| “The mainstream media is a bunch of urban elitists with a liberal agenda, not just a bias. They consistently show America at its worst, and embolden our enemies.” |
Why is the mainstream media biased?
The mainstream media has a serious bias, but it’s not the one the right or the left wants you to believe in. The mainstream media has a bias to make money, sell advertising, and keep their audience. The most popular and profitable paper in the US isn’t the New York Times or even USA Today. It’s the National Enquirer. The highest paid news editorializer in the country isn’t on CBS or CNN or even on TV at all. It’s Rush Limbaugh.
This media bias comes means they have to dramatize news items and focus on the negative. That sells papers. Readers are bored by “good news” stories.
This media bias makes editors really selective, over-reporting on “the hot story” and ignoring everything else. In sports, you’ll never hear about the #3 team — in politics, you’ll never see corrections or get important updates once a story has cooled down.
To keep their profits up, the media swallows news feeds whole. The media makes more money if they can avoid sending reporters on a bunch of investigative wild goose chases. Expensive and risky. So government and business propaganda are amplified without any analysis.
Virtually all the media in the US are controlled by just five corporations, so there’s a lot of self-censorship. Sure, reporters tend to be younger and less conservative…but it’s the editors and owners who control what goes out to the audience, and they are older and more conservative.
The media bias to watch out for: conformity and laziness. The only solutions to that bias are letters to the editor, and using a variety of internet news sources to keep yourself informed in the fairest and most balanced way of all.
Find out more…
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What Media Bias? Read a couple of paragraphs, you’ll get the point
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The BBC: A pretty neutral news source, even though government-sponsored
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Google News: It’s unbiased because it’s a robot
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WikiPedia: Balance out media bias by becoming an author
Dave,
I like what you’re doing here. I think there’s an important point that you should consider including. Because of the media being owned by so few businesses and that it is profit oriented, there has been a blurring of news and entertainment. The public seems to confuse the two. The FCC used to give out transmission licenses based on the tv/radio station offering public service and balanced reporting. Today it is less clear how to identify reliable news reporting. As soon as the line could be crossed, many outlets began to compete for market share using the strategy you describe above. As there is no clear distinction for the listening audience between news and entertainment the latter is often confused with the former. Shows like Limbaugh and Fox are representing themselves as “reporters” when they are actually entertainers.
Of course you have to wonder why the public is not understanding this and why the FCC is no longer taking an interest.
Comment by Audrie Meyer — 14 September 2008 @ 2:30 pm |