How to be media saavy…
Dec 3rd, 2009 by ljkim
Many people think that the news media is biased toward “liberal” things. “Mainstream” news media is notoriously liberal. Don’t you know?” I’d like to question that line of thinking, and suggest that the mainstream press (not FoxNews, but more on them later) is not liberal or conservative, but, for better or worse, plays by the rules of contemporary journalism which is really neither…
First, how can we prove there’s no media bias?
One way is to look at all the BIG news stories and try to categorize them into stories that benefit a politically “liberal” agenda, or “conservative.” So… did Monica Lewinsky benefit the Democrats or Republicans? (I’d say Republican). How about the post 9-11 coverage and the search for WMD’s? (I’d say first it benefited the Republican agenda in going to war against Iraq, but later benefited the Democrats when it turned out there were no WMDs). Anyway, you get the idea, just go through all the big news stories that non-news junkies would have heard about and put them into Liberal or Conservative buckets and see which one comes out ahead.
I’m proposing that if you have a big enough sample, it’ll be pretty much even…
So why do people think there’s a Liberal Bias to media? How could all these sensible people be wrong? I think it has to do with the rules of journalism. The key rule is that a journalist has to show both sides of the story. So if the majority of scientists believed in the reality of global warming as a future problem in the late 80′s – and some people on the fringe of the scientific community disagreed – then one could say by the rules of journalistic integrity that some believe — but others disagree. A journalist feels required to give equal time to both points of view…even though the two different points of view are not really equal.
Not only that, but a journalist’s job is not to try to tell the “truth” about an issue, but simply to present what key people are claiming as the truth. This can be frustrating for people who are trying to get a message out there… So if a news program does an Easter or Christmas piece about Jesus’ birth or resurrection, interviewing scholars and historians, they’ll probably also include those who think Jesus never existed… “Damn liberals!” No it has nothing to do with a particular viewpoint, it has to do with the rules of journalism. And although it’s open to abuse and manipulation (e.g., the global warming “debate”), it’s the best we got for now…
PS: About Fox News
By the way – when it comes to Fox News proper, I think the rules of journalism still apply – their actual news reporting is fair in the same way that other news programs are fair. But their political commentary is not. Bill O Reilly, Hannity, Beck… they ARE biased, and they are not journalists… And they’re biased to an extent that I could not recommend them at all. On the flip side, political commentators like George Stephanopoulos are biased too although in a very different way that (I think) makes them worth hearing out…
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