Well, don’t worry, we easily should be able to settle that question once and for all before this thread is done.
And yet the most famous unsubtly-politically-biased media organization in the US is immensely successful financially and ratings-wise, having enormous impact on the political landscape. It might be an exceptional case but it’s a helluva big one. Of course, by doing so it is also making a lot more money than it would otherwise; no one would argue that the political leanings trump the profit-making.
Fox saw an opportunity and took it. But this couldn’t be replicated on a widescale basis. I doubt if Murdoch micromanages Fox stories. He just hired a lot of conservatives. But as others have noted, conservatives in media are a tiny minority. So Murdoch is simply just concentrating more of them in one place (leaving the rest of the media that much more liberal).
You couldn’t do that on a broader basis. There simply aren’t enough conservative journalists to go around.
In addition, Fox’s claim to fame is being “fair and balanced”, i.e. not liberal. That can’t be the selling point for everyone.
“Democrat” and “Republican” describe allegiance to a party. Bill Clinton is a Democrat, because he professed membership in the Democratic Party.
“Liberal” and “conservative” in American parlance describe ill-defined political philosophies. Many people consider Clinton a liberal. Some people don’t.
As a major party in a two-party political system, the Democratic Party is a broad party. It has no ideological test for its members. Many members of the Democratic party are considered to have liberal or leftist leanings. Overall, the Democratic party tends to be more liberal than the Republican party.
I’m somewhat conservative.
I would say that the outlets themselves are not, but, certain individuals that represent those outlets certainly are. . . So, I don’t believe in an institutional liberal agenda with the media, but I do believe that certain producers, reporters, anchors, editors, have certain biases, and maybe on-balance, this produces an overall bias with some outlets.
So, no, but kinda yes.
But, I do believe that Fox News has an institutional bias that it justifies by pointing out the the non-institutional bias of other networks. But, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that.
Part of the reason there is perceived liberal bias is that journalists are generally expected to report facts.
If a journalist talks about global warming or evolution, that, to some wedge of our population, marks them as liberal.
I suspect it’s because of the huge amount of misinformation that the American right sees the world through, that people who report facts seem unfairly liberal to them. Look at Conservapedia, probably 20% of the country is in that sphere, and if those 20% see the media denying their stances over and over, of course they think it’s because the media is siding, in a partisan way, with the liberals.
The New York Times and the Washington Post are controlled by families.
Moreover, I’m not sure that the mere fact of corporate ownership is a political predictor in itself. If corporate managemant of a newspaper believed, for instance, that its readership leaned left (or right), it might reasonably decide that the profitable business strategy is to lean its coverage to the left (or right).
It might further decide that it would best please its readership by portraying their views (and its coverage) as the political center. Obviously, that gets harder to do as one moves farther out the political spectrum, but it’s possible for certain values of center-left and center-right.
You might want to read Bricker’s thread. The SDMB did not seem to be able to come up with any way to demonstrate that FoxNews was biased but the MSM was not.
Plus the fact that the success of FoxNews demonstrates my point. The existing MSM were biased to the left. The market for liberally-biased news and commentary, IOW, is well-served to the point of saturation. Along comes FoxNews, and it is an overwhelming success - because it found a largely untapped market. MSNBC comes along with about as much of a liberal agenda as Fox has a conservative one, and does not succeed nearly as much, and Air America goes even further in that direction and falls rather flat on its face.
Liberal media bias is one of those issues that tells you more about the people denying it than anything else. 60% of the American public sees media bias, and the overwhelming majority of those who do see liberal bias. Half of all independents (those who are neither Democrats nor Republicans) see liberal media bias. In no group does even a plurality see conservative media bias. (Cite.)
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, mere reporting of facts is rarely what happens, since that would be dull. For example, if one were to read only the fact of a shooting, it would be something like this:
“Two men were in an altercation at 51st and Elm around 10pm last night. One man shot the other, who was later pronounced dead at General Hospital. Police are investigating to determine motive.”
Instead, we often get something like this:
“Around 10pm last night, an African-American male and a white man were involved in an altercation at 51st and Elm, an area well-known for its minority population, low incomes and high crime. The black male pulled a gun and shot the caucasian, who was later pronounced dead at General Hospital. Police are investigating, but it is speculated that robbery was the motive.”
The first reads more like a police blotter and actually sticks to all of the facts that are relevant. The second implies and injects potential racial bias, class struggle, and hints at motivation. Though not necessarily liberally-biased, it does attempt to enflame emotions by making appeals to biases already present in individuals. Which of these two reports do you think we’re actually most likely to see?
Let’s not forget that those who are immersed in their own perceptions and in their own “echo chamber,” tend to be blind to their own biases, and aren’t as apt to check them when reporting, especially in a written story. This phenomenon has already been pointed out in previous posts.
All we can establish is this: whoever decides on what is newsworthy will, without question, impose their own taint on the news, by virtue of the fact that “newsworthy” is not an objective category. Right and left wings have both, at various times, politicized basically every activity, or perhaps I should say, have shown a willingness to view all activities in a political context. Then these same groups turn around and, having so politicized things, decry bias. This “feature” of otherwise muddy thinking could even serve the public interest by keeping a pressure from both fringes toward the center, but this is not the effect at this time.
Instead, the effect is the resounding call that “the media” is biased. But “the media” is not a monolithic entity. It is a profession. When people otherwise unrelated agree on issues, it is not “bias” it is “consensus.” This is why the charge is usually one of hypocrisy: it’s bias only when you disagree.
Part of the motivation behind this sophistry is that the parties in question don’t want journalism to be a profession, they want them to be copying machines. Phrases like, “just report the facts and let me decide” picture a world that doesn’t exist. There are only 24 hours in a day and 6+ billion “24 hours” worth of facts. There are a finite number of journalists and they must be sent to a number of places which is necessarily smaller than “everywhere.” They therefore must have some selection process by which to decide which facts to exclude and which to admit, both in sorting all the material collected and in deciding where to go to get facts. There is therefore no way at all, even in principle, period, to “just report the facts and let [the viewer] decide.”
This expectation is further compounded by the fact that, in a fair and balanced world, with some political center of mass, we expect that the standard deviation in political opinion is not zero. For instance, anyone more than one standard deviation from the political mean, which is like 30% of the entire world, would perceive a bias in any centrist, trying-as-hard-as-we-can-to-be-fair report. So even if we disregarded all the foregoing and insisted that nevertheless, journalists could try real hard and by the grace of god and a long-handled spoon be unbiased, they’d still look biased to a significant portion of the population.
But we know journalists can’t do that, and they’re not just copying machines. They are real people and have real interests and for whatever reason they think journalism satisfies those interests to a reasonable enough degree that they will take it on as a job. What they have in common is not that they conspired to turn the media in a direction; what we see—if we do, in fact, see what is claimed, which I am skeptical of—is that journalism attracts a certain political mindset. And I’ve only ever heard insulting “reasons” for this rather than any analysis which tried to explain the purported fact of bias.
As I mentioned many times before, one has to take into account what the liberals consider “their” news: once Fox appeared in the scene, conservatives considered it the “fair and balanced” news: in other words “their news” I have seen both the irrational and reasonable liberal groups out there and many liberals don’t consider outfits like CNN “their” news, I do consider the network news (except Fox) more balanced overall, but the whitewash of many items (e.g. news regarding the conglomeration and weakening of rules so the mainstream media outlets get bigger and less diverse) makes them IMO more in favor of the conservative side. Nowadays I can see that there is more liberal content on MSNBC but that is just one cable outlet.
Elsewhere, no matter how liberal reporters or owners can be, they cannot show that position for long:
From the book: Witness to a century- By George Seldes: In the "Spain broke the heart of the world.” chapter:
J.David Stern was the owner of the New York Post. In a conversation, George Seldes mentioned that Stern was a liberal, and that liberalism was not being reflected at all in the obvious conservative slant that the news from the Spanish civil war were getting. Stern replied:
“What do you want me to do, take a quixotic stand, print the truth about everything including bad medicine, impure food and crooked stock market offerings, and lose all my advertising contracts and go out of business- or make compromises with all the evil elements and continue to publish the best liberal newspaper possible under these compromising circumstances?”
Amazingly, that was in 1936, and it looks like things have not changed much:
In a recent Charlie Rose interview in PBS, circa 2002. The New York Times knew that Enron’s economic models were bananas and Enron was likely not a good investment or a failure to come.
The Times economic reporter had this commentary, on why they did not report much of that conclusion:
Because “Other things came up!”
Charlie Rose, by not making any follow up questions to that whitewash of an answer just completed the picture, media that depends on corporation revenue will have many inconvenient points of view not covered much if at all.
Assuming your numbers to be accurate: if the truth or falsity of a thing depends on how many Americans believe it, then we can safely conclude that the theory of evolution is false, ESP and ghosts probably exist, and the jury is definitely still out on whether Saddam Hussein perpetrated the attacks on 9/11.
Interestingly, each of these sets of characterizations happens to be completely and entirely true, of roughly half the population.
I’ve read it, and of course one can find evidence of bias in the MSM as well. Anything humans are involved in will demonstrate some bias. The problem is of degree. If one person scuffs mud on your shoes and another pumps the contents of his septic tank into your bedroom while you’re sleeping, both have gotten you dirty but the offense is not the same.
Yes! The half that doesn’t agree with me!
I prefer the term “Godless heathen”.
It’s possible that **Shodan **believes some of those things, or at least that he will profess to if he thinks it will annoy liberals to think he does–what you need to do to 'splain it to him is to argue that in Pakistan, by popular belief, Americans ARE actually evil warmongers, or in France that ladies should NOT shave their armpits. Such notions may offend us, but since a majority in certain locations vociferously believe these notions to be true, they ARE true, at least by Shodan’s logic, to employ an oxymoron.
What you guys are saying is essentially “it’s not bias because we’re right”. Which is pointless.
Shodan’s perspective (& mine) is that media bias is determined by measuring the presentation of the media against the opinions of the US public at large. This is not a judgment that the public at large has correct opinions, but simply a way of measuring bias. This is simply what “bias” means when talking about media bias.
So saying something that is factually true is bias if you’re a journalist?
Opinions and facts aren’t the same thing. “I like chocolate” is an opinion, “Iraq wasn’t involved in 911” is a fact. If plenty of people think it’s wrong, that doesn’t make it media bias if someone reports it as fact.
From the perspective of people who consider it a settled fact, it’s not bias. From the perspective of people who consider it subject to debate (even if they have their own opinion) it’s bias.
A lot of die-hard close-minded liberals consider their liberal dogma to be settled fact. But a lot of other people don’t. From the latter perspective, whether the media presents a version of the world that adheres closer to the liberal worldview than that of the average American is of some interest.
I’m not interested in arguing with die-hard close-minded liberals about this. I am interested in pointing out to others what these DHCML mean when they deny that the media has a liberal bias.
This sort of thing came up in the Bricker thread as well. There doesn’t seem to be any standard of evidence that the left will accept in order to see what they don’t want to see.
Everyone else can see it - doesn’t count. Scholarly studies - doesn’t count. Insiders testifying as to bias - doesn’t count. Anecdotes and examples galore - nope, not there, doesn’t count, can’t hear you.
:shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan