Week 1- Journal

Bias is a prominent topic and problem in modern journalism, especially political journalism. Everyone has different life experiences that cause us all to have conflicting opinions that can affect our writing. There are many elements of a person's background that can lead to bias. The way a person is raised in childhood and the type of people they were around can affect how they see the world. For instance, if a child's parents are politically conservative or religiously conservative, most of the time that child will also adopt those beliefs. Bias can also be caused by who the person is as far as race, class, gender and sexual orientation. A straight white male is likely to have different beliefs than someone who is female, African American or transgender, etc. Another element of one's background that can cause bias is life experiences. For example, a soldier who has been on the front lines of war is more likely to have strong opinions about government spending on military issues rather than someone who has never experienced war or even had a close relation to it. 

Personally, I am aware that I have many biases because I have lived my life fairly politically active and I feel strongly about a lot of issues. Because of this, when writing in journalism, I will have to work extra hard to be unbiased and fair. I grew up in a household where we didn’t talk about the government all that much but from the time I knew anything about politics I understood we were a liberal family. Even though I grew up liberal, I don’t think that has a lot to do with why I am so opinionated now. My parents were never really open about politics so I developed strong opinions from learning about government issues online. I became very politically active on social media and with my friends. I adopted these biases because I would see the opposing side to some political topics on the news and at school and I developed meaningful opinions about these topics on my own. Life experiences could make my biases stronger. I am an openly bisexual woman and I am lucky to have never been a victim of homophobia or bullying, but if something were to happen, I would gain a stronger bias toward fighting homophobia and LGBTQ rights in general. Similar events could happen and cause my stance on feminism to become stronger or any other topic for that matter. 

Gun control is a very important topic in today's political atmosphere. When it comes to my opinion on gun control, the first thing I think of is schools shootings. An insane amount school shootings happen every year in the United States and in the past few years when I was in high school this topic was probably what I was most politically active in. When the shooting happened in Parkland Florida in 2018 I was in my senior year of high school. I was in a group of about 10 kids who met with our AP government teacher and planned an 11 minutes of silence in our cafeteria during the school day, one minute for every student killed in Parkland. I went to march for our lives in Minneapolis later that year with a group of my friends and we marched through the streets of the cities to the state capital. In general, my opinion is on gun control is that there should be more government regulations that make it difficult to buy a gun. I think that the second amendment is a constitutional right and Americans should be allowed to have guns. But with this, the amendment was written a very long time ago and needs to have some regulations added to it. 

It is very important to keep biases out of one's writing unless purposely writing an opinion piece, most of all in journalism. Keeping biases out of writing and reporting prevents the reader from not knowing the true story. If a reader chooses to read a biased article, they only know what that writer thinks and not the facts of the situation with no biases. If this is done for large groups of people over and over again, it can cause false information to be spread. 

While writing in this class and after this class, I will try my best to keep my personal biases out of my writing about all topics. Specifically for gun control, in order to stay unbiased I would need to do research about all different stances and only write about the facts.