ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand what habits of thought are and how they affect a journalist’s work and explains the difference between cognitive bias and media bias. The habits of thought generally fall into two categories: cognitive biases and mental frameworks. Cognitive biases, and cognitive errors, are the errors and distortions in human thinking that can occur automatically, meaning spontaneously and involuntarily, and without conscious intention to distort. Knowing how the mind works and what can be done to control the cognitive biases that most impact journalism can help news people produce more inclusive coverage. The mental frameworks describe the perspective from which a person views the world and his or her viewpoint on what is normal or accepted practice and behavior. The goal of metacognition with the practice of journalism in mind requires installing mental filters that help scrub stories of distortions and accentuate truth-telling.
