Source Bias

Source bias is the tendency to select information sources that reinforce a person's existing confirmation bias or negativity bias about a given belief or value, a pattern that plays a significant role in building the echo chambers found across modern media. In journalism specifically, source bias shapes reporting through the choice of which people to interview and through how facts are framed and arranged to steer an audience toward a particular conclusion. Because a genuinely unbiased source is rare, evaluating a source for bias involves watching for specific warning signs: opinionated language, unsupported claims, selectively presented facts meant to guide the reader toward a conclusion, inflammatory phrasing, an unidentified or uncredible author, and advertising disguised as ordinary content; primary historical sources written by eyewitnesses often show especially strong perspective for the same reason. A source that shows excessive positivity while leaving out negative information, or the reverse, that fails to acknowledge facts it should reasonably know, or that includes information demonstrably false, is treated as biased under this framework.