“The effects of media bias are real and significant. My results suggest that media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election.” – Left Turn
While President Trump’s hate/hate relationship with the media is well-documented, Obama had his own trouble with one cable news network in particular. In 2008, while lamenting his popularity, Obama claimed his poll numbers would be 2 to 3 percent higher if Fox News didn’t exist. But presidents aren’t the only ones disgusted by the present state of journalism. In a recent Gallup/Knight Foundation survey, nearly half of the respondents found the media “very biased” and “intentionally mispresenting facts”. At the same time, the Center for Public Integrity reported that 96 percent of political donations from journalists in 2016, went to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps this is a good place to start.
Polls reveal that Washington reporters vote 93-7 for the Democrat over the Republican in a typical election. This suggests that newsrooms act from a partisan position in a country that is largely split 50/50. Here in their liberal stupor, detached from the realities of life outside the beltway, the die is cast. It isn’t that opposing views aren’t permitted; such views are simply too foreign to contemplate. As a result, their idea of centrism is hopelessly skewed. Their progressivism is further revealed by the use of political words or phrases, like changing illegal immigrants to undocumented workers. The phrase is then repeated in every newscast and print story as if it were universally accepted.
Whether a news item is about coronavirus, environmentalism, vaccines, nutrition, race, etc., only one perspective is typically presented. Experts, pundits, and other contributors representing one set of facts are used exclusively as if representative of the whole story. Much like the talk show, The View, where four liberals and one republican lite are presented as a balanced reflection of America. We all know it’s not. Likewise, mainstream journalism promotes a narrow view based solely on the progressive side of the issue. What’s sorely missing is the other side of the story.
In the few instances when an alternative viewpoint appears to be gaining ground, social media is there to tap it back down, labeling it as spam or misleading. When medical doctors and academics advanced alternative opinions on the coronavirus, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all came together to remove any evidence of the opposition from their platforms. A former Facebook employee revealed that trending topic lists were manipulated to suppress conservative topics and advance liberal ones. Like moving Black Lives Matter to the top of the list to suggest more interest than there actually was.
As Benjamin Franklin foretold: “Half a truth is often a great lie”. In many cases the facts presented in the story are true, yet the overall point of the story is incorrect. Bias occurs when presenting a limited set of facts to advance one side of the story. For example, the media have recently portrayed both Donald Trump and Amazon as tax evaders for paying little or no taxes during previous tax years. The focus is limited to a discussion of Trump’s and Bezos’s incredible wealth and perhaps even, their white privilege. The other side of the story is that government-approved tax deductions and schemes passed by Congress allowed the mitigation of tax liability for individuals and businesses. Tax evasion is the deliberate misrepresentation of one’s true tax liability. Neither Trump nor Amazon appears to be criminally responsible for any misdeed. The problem doesn’t end with the deliberate distortion. It is exacerbated when misinformation is believed, and harmful policies are implemented to address it. Here, partisan facts are as damaging as false statements.
In Tim Groseclose’s 2011 book, “Left Turn”, UCLA Political Science and Economics Professor Groseclose shares the results of his research by numerically identifying a politician’s Political Quotient (PQ) and the media’s Slant Quotient (SQ) using a computer-generated analysis of voting records and think tank citations. His empirical results were not surprising. Groseclose’s findings, corroborated by other studies, confirm the significant level of media bias in America. For instance, 18 out of 20 news outlets were deemed liberal-leaning while only 2 favored conservatives, with left-wing bias twice as prejudiced as that found on the right. Groseclose also reveals that the average voter consumes approximately 80 percent of their news from mainstream media sources and only 8 percent from Fox News. While some of the data is 20 years old, Groseclose warned that the longer the bias is left unaddressed, the more bias there is and the more the distortion grows. And the more biased the news source or politician, the less truthful they tend to be.
Most people watch or read news reports to become better informed about topics they know little about. When that information is intentionally inaccurate, they are left misinformed. The good news is we no longer have to wait until 6:00 pm for our daily dose of news or rely exclusively on the local newspaper. There is a growing list of online resources in which to enhance our knowledge. Because of the abundance of content available, intellectual curiosity has made a rebound. Now the public is better informed and can recognize a lie when it is told. Then again, media outlets might consider implementing an affirmative action program to create a more diverse workforce that better represents the audience they serve.
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