It seems to me that a lot of conservatives in the USA have the belief that the mainstream media is biased against Republicans and conservatives or biased for Democrats and liberals. Which media it is exactly that is considered both mainstream and biased against conservatives? When I think about the mainstream media I think of these outlets. For newspapers I think about papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. For television I think about ABC, NBC, and CBS. There’s also CNN. None of these media outlets seems to me to have a bias for or against either party. Do I just have the wrong idea of what media the mainstream media is, or do the organizations I mentioned have a bias that I don’t recognize?
I think that what is really going is that some conservatives can’t wrap their heads around the idea that the country is no longer as conservative as it used to be. They perceive this as the mainstream media being against them, when the reality is that the country as a whole has moved to the left, and they refuse to acknowledge that. What do you all think?
The farther right you are, the more media outlets will be to the left of your viewpoint and thus seen as liberal even if they’re in the middle in reality.
You’re probably a moderate liberal, in which case you don’t see bias because the media mirrors your perception of reality. You need to check your privilege and view the media through the lens of political minorities, such as the far left and far right, to see the implicit bias of the hegemonic media in America.
I certainly think most mainstream media outlets in the Anglo-sphere have a historical liberal bent. Whether or not this transfers to a bias for or against political parties is a more complicated matter. From memory the NY Times has not endorsed a Republican for President since the days of Eisenhower. The Washington Post presidential endorsements I have just googled. Wapo has never endorsed a Republican for President since it regularly started endorsing candidates in 1976.
Modern conservative thinking is categorical, tending towards dichotomous. “If you ain’t fer us, you’re agin us.”
Look at the turnoil in the US House of Representatives, for evidence. The teabagger causus is willing to ruin their party and our country out of sheer ideological purity. It’s also why there are no more moderate Republican politicians.
Thus, any media outlet that isn’t saying exactly what they want to hear - an ideologically pure message, regardless of evidence, reality or truth - will be considered indicative of the dichotomous alternative, e.g. “liberal.”
Until people with moderate conservative leanings either knock some fucking sense into their loonies or leave the loonies to drown in their own crazy, little will change.
“Mainstream media” is whatever you want it to be, unfortunately. When 80% of the population disagrees with you and you have no evidence with which to rebut them, the problem is clearly a bias in the media.
I do agree with Construct’s point that people in the media industry tend to be liberal. There are far more journalism students out to stick it to the man and change society than there are hoping to uphold blue chip stocks and promote their parent’s values. But there’s no widespread conspiracy to twist the information to fit a particular view point… it’s just Fox doing that. (I’m a Republican myself, but two hours of watching Fox is enough to make me reconsider that.)
AFAIK Nixon did play the doves like the editors of the American newspapers. He communicated with them or met with them and gave them the impression to many of the doves that Nixon had a plan to take us out from Vietnam. With that “secret” plan the press then made less efforts to take the warmongers, even the president, to task for wanting to continue the war in his second term.
They found that they were had and when Watergate happened they found that Nixon was indeed a crook. The press also got a refresher course on they being manipulated again from guys like Dick Cheney (who also worked for Nixon!) before, during and after the Iraq war. It is not strange to me that a lot of what the right sees as bias is just a reaction of the press reacting to the many times were keeping the idea of “being fair to both sides” is unfair to reality and the facts.
An then one has to remember that the bottom line is that no matter how liberal an owner or reporters are they have limits in the corporate press for them to show a preference for liberal causes. (Until a disaster happens and then what I mentioned about “being fair to both sides” position cannot be maintained. It is a charade they have to keep even if there is evidence or even science that is against the conservative talking points.)
A classic example comes from J.David Stern, the owner of the then “liberal” New York Post in the 1930’s. In a conversation, reporter George Seldes pointed to Stern that he was a liberal, and that his 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?” -Witness to a Century- By George Seldes in the "Spain broke the heart of the world.” chapter.
Amazingly, that was in 1936, and it looks like things have not changed much.
Except that the New York Post now spews more right wing propaganda with very little counter points thanks to owners that do not need to be fair, like Rupert Murdoch.
I think that if the vast majority of journalists self-identified as right-of-center Republicans, this board’s perception as to media bias would be very different.
I think most journalists genuinely strive for objectivity, but it’s often the case that they have little personal or professional interaction with conservatives, and so their writing can feel biased to those on the right because it feels like they’re being presented as aliens.
Objectivity can also manifest itself differently when interacting with different parts of the political spectrum. NPR, for instance, has a lot of conservative interviewees as well as liberal ones, but there’s often a tendency to approach the lefty guests with something along the lines of, “tell me about your ideas,” and the righties with something like, “tell me why people shouldn’t oppose your ideas.” They’re both entirely acceptable approaches to journalism, but the breakdown occurs along political lines.
There’s also the question of what gets covered, which can lean left because that’s the world the press lives in. The Washington Post, for instance, didn’t cover the O’Donnell Planned Parenthood video when it was issued. (This of course had the unintended consequence of allowing Carly Fiorina to try to define it in the public mind, since many people had not heard of it before).
None of this is to say that Fox doesn’t do the same things, often more openly. But these are the conditions that caused Fox to arise.
Regarding the Planned Parenthood tapes I did notice that NPR on many occasions did not mention to their listeners or readers that there was evidence that the tapes were tampered when reporting about the controversy. (AFAIK NPR has pointed that out on occasion, but not much when they have to “be fair to both sides”). They really did twist themselves like a pretzel to be “fair” to the conservative politicians that were actually in a bubble of information.
I still have a hard time seeing any bias. Take the reporting on the 2016 presidential election. I see a lot of negative news about Clinton. We hear about the e-mail investigation, her declining poll numbers, and how at best she runs 50/50 against a Republican candidate in polls for the general election. With Bernie Sanders we hear about his liabilities as well, whether it be his age, lack of electability, how he doesn’t have any endorsements, and so forth. Of course we also get negative stories about the Republican candidates, but if they didn’t report those, the media would be biased for conservatives the way Fox is.
Maybe conservatives mean the media is biased with regards to the issues rather than the candidates. In that case, however, we’re dealing with the problem that facts are facts, and sometimes the objective reality supports the “liberal” position. Global warming is the first example that comes to mind. If that’s the case, they can complain all they want, but it’s not going to change reality.
Conservatives are a part of the established power structure, so whenever any threat to the power structure happens they immediately start getting upset and feeling they are being victimized. A good example of this is something like affirmative action. Non-whites have been locked out of society for years, and whites were fine with it but once you start balancing the power away from whites, they have a conniption because now they/we only have 85% of the power instead of the 100% we are used to.
Same with the media, many conservatives aren’t happy unless the media tells them what they want to hear and perceive any deviance from that as a threat to their power base. The only ones that do that are fox news and a few newspapers.
I think on some level this is why conservatives reacted so badly to having a black democrat like obama as president, they see it as the death of the power base of white, heterosexual christian men running the world (Obama is heterosexual and christian, but the base of the democratic party has many agnostics and non-believers as well as LGBTs)
Political beliefs are heritable, so discriminating against conservatives and justifying it by saying that they should become liberals is no different than discriminating against the poor and saying that if they don’t like it, they should become rich.
It’ll take a liiiittle bit more than “three guys ran a single battery of tests on a pair of twins” to actually prove anything approaching that.
Oooh, now people voicing moderate opinions is “discriminating against conservatives”, too ? Man, cargo cult rhetoric is working overtime today.
Beyond that : it’s not possible to will oneself out of poverty overnight. It’s effortless to declare oneself a moderate, or a liberal, if that were to give anyone any advantages. The equivalence you draw is ludicrous.
People generally perceive their own political positions as centrist, and therefore identify sources with the same political positions as centrist. The SDMB is a liberal board, so Dopers think the mainstream media is centrist.
Interestingly, although the SDMB believes fervently in the conservative bias at FoxNews, the same level and sort of evidence of liberal bias in the rest of the media is insufficient to demonstrate anything. Bricker started a thread on it some years back. I should bookmark it - the discussion comes up every so often.