News Bias

I was reading Patrick Ruffini's post on media bias and was struck by something he said.

I can shut out ABC, NBC, CBS, and the New York Times if I want to — and not miss a beat. This isn't an act of ideological blindering so much as it is a statement that no one media source is indispensable. The news is too important to be left to the media.

As a blogger operating out of my own home, I have to rely on external entities for news, facts, and opinion. Opinion, being what it is, doesn't matter if it's biased or not. However, for the other two, it does matter if the source taints the writing with a bias.

Let me first say that there is a difference between the naturally-occuring beliefs and biases of every person and letting those biases interfere with the truth. I would have no problem if every New York Times reporter and editor were to the left of Ralph Nader. I would have no problem if every Wall Street Journal reporter and editor were to the right of Patrick Buchanan. What I would have a problem with is if those people lied, misquoted, mislead, or otherwise alter their writing in order to align their story with their biases.

Since I base much of what I have to say on the reporting of others, it matters to me that those reports are as factually accurate as possible and don't play games with that data in order to suit someone's viewpoint. This can be as simple as referring to Palestinian terrorists as "militants" as Reuters does or something as pervasive and blatant as the front page taglines Buzzflash whips up. And I feel that for most people, when they watch the news, they want hard fact and not opinionated interpretation. For that, they have talking head shows.

A lot of what people digest as news today comes from the wire news agencies: Associated Press, Reuters, and United Press International (UPI). Spend any time reading news and you'll quickly see how common it is to find the mainstream media relying on their reports. I daresay the majority of news found in local newspapers is from these wire reports. Not to lessen the original reporting done by companies such as CNN, MSNBC, etc, but the wires do the bulk of the news reporting work.

That is why any claims of liberal or conservative bias don't carry much serious weight with me unless they focus on the wire reporting of these three companies. And I'd say that for the most part, these services do a good job of reporting news. Since they are independent, we can corroborate their reports with the others. Failing that, we can then go to the other primary-source news agencies and work from there. Of course, this doesn't address the problem of people limiting themselves to a single news source. I do believe, however, that the percentage of people doing this will drop over time as they take advantage of the Internet.

Being pro-capitalism, it's real easy to take swipes at the media as being biased since they, almost to a point, endorse and support the functions of government that I loathe. Being out on the fringes of the debate colors my perception when in reality, it's just that they represent a broader portion of public opinion...and I find myself regularly disagreeing with that public opinion.

Posted by Drizzten at February 07, 2003 01:15 AM