Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
In general the media has a liberal bias. I can say this because I see if from both angles. As a "social liberal" the mainstream media takes my side. I rarely notice it until I watch something like Fox or read the Washington Times. But generally, when I watch the mainstream media, I always think they do a good job of reporting the social issues (which means there is a strong bias in my direction).
But I am also angry at the way the mainstream media addresses the war, economics (actually with economic it is usually just ignorance), education policy etc. The mainstream media treated Murtha and Cindy Sheehan as heroes, and as unjustly criticized champions of a worthy cause, which drove me nuts. The mainstream media also took Michael J. Foxes side and I loved that.
When a social conservative accuses the mainstream media of being biased against them, I don't argue with them, I just acknowledge it and think to myself, this is a good thing and I am glad you just have to suck it up.
I don't see why in general liberals just don't act the way I do instead of trying to deny the bias.
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The press is, for the most part, a for-profit institution, and so it has this odd bias towards reporting things that make it money. This means, inter alia, that reporters on the White House beat often report what the White House is telling them so that it will keep doing so; that local TV stations tend to tell you more about murders and robberies than about school bonds issues; that many complex issues get reduced to two commentators yelling at each other; that stories that involve reporting from esoteric foreign locations get shortchanged in favor of stories that can be reported from behind a desk in NYC or DC; that stories that require sophisticated credentials to make sense of (e.g., a law or economics degree) get reported poorly; and so on. All of these thing reflect the markets that the media are in.
The notion that all of these "biases" have less of an impact on the news we get than the particular political viewpoint of the reporter involved is foolish and ignorant, and would not be taken seriously by people conversant with the concept that large for-profit enterprises tend to act rationally to make money, except that it's a useful deceit to the sort of conservatives who like to complain that the deck is stacked against them by the cultural elites.
