It seems in this day and age, it’s becoming it’s becoming increasingly difficult to receive the entire story from any news organization (and it’s accelerating exponentially). What sort of ground do media companies gain by purposely distorting the information that is sent to citizens? How will we be able to sort through all the Bs in the coming years? Now, just to obtain any sound information you have to consult 15 different news organizations. I find it quite ironic that adults are now playing the “telephone” game like we used to as kids.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you, but as with all such questions… who says? You need to establish some index of bias before you can ask a baseless question about “Why is…” - it may not be “is” at all.
Establish that “media bias” is any degree greater than at some point in the past. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is far less, far more accurate and “balanced” than at some times in recent history.
This.
Historically speaking, the last 60 years or so has been an anomaly of relatively unbiased news reporting. It used to me that each town would have a Republican news paper and a Democratic news paper, with both showing a bias that would put Fox to shame.
You don’t have to establish any degree of bias to ask why one seems biased. It’s quite easy to remain in a neutral position when asking “why is”. A child may ask why you seem angry. The child isn’t biased, he/she simply noticed a personality change. The same applies to the original question.
There has been a hint of favoritism. Some networks lean towards a more conservative side, while others liberal. Some simply give their own opinion on another basis. While we can debate at which point in time Media seems to be more or less biased, that isn’t the point. The question is why bias exists at all in an organization that is suppose to deliver raw, unfiltered information to the public. Huffington Post, WallstreetJournal, Rt news, Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, ect (I’m just using the big names as an example), all push some sort of agenda, be it political or something else.
With the above caveats in mind. I believe it is more biased (polarized) because media companies can afford to be.
Its the internet and information technology explosions fault.
Previously, with only 3 networks available, they each had to appeal to the largest market in order to be profitable. That meant they had to be fairly centrist in political stance. Blatant promotion of more extreme thoughts would disenfranchise so many people that the readership/viewership would plummet.
WIth the advent of 500 channels and millions of blogs and websites (very inexpensive), the readership is fractured enough so that each one can find its (albeit smaller) niche and is supportable.
There is no need to have large viewerships that appeal to the large majority of people. fragmentation has become more economical…hence the trend toward bias.
People now have the ability to pick and choose where they get their news. Liberals will choose those parts of the mainstream media which echo the way they think about the world. Right-wingers will go to Fox News. Both sides will insist that their chosen channels are fair and impartial. Both sides are wrong. There is no such thing as unbiased news reporting, never has been. Just the selection of stories and what prominence given to them will reflect the bias of the news team. The myth of balanced reporting has always been just that - a myth.
How is a news organization supposed to deliver “raw, unfiltered information”?
No news organization can report on everything. We don’t see on CNN headline news what I had for breakfast today. The producers at CNN had to make a judgement call that my breakfast was not newsworthy. They also don’t report on what President Obama had for breakfast. They don’t report on millions and millions of things that happened today. They only report on, at most, a few hundred.
And someone has to decide what those few hundred stories are going to be, and how much time to devote to each story. Those someones are human beings, not robots. And even if robots picked the stories the robots would have to be programmed by human beings that would decide what criteria the robots should use to choose newsworthy stories.
There is no such thing as unfiltered information. Even if the reporters simply point their cameras at an event and record video and audio and don’t make any commentary, how do they decide what events to record and broadcast? How do you as a viewer decide what events to watch? We can have millions of cameras and microphones all over the world recording information, if you want to find out what is happening around the world which cameras should you watch the raw output from? You can’t watch all of them, or even a representative sample of them, you need someone to tell you, “Watch this 5 minute clip about topic Y from place X”. And you have to have some reason to believe that the person who advised you to watch the clip had good reason to advise you.
We call these people news editors, or news aggregators. They put together an hour or half hour clip show and call it the daily news. Or they put together a digest of dozens or hundreds of stories and call it a newspaper or magazine or website. If you look at the story attribution for your daily newspaper you’ll see that 90%+ of the content is simply reprinting articles from AP or Reuters, the only features that have in-house reporting are local issues, and that’s because if the local reporters don’t cover local news no one will.
I think this is the answer. the old “big three” networks, and the prestige daily newspapers, made a virtue of being above the fray and unbiased reporting. In a way, that appealed to everyone and expanded their customer base and appeal.
With cable and the fragmentation of the media universe, a specialty channel can carve out a niche by catering to a moderate-sized demographic - such as cranky old farts who think they pay too much taxes. Along with the growth of these is the shrinking of audience for the mainstream “unbiased” networks and papers. With this shrinkage in audience comes a shrinkage in coverage. The days are long gone when not only the New York Times but the three networks had their own correspondents in many of the major capitals. heck, the Toronto Globe and Mail had their own people in London, Beijing, Washington and many other large cities. So did British papers, and presumably the major newspapers and networks from many other countries. Shrinking audiences have reduced the budgets for that. Everyone seems to re-write the same newswire stories.
Shrink the news gathering ability and the audience will notice and shrink more in a downward spiral. Meanwhile, the bias news gathers audiences who want to be told news in line with what they believe. After all, televangelists are big business too.
And talking head commentary shows - they are cheap, and it’s easy to find biased people who want to duke it out with the other side. If yo have a favorite demographic, well, you can pick the heads that guarantee the audiences like how the talking emerges.
Money.
The public clearly demonstrates today that it wants information delivered through an ideological filter. So media fill this niche - which is today so large that it may be the majority - with content that will drive readership or viewership. How would anybody expect otherwise as long as big media are big public businesses with shareholders to placate.
Partisanship in the media has cycled up and down as long as America has existed. Early newspapers had little purpose beyond disseminating the publisher’s ideological views. When mass printing became feasible around 1840 or so, sensationalism rose because it was thought that only the elites cared much about reading politics. At the close of the 19th century, newspaper moguls created national chains and used them to advocate for their opinions. After WWII, newspapers tried to create a more professional image, one aspect of which was the seeming objectivity of news. Every newspaper had an editorial page and an ideological slant though and except for the 1964 anomaly of Johnson, the vast majority always endorsed the Republican presidential candidate. Television news, because it went into every home blindly, not merely those who chose to buy it, was very carefully neutral. Cable news didn’t have to be. People could make that a choice, so specialized ideological channels appeared. Same with internet sites when they saw niches to be filled.
This current trend is part of a larger societal attitude. In the technological utopianism of the early 20th century, serious thinkers truly believed that they could find the One Right Answer to all problems that everyone would agree with. We no longer believe this. We’re split into ideologies with worldviews so different that they are like different non-Euclidian geometries with different axiom systems. Every piece of information gets processed through these worldviews. Nothing can possibly be neutral or objective.
I believe that this cycle is getting extreme and will fall apart soon - historically soon, meaning a couple of decades. In the meantime it is simply good business and common sense to process the world through a filter. Anything else loses your audience.
I think you’re completely wrong, but you have much company that not only thinks there is such a thing as a “neutral” or “objective” viewpoint, but that they hold it.
Here’s a starting point: many things thrown around as “obviously true” by one faction of the media or another - or all of it - often aren’t anything of the kind. I’d put the gross assumption that “the media is all biased” in that category.
Prove some degrees of bias before engaging in yet another windy, empty dialogue about “how biased everything is.”
Back when cities had many papers, some were called Democrat and some Republican, and that wasn’t by accident. They found that it was a good business model to lock in a set of readers of a certain ideology. This more or less went away when papers consolidated and you couldn’t afford to alienate a large chunk of the market.
When the number of channels proliferated the same thing happened, and Fox proved it was a good business model to lock in viewers.
It helped them that with the incorrect charge of media bias before they started, real and intentional media bias could be presented as a counterweight.
The biggest bias in media isn’t towards one end of the political spectrum or another, but the built-in cultural bias shared by both sides. To get a clue about that, visit foreign countries with free press, and compare. Even then, you’re only seeing the cultural bias between the two (probably very similar) cultures. For a different kind of comparison, try news from a century or two ago. Even then, there’s so much shared bias between the samples that you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
IMHO, NPR tries pretty hard to be objective, but often fails. Fox doesn’t try very hard, but does try hard to appear to be “balanced” by allowing the liberal position to be defended after being attacked. What’s funny is that very intelligent and urbane people (like my parents, who don’t think they’re particularly conservative, but are) can be fooled into thinking that’s balanced. (“But – Hannity has Combs! See? Balanced!” … laugh and sigh.)
I must be unbiased, because liberals think I’m a conservative, and vice versa. 
Moderator Action
While there are probably some market studies and such that can be cited factually, I think many of the answers to this topic are going to require a bit of speculation and opinion, which makes the thread better suited to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
From the opening of Horatio Alger Jr.'s juvenile novel Rough and Ready, published in 1869:
Several generations of liberal education have conditioned people to expect this. People need education that is balanced - both liberal and conservative - but we should have never allowed public schools to be the place where it is done.
Somewhere along the line the definition of journalist has been altered. Perhaps technology has been responsible for that.
I’m not sure that most of the young among us know how to be objective. They seem to feel it their personal mission to preach the gospel as they see it. There’s nothing new about the zealotry of youth on both sides of the political spectrum. What is new is the resistance of more neutral voices to speak up and create the balance for fear of demonization.
I was reading in the thread about moving to Louisiana and the comment was made that there rednecks who fly the Confederate flag sit and eat barbecue with Black people and how weird that was. And I thought, “No, that’s not weird. Folks in LA still haven’t gotten the message that they aren’t supposed to coexist anymore.”
I sometimes read on this site people questioning if they should be friends with someone who doesn’t hold the same political ideas as they do and I’m astounded at how divided we’ve become.
I don’t know how to get my education other than reading from an array of news sites both conservative and liberal and then trying to sort it out. It takes up a lot of time.
I think it’s because bias sells.
Media oulets know that people are attracted to the extremes of things so leaning in one direction or the other will attract viewers.
Truly fair and balanced bores people and they’ll go elsewhere to seek out extremes to either validate their views or enrage them.
Again, extremes are what sells. Typicals and averages don’t.
When a reporter goes to New Orleans to report on Katrina damage do they show destruction of a typical street? Or do they seek out the street where the damage is at it’s most extreme?
Who gets the louder voice in debates on social issues? The extremists like Michael Moore and Ann Coulter or some no name who dares to take the middle ground?
That’s certainly the *why *of it. I think any faint issues of power, control, ethics, etc. pale before the ability pandering to a select audience has in filling the panderer’s pockets.
This is especially true in an era when print news is dying and even e-news is still secondary to television/video news… and television is an advertising medium that occasionally shows less overtly promotional content.
Not sure we’ve addressed the actual *what *of things, though.
I disagree that the media is supposed to deliver"raw, unfiltered information." The entire point of a news organization is to condense and filter information into a package its customers find appropriate. Some portion of that is going to include selecting which stories to emphasize, how to explain them, and which ones to skip. That pretty much fills the definition of “bias.”
Some years ago I happened to know the news director of a local TV station. He made sure every newscast had a generous load of crime and sensation. A local group complained that he spent too much time focusing on murders in poor, black neighborhoods. His response was that he focused on EVERY murder in the area and if people thought there was too much reporting on certain neighborhoods, they should clean up those neighborhoods instead of complaining about the reporting. Question for discussion: who was biased?
“The media” is made up of many different private companies, many of which were most likely started by individual publishers with agendas to promote. As mentioned earlier, some newspapers once had political parties in their names, “The Evening Republican Standard,” was one in the small city near me. Even without a stated party line the regional daily newspaper here endorses specific candidates for public offices. Certain magazines have had conservative or liberal leanings and particular editorial slants. There is nothing at all new about this. It’s surprising to me sometimes how many people feel any one particular news source is “supposed to be” unbiased.
Seems biased? That’s your biased view. Maybe everyone doesn’t share your opinion.
I think Amateur Barbarian raises a significant point.
If 70% of a news organizations stories about a political candidate are negative, does that makes them biased? Maybe the guy is just really an asshole.