I have been taught to identify bias in sources, and the natural conclusion is that a biased source is unreliable and should be discounted. But almost every source I have is biased in some direction.
If I discard them all I have nothing left. How is bias supposed to be handled instead?
Accepted Answer
Bias changes what a source is evidence for. It does not remove the evidence.
A government pamphlet defending a policy is poor evidence that the policy worked. It is excellent evidence for what the government thought needed defending, which arguments it expected to land, and what it assumed its readers believed.
So the question is never "is this source biased", since the answer is always yes. It is "given who wrote this, for whom, and why, what can it establish".
That reframing is what marks well. Dismissing a source for bias reads as a box being ticked. Using its bias to extract something is the actual skill.
One thing to unlearn from school level teaching: the idea that primary sources are reliable and secondary sources are interpretation.
A primary source is closer to the event, not closer to the truth. An eyewitness may be mistaken, partial, or writing decades later. A careful historian with access to twenty accounts may well be more reliable about what happened.
Primary and secondary describe distance from the event. They do not rank trustworthiness, and treating them as if they do produces essays that trust a diary over a monograph for no stated reason.
Also useful: unintentional evidence. A source is least guarded about the things it assumes rather than argues. A letter arguing about grain prices tells you what the writer took for granted about markets, and that part is not being performed.
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