Zogby Poll: Voters Believe Media Bias is Very Real

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Fox news is right. Everything else is left. Yet people still bash Fox.

And yet they really aren't that different from the other corporate news channels. Nor is their journalism "better"

Didn't say it was better With access to instant information on the internet TV news is less and less useful.

[Alex+R 0]

I think erekose is right that the issue really isn't political bias in the media so much as the move to corporate media. Liberal, conservative, whatever, in the news these days they are all covering the same issues, which are being defined in the interests of corporations. Journalistic integrity is not a priority for a corporation, large or small, in the news business.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Fox news is right. Everything else is left. Yet people still bash Fox.

And yet they really aren't that different from the other corporate news channels. Nor is their journalism "better"

Didn't say it was better With access to instant information on the internet TV news is less and less useful.

Sure - but you do have to wonder how useful some of that information is, given that its the internet which is the source of, for example, 9/11 conspiracy theories...

[Alex+R 0]

Actually I think the biggest risk with internet news is that while people mostly turn to websites of their favorite newspapers and TV stations for reliable news, the rush to get the story out leads to much more inaccuracies. You can watch a story change from the first thing posted if you look at a news website for a whole day. Sometimes the speed they CAN produce news is a little too fast, IMO

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Actually I think the biggest risk with internet news is that while people mostly turn to websites of their favorite newspapers and TV stations for reliable news, the rush to get the story out leads to much more inaccuracies. You can watch a story change from the first thing posted if you look at a news website for a whole day. Sometimes the speed they CAN produce news is a little too fast, IMO

Which again reminds me of the London subway shooting - coming as did with merely days after the 7/7 bombings. A whole bunch of police and 'eyewitness statements' were aired, which later turned out to have been greatly exaggerated or blatantly untrue.

[almaty 19]

I don't think they are biased at all, except maybe fox. they have to report the news as it is.

i agree with you on that brother

[mybackpages 0]

yes, there are studies that show liberal bias. but i'm not surprised that some can't find them.

and there are varying degrees of left

Why you have to respond to me is beyond me. But I have to respond since you not only challenged what I wrote but did it with a insult directly towards me. Go ahead Charles- show us one serious and credible ACADEMIC study that proves this.

I think Erekose already explained why you would not be likely to find one.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

...just because a journalist has liberal or conservative views, this does not mean that his or her reporting will be slanted. For instance, as Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2000, 188) notes,

One might hypothesize instead that reporters respond to the cues of those who pay their salaries and mask their own ideological dispositions. Another explanation would hold that norms of journalism, including `objectivity’ and `balance’ blunt whatever biases exist.”

Or, as Timothy Crouse explains:

It is an unwritten law of current political journalism that conservative Republican Presidential candidates usually receive gentler treatment from the press than do liberal Democrats. Since most reporters are moderate or liberal Democrats themselves, they try to offset their natural biases by going out of their way to be fair to conservatives. No candidate ever had a more considerate press corps than Barry Goldwater in 1964, and four years later the campaign press gave every possible break to Richard Nixon. Reporters sense a social barrier between themselves and most conservative candidates; their relations are formal and meticulously polite. But reporters tend to loosen up around liberal candidates and campaign staffs; since they share the same ideology, they can joke with the staffers, even needle them, without being branded the “enemy.” If a reporter has been trained in the traditional, “objective” school of journalism, this ideological and social closeness to the candidate and the staff makes him feel guilty; he begins to compensate; the more he likes and agrees with the candidate personally, the harder he judges him professionally. Like a coach sizing up his own son in spring tryouts, the reporter becomes doubly severe. (1973, 355-6)

From... A Measure of Media Bias

http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/grosec...edia.Bias.8.htm

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Also the writer/newsreaders words don’t flow straight from his pen onto the page/autocue – they do have various levels of editorship who review and amend scipts and copy.

[Ban Hammer 13,334]

yes, there are studies that show liberal bias. but i'm not surprised that some can't find them.

and there are varying degrees of left

Why you have to respond to me is beyond me. But I have to respond since you not only challenged what I wrote but did it with a insult directly towards me. Go ahead Charles- show us one serious and credible ACADEMIC study that proves this.

I think Erekose already explained why you would not be likely to find one.

depends on the definition of credible academic, does it not? i also suggest you reread erekose's post, as "many" does not mean "all"

and i musta missed the memo about not being able to respond to you.

There are indeed studies that show “liberal bias”, but like the GW issue many of those are politically motivated.

The biggest influence on the mass-media is corporate ownership – far and above the perceived bias by individual journalists. That people look at Fox as some sort of “breath of fresh” air is mystifying as they engage in the same narrow range of debate as the other networks.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

as "many" does not mean "all"

True enough - but there are some pretty bizarre assertions out there - like for example that reporting bias can be quantified by the voting preferences of journalists rather than the actual content of their journalism. Studies which don't look at specific samples of journalistic reporting are pretty worthless IMO.

Edited March 23, 2007 by erekose