10 Sports Biases You Need To Know: Bias Against Bias

In an attempt to more fully understand the nature of covering sports in an accurate and informative way, the BSN Denver Rockies staff has been pouring over all kinds of argumentative pieces over the last few weeks in order to try to highlight some of the gaps that most commonly arise.

There are all kinds of fallacies and biases that exist in these arguments and the point of this list is not to denigrate anyone or to separate ourselves from the criticism herein. The goal here is to make sure we are recognizing the flaws in logic and consistency that occur on all sides of all debates while filtering that through our experiences covering the Colorado Rockies.

Many of the 10 Deadly Biases are well known to most of us. When you use the word “homer” around a sports fan, they don’t first think of an ancient Greek poet or an indelible cartoon character. But there are numerous (apparently nine) forms of bias in sports coverage that are just as insidious and just as common.

Bias against Bias

Explaining the nature of this particular bias is a nice exercise in keeping this entire list in proper perspective. That is to say that there is an important difference between a logical fallacy and a bias. A fallacy leads to an invalid conclusion but a bias does not necessarily.

Therefore, accusing someone of an opposing view of having a bias does not mean that you’ve now won the argument, even if the bias can be proven. If you are a lawyer, and your mother has been accused of a crime she did not commit, you can argue her case and legally win, making you both biased and correct on the facts at the same time.

What is more often the case, however, is that the bias is assumed through the reverse logic that the opponent could never reach the conclusion they have without having been biased in the first place. In other words, the lawyer is defending his mother only because she is his mother. Doing this without any evidence to support the claim results, ironically, in a logical fallacy.

So, for example, when we at BSN Denver publish a glowing report of Raimel Tapia, it is absolutely within the bounds of fairness to ask whether it arose from some kind of homerism, since I have a long history with that particular player. But dismissing any claims in the report based on that, without taking each argument on its own merits, is direct ad hominem.

A bias against biases results when a person shuts down the conversation at the first sign that there might possibly be something other than pure objective fact driving their opponent’s arguments. Unless, of course, you hate pure objective facts and prefer gut feelings, in which case the opposite is true.

As we go through this list more we will continue to see types of bias that affect all manner of conversations, and with each of them comes the potential pitfall of thinking that they render one incapable of objectivity. Placing the label of a particular bias on someone does not absolve us from having to make the superior argument.

Furthermore, it’s impossible to truly know what lies in another person’s head, and suggesting you know better than them lends to the futility of trying to prove the unprovable. This is especially frustrating because the answer to the unanswerable question of what is really going on inside a human mind at any given time would remain irrelevant. Pardon the cliché, but the proof is in the pudding.

If a person truly has such a pronounced bias that it is worth bringing into the conversation, then surely, the argument they are making shouldn’t hold up. The argument should be bad enough that proving it false based on relevant facts and evidence, rather than pointing out the intentions of the opposition, would be both far easier and much more productive.

If, however, a clear and pronounced bias exists but does not create a weak argument, we still ought to condemn it based on the argument itself and not the source of it. Remembering our analogy from before, the lawyer defending his mother was still right, proving he was bias accomplishes nothing.

On a final note, it is common for those who make this mistake – showing their opponent to have a bias and thinking they’ve won the argument – to respond to the defense that no such bias exists by claiming that “everyone” is bias. This feels intuitively true, though is of course, impossible to prove.

But if it is true, there is no reason to point this out. Everyone being bias puts us right back at square one looking for the proof in the pudding. But if you refuse to even look at the pudding because the person who made it did so with biased intent, then you are the one refusing to engage the topic in good faith.