Media professionals and journalists rightfully recoil at the term “fake news,” which is pejorative and unhelpful. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an honest discussion about media bias, which we all know is real and can be measured.
When I founded Ad Fontes Media and started tracking bias five years ago, I found the more biased the media, the more likely the media to be non-fact-based and unreliable—in practical terms, the more likely it is to slap a headline on a “story” that is nothing more than bashing or praising of a Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet.
But Madison Avenue also played a huge role in creating this world when it launched an industry around the concept of brand safety within the last decade.
The rationale for it made sense at the time: As advertising moved online and was increasingly bought indirectly through tech platforms, marketers wanted assurances that their ads would not appear next to broadly defined “inappropriate” content. But in practice, brand safety has been implemented by the blunt force tool of keyword-blocking news topics, which effectively leads many advertisers out of the news category altogether.
An estimated 80% of brand ad dollars have left news over a 20-year period leading up to the pandemic, and 28% of newsroom jobs have vanished since 2008, according to the Pew Research Center. Much of that shift away from news coincided with the rise of Facebook and Google.
Ad dollars leaving news, combined with distribution through Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms, forced the media to increasingly chase more scarce revenue with more partisan headlines that appealed to emotion and outrage. It didn’t help that on Facebook, articles were stripped of context and pretty much looked the same, making it more difficult to discern quality news from the partisan sites that today manufacture and perpetuate controversy after controversy.
Brands have been trained to believe that news is inherently risky—that their ads next to bad news or controversial topics are somehow the biggest threat to brand safety. But that’s simply false: Real news is actually an opportunity for brands. What’s risky is extreme partisanship.
