Last week, Emily Bush, our instructional librarian, was giving a presentation to a philosophy class. She was showing  a database that provided opposing viewpoints on various topics. A student raised his hand and asked, “Aren’t those biased sources?” He wanted sources that were unbiased.

And that, my friends, is the problem at hand. Is there such a creature as a totally unbiased source?

Let me be clear on the front end that I am being biased when I answer the question. And to me, the answer is no. I grant that there are facts that can be proven or disproven. For example, George Washington was the first president of the United States is a factual statement, and I would agree that there is no bias in that statement. But most would also agree that as a piece of common knowledge, it is not terribly useful as a source. Very few papers would ever try to prove that George Washington was not the first president.

But when looking at sources that defend or contradict controversial topics, there will always be some bias.

Think about the subtle ways that we are biased towards certain things each day. You may think that a newspaper is an unbiased source of information. But there are decisions that are made every day about what goes into a newspaper. Who decides that the story that gets the biggest headline is the most important news of that day? Who decides what news gets placed in the paper and what gets left out? How does a reporter decide that he/she has interviewed enough people and gotten enough background information?

Perhaps, you’re thinking that you’ll just spend time on facts and statistics, but we all look at statistics in different ways. Just think of the news commentators: Both liberal and conservative pundits have the same facts available to them. But the conclusions they draw are worlds apart.

The safest thing to do is to assume that you will be confronted with biased information. (One problem may be that we’ve been trained to think that bias is bad. It may be more useful to think of it as inevitable.) Then use your critical thinking skills to analyze and evaluate the source.