fling93 loves fishies

Media Bias?

It’s about time I got into something at least somewhat resembling a rant, so here it is: I’m sick and tired of hearing people complain about bias in the media. I think it’s a total cop-out.

Let me first say that I think television is a truly horrible way to get your news. For one, it is incredibly time-inefficient. Not only can you read much faster than you can listen, you can also pick and choose what topics to read about, whereas a news broadcast walks you through a bunch of topics chosen by somebody else. Also, the amount of time spent wading past advertisements seems higher for television than for newspapers or web browsing (especially using the Opera web browser with image-loading and popups turned off). A TiVo on fast-forward with closed-captioning turned on would address that somewhat, but then you’re reading your news again, just from your TV (and that’s still a lot less efficient than reading it from a newspaper or web page).

Not to mention that it is a lot harder to speak about a subject objectively than it is to write about it objectively for the simple reason that it’s much easier to remove emotion and bias from a piece of writing than it is from a human voice or face (not to say that my blog is a shining example of that, but hey, I try). Plus, images tend to be much more emotionally loaded than words and can probably distort your memory of what actually happened.

So I hardly ever watch the news. I just read about it, mostly from the AP and Reuters headlines on Yahoo! plus The Economist (which to me has always seemed a lot more objective and balanced than US rags like Time, Newsweek, or… <shudder>… USA Today). I try to check out a few other sites and blogs and am starting to experiment with RSS feeds and news aggregators (suggestions are always welcome!). But I eschew the tube for anything except entertainment. So perhaps I’m not the best person to comment on this, but hey, this is a blog, and you’re here because you want to hear my take on stuff, even if it’s stuff I know little about, right?

Anyway, I personally don’t see the bias in the media. I think perception of media bias merely reflects the bias of the person complaining about it (the hostile media effect, a known and scientifically verified psychological tendency), because both liberals and conservatives complain. The liberal FAIR claims conservative bias while the conservative MRC claims liberal bias. This is hardly surprising. Even if the media was exactly dead-center, those to the left and the right of it would perceive bias. What I’d like to see is if there’s a non-partisan group out there — and I mean a 501(c)(3) organization — that has done any sort of study on the issue. I’ve looked, but haven’t found anything yet.

Leftist Noam Chomsky actually makes a somewhat decent argument as to why the media would be conservatively biased. He points out in Manufacturing Consent that a majority of the major media outlets are owned by very large corporations. Even the ones that aren’t that large still get their money, not from subscribers, but from advertisers. While advertisers do want a large subscriber base, they actually more specifically want a large audience of people with disposable incomes (and the ones that spend the most money probably lean conservative).

That these motivations would cause the media to report more about the atrocities in Cambodia than in East Timor strikes me as a bit paranoid (I’d imagine journalists simply don’t push the government too far for fear of losing access, but this would happen regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican was in power). I believe he does raise a valid point about the motivations, but that argues towards the media simply refusing to criticize their parent corporations and their subsidiaries, and not towards creating a bias.

In contrast, while I get that conservatives believe there is liberal media bias, I haven’t yet heard any reasoning explaining how that bias can exist in a free market. If there’s an unfilled demand in the market, there is profit to be made to meet it, so suppliers will step in to do it until supply and demand balance and the markets clear. I don’t see why the media would be any different. If the media was biased to the left of the general population, there would be an unfilled demand for conservative media — an imbalance that cannot survive for very long.

One theory I’ve heard is that most people who go into journalism tend to be liberal. Perhaps that’s true, but the people really making the decisions at the media outlets aren’t the journalists, it’s management. They’re the people who tell the journalists which stories to cover, which stories can go to print, which stories need editing, and which stories get glossed over or pulled. And of course, more importantly, which journalists get fired. Of course, I’d imagine the CEOs and the board members of most media corporations would tend to be conservatives.

Besides, I’d expect market forces to trump personal politics for journalists (just like it does for many politicians), and also for the unmet demand to increase the demand for conservative journalists. Most college kids tend to be idealistic liberals anyway, so I don’t see why journalism is any different from any other field. Since politics is dominated by rich old white men, the same argument would indicate our government has a conservative bias.

So those of you whining about media bias, just give it a rest. Claiming media bias has always struck me as a cop-out coming from someone who doesn’t actually have a rational response to a news item that conflicts with their world-view. A cop-out because it allows them to simply dismiss the item instead of doing the smart thing and investigating it further for themselves. Why do so many people choose to filter out useful information like this? Well, that’ll be a topic for another time…

Update 2/19/04

JC at Old Fishinghat has a strikingly similar take, if worded a bit strangely (he says there is bias, but because the media is almost a perfect market, the bias doesn’t matter).