Is Fox News the only unbiased media source?

[thewayne]

"I'm not going to sit here and complain about coverage of the campaign. As a candidate, if you do that, you're losing."
-- Chris Christie

"It goes without saying that there is definitely media bias."
-- Paul Ryan

I've never understood this. News channels are owned by some of the biggest media conglomerates ever, and they complain about liberal bias? It's like calling Obama a socialist and anti-business. The Dow is doing really well, as are big business.

Cognitive dissonance, a case of the stupids, or just willing to spout rubbish?

Comments

[silveradept]

There is media bias. But it isn't bias against the conservatives, no matter how much the fringe wants you to believe.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

There has been extensive research into this phenomenon, and the best study I ever saw on the subject came to some interesting conclusions. Item: media jobs are extraordinarily fickle, as in you can have a job on Friday and come in to work on a Monday to find your stuff in a box and security escorting you to the door, because of happenstances that have nothing to do with the job you do. Item: media jobs are urban, even in smaller communities. Item: I don't know what journalism schools are teaching these days, but it's forms, not how to get content. (I had to take some journalism classes for my major and the lack of curiosity was startling*.)

The upshot of the study is that several inherent traits about a career in media led to certain traits in the people who work in it. They're renters, because it's foolish to buy a house with an unsteady job. They're urban, because as long as you're renting, you want to be close to your job. They tend more towards a certain age range, to be single, to have been raised a certain way... and the upshot is that after you take all of the factors into account, you have a demographic that represents less than 2% of the population. And this particular study wasn't done in New York or L.A. but mid-markets like Tulsa.

When you have a narrow demographic like that, you get a self-referential loop where people tend to believe a certain way because they're surrounded by people who are a lot like them—and they treat people outside of that as aliens. Look at any story on farming, for example: the way it's framed shows a complete bafflement about that way of life, because the default assumptions are different.

*I don't care for classes that tell me to treat my readers like morons, especially when there are no classes offered that teach how to find out information. Seriously, all of the classes were about how to phrase information received... and where did that information come from? Journalism is dead in the major media.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your reply it was very informative. I had the honor of meeting Walter Kronkite, he was doing a signing of his autobiography, I bought three copies. Wonderful book. He says that quality journalism began to die when the network execs decided that the news programs had to get Nielson Ratings and had to be competitive. I remember the news when I was a kid in the 60's and 70's being a lot more factual, and the broadcast always included an editorial where an exec or the newscaster could make some personal commentary on the day's events.

Now it all seems to be commentary.

The thing that I found tremendously amusing, and now sad, is that Fox was not allowed to start broadcasting in Canada because Canadian broadcast laws required news broadcasts to be factual. I believe Fox was able to get the law amended to remove that pesky little clause.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

One of the best of the real journalists of today that I've seen is a guy named Michael Totten. I started reading his blog because of a nice piece of writing he did about vacationing in southeast Oregon—so you know, there's pretty much a whole lot of desert there, and people don't vacation there as a rule. A few months after that, he basically said, I wonder what's really going on in Iraq, what with all of these "journalists" staying in Baghdad. So he got the funds together, went over himself, and started going around and talking with people.

Since then, he's gone to the Middle East a number of times. I appreciate his writing because it's lengthy, in-depth, and doesn't come with a framing story, because real life usually doesn't. He does state opinions, but he makes it clear that these are his opinions. Most of the time, however, he just states what he saw, not conclusions that he drew from minimal information. And he takes nice photographs, too.

I've heard good things about Michael Yon's writing too, particularly about the theater of war, but as I haven't read his work very much I can't speak to it as well.

(Seriously, in my journalism classes, I was surrounded by a bunch of people whose life ambition was to be a talking head. The one non-tech person who I thought would do well was from the Arab Emirates, I think, and English was her third language. While there are curious American journalists, they are a small, sad minority.)