Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Mike Smith: With me today is Kathy Privrat, executive director of StudentNewsDaily.com. Kathy, how can parents teach their children to identify and compensate for bias in the news?

Kathy Privrat: This is an important issue, Mike. First, parents should make their kids aware that media bias exists and teach them to recognize the different types of bias. Media bias comes in several different forms. Brent Baker's book on identifying media bias provides definitions. (We post an excerpt of it on the website.)

One type of bias is "spin." To check if a news report is spin, parents should notice which interpretation of an issue the news story matches—the liberal or the conservative. If a story reflects one to the exclusion of the other, then you've found bias by spin.

And for other types of bias and their definitions, parents can go to StudentNewsDaily to our "Wednesday's Biased Item." In this category, we post an example of media bias each week from different media watchdog groups, along with a question asking the student to identify the type of bias.

And finally, the way to compensate for media bias is to use sources from both the right and the left.

Mike: Those are great suggestions, Kathy. And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.