Depp v. Heard

Media Bias Case Study #1

I’ve read many articles at this point with psychologists and domestic violence (DV) experts’ claims comprising the entirety of the story. This is the new ‘journalism’: introduce a currently trending situation with a few basic facts (repeated ad nauseum in other ‘articles’), and then interview one person and summarize/paraphrase their narrative with a neat conclusion.

Don’t mistake my criticism: experts are worthy sources for a perspective on many current events issues and their opinions should be given weight. Rarely are their opinions so compelling that they should be treated as news themselves, though, with no critical analysis or counterfactuals, and they shouldn’t be granted special status when speaking outside their area of expertise (for instance: clinical psychologists making simplistic claims about the collective reaction of millions of strangers to this case, despite having gathered no data or even, as far as I can tell, spoken to any of those people).

In the trial of Depp v. Heard there are literally only two sides, and while every person I’ve spoken to and thinker I respect seems to doubt the claims and motives of Ms. Heard, the news articles I’ve encountered disregard that popular reaction entirely, or, worse yet, try to malign it. About half of the articles I’ve encountered give absolutely no acknowledgement (much less analysis) of the damaging testimony about Ms. Heard or the damning discrepancies in her story.

Some of the narratives I’ve read in the past few days are:

1.)    The public reaction against Heard will make it harder and less likely for DV survivors to come forward. This makes some intuitive sense but if a professional says such a thing they should have some examples or statistics to support it. A professional can work with DV survivors for decades and still not know how a high profile defamation case involving allegations of DV will impact reporting of abuse. This message is repeated (often verbatim) as if it is more or less a certainty.

2.)    Heard critics are motivated by sexism, or men’s rights, or are part of a backlash against #MeToo. I’m not sure if the media actually believes their simplistic and moralistic narratives or if their inclusion of ‘Black Lives Matter’ (for example) every time a black person is killed or wounded by police (even when there’s no evidence of any racist intent by the officers and no protests connected to the event) is simply a strategy to promote their content in the online world of Boolean algorithms but it’s a flawed journalistic technique either way. By trying to force discrete events into neat moral framing devices (like the Depp-Heard trial into a global online women against the sexual abuse of women) they lose an opportunity to discuss the event as it is and succumb to a kind of analytical laziness, where the perpetrators and victims are already assumed and opposition to the ‘wronged’ parties must be invalidated.

3.)    Heard critics are motivated by celebrity infatuation and internalized misogyny. Journalists have struggled to explain or sidestep the fact that many-probably most-women (millions of them survivors of DV) are as critical of Amber Heard as anyone else. In an attempt to delegitimize support for Johnny Depp in this situation and buttress an a priori moral claim, journalists and experts write that trauma can make people confuse facts, and likeable people are less likely to be believed to be abusers, and there’s a narrative of a ‘perfect victim’ which is generally unrealistic and unfair to DV survivors. That all may be true, and it all may be irrelevant. To describe Heard’s testimony by citing research on trauma victims is rather besides the point when most people don’t actually believe that she’s been traumatized as she claims and expert testimony has diagnosed her with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and, effectively, malingering (intentionally faking symptoms). Similarly blind are the introductions of the likeable abuser and perfect victim archetypes. To apply these lenses to the trial is assuming that people don’t believe Heard because she’s not a perfect victim and that they believe Johnny because he’s an attractive celebrity. There is undoubtedly some misogyny and some celebrity-worship in the reaction to Heard’s and Depp’s stories, but I suspect the number of women who are so infatuated with Depp that they would disregard the credible claims of an accuser is fairly small relative to the numbers of Heard critics.

That really gets to the heart of the issue: mental health experts SHOULD be interviewed for information that could relate to the trial, but if they disregard the position of Depp and his lawyers (that Heard has personality disorders and is consciously manipulating the trial by exaggerating her own DV experience and minimizing her alleged role as the primary aggressor) a journalist should fill in those blanks. These are THEIR stories. Similarly, the opinions of millions of people shouldn’t be attributed to causes without some data. If I’d read EVEN ONE quoted Heard critic from the public on why they disbelieve her I would be somewhat placated, but instead psychologists and journalists simply paint their opposition to the actress as malign bias, because Johnny is a popular actor, or due to resentment towards women, or that is damaging to the real struggles of DV survivors across the United States. Really? None of the people I’ve spoken to and read are huge Johnny Depp fans, and many of them don’t seem particularly ignorant about the often flawed nature of DV victims or the effects of trauma.

They doubt (and I doubt) Amber Heard because she appears to be manipulative and deceptive and her testimonial discrepancies seem to cross the boundaries of what might be expected from a trauma survivor. They wonder if she’s vindictive and aggressive herself and there are many data points in support of those propositions. None of that is dealt with in these articles. Indeed, if you were reading them you wouldn’t even know they existed.

Why does this matter? The media is incredibly important in a democracy, and the reflexive moral biases of journalists should be minimized in their articles. We’ve seen a fissure between the discourse of professional journalists and the dialogue of mainstream Americans appear and widen to a chasm. Support of abortion rights or BLM or Amber Heard might seem self-evidently correct to many journalists but that bias shouldn’t preclude those journalists from examining these issues from all sides, or introducing uncomfortable facts, or fairly representing the motives and outlook of those on the other sides of these issues. People have largely already stopped paying attention to the work of these writers, and they should critically examine their stories and ask why that might be.