media bias

[jgrivna]

It's a question that man has pondered since the beginning of time: Is there a media bias?

I got into a lengthy debate the other day about bias in the media in the United States. I have always thought that the notion the media slanted to the left was false. My reasoning was that most media is owned primarily by large corporations which tend to be conservative. However, my opponent pointed out that with the exception of fox news, the media is dominated exclusively with liberal anchors. I think that we can all agree that fox is conservative, but what about the rest of the networks? I'm starting to see that both arguments are valid.

 

[Aught3]

This seems to be a problem with the worldview mantra of relativists, although it's difficult to remove your own bias so I'm not totally certain of this.

What I mean is the assumption seems to be that conservatives have one worldview and liberals have another worldview, both are equally valid. This is not true. What we should be looking at are the facts of the case on the 'liberal' news channels aka the mainstream facts are presented and both sides of a legitimate argument are treated equally. On the fox channel facts are distorted to fit the story, it's the news people want to hear. There is no reason why a conservative presenter couldn't host a news show on a mainstream channel, but they would have to present facts, and at the moment reality has a liberal bias.

 

[obsidianavenger]

This seems to be a problem with the worldview mantra of relativists, although it's difficult to remove your own bias so I'm not totally certain of this.

What I mean is the assumption seems to be that conservatives have one worldview and liberals have another worldview, both are equally valid. This is not true. What we should be looking at are the facts of the case on the 'liberal' news channels aka the mainstream facts are presented and both sides of a legitimate argument are treated equally. On the fox channel facts are distorted to fit the story, it's the news people want to hear. There is no reason why a conservative presenter couldn't host a news show on a mainstream channel, but they would have to present facts, and at the moment reality has a liberal bias.

i don't think it's asserted that they are equally valid so much as that they are equally invalid. that news channels selectively report only what supports their worldview (or rather the worldview of their viewers) and minimize stories and issues that they find challenging. as i don't watch much news, i don't know if this is the case or not, but to say "reality has a liberal bias" is to dismiss the whole debate completely and to assert that liberals are right about everything...

 

[Gnomesmusher]

Let's just say that even if the "lefty" media was biased (and they are), they'd still have far more facts correct than the right wing media because that bias doesn't necessarily exclude the facts, while outlets like FOX often spins out misinformation. But often facts don't matter just the number of people they can convince to believe in their views.

 

[stratos]

Without jumping to reality just yet. News always has a bias, it is the goal of any decent reporter to remove bias and report in an objective fashion, but it is an unattainable goal, because even in the selection of facts a reporter wants to present, bias will creep in. But even if it is an unattainable goal, reporters should of course strive to reach it anyway.

In reality there is a long tradition in many countries for having different media outlets for different perceptions. Here in the netherlands we even had a whole period stamped by what is called pillarisation, this went further then just media, but in effect it was basically "You vote that party, you believe that religion, so you read that newspaper".

The effects of that can be still clearly seen in the media, or at least in the minds of the people. Certain newspapers are directly refered to a certain political/social outlook on life. I don't know if it is as strong in other countries as here, but I don't doubt that it is at least for a little bit.

Now this of course looks like it implies bias, but that isn't necessarily true. The papers could still have a mostly unbiased article selection, and the articles could still be written mostly unbiased. I've not yet seen any research that tries to disseminate this by comparing a years worth of different papers and articles in those papers though, although I am sure it has been done.

Now I've talked about papers, and not news networks. The reason for this is mostly because I don't consider news broadcasts to be unbiased enough. The amount of time alloted to describe any item is simply too small to give enough facts for it to be unbiased, also the ratings system of TV acts as a catalyst to appease to a certain kind of viewing audience. While the idea that we all want unbiased news is nice, the reality doesn't reflect this I think, we want news that we can agree with, concussions that we can agree with, and those are quite biassed. As such, I don't even think I will personally categorise those shows as news. More like news based entertainment. But that doesn't aptly describe it either I guess.

 

[Nogre]

but to say "reality has a liberal bias" is to dismiss the whole debate completely and to assert that liberals are right about everything...

I don't think that's what Aught3 is saying. I think his point is simply that it's not necessarily all bias. Part of it could be that the "left" side of politics has more things right or that the "right" way in politics is farther left than what we normally think as the middle. This doesn't mean that there is no bias; it just explains why the spectrum that exists in the media is slightly off from the normal political spectrum because in reality people have generally moved towards the "correct" view.

 

[Ozymandyus]

Honestly, I think one of the big supposedly liberal news media stations should change their news shows over to to ACTUALLY show some liberal bias. They should feel free to propagandize news and show pictures which distort reality, and create false news stories in the same way fox does. Then we will see how neutral the real news has been all these years.

I think you could get some decent viewership too. People apparently love juicy gossip that is barely based on reality.