology were erased just this last summer to create the image of a pair of troubled young men who went on a murder spree across my country just this last summer.
“Unbiased” just means it plays to your conscious and unconscious defaults. It’s still a bias, you just can’t see it because you’re in the middle of it.
