barriomulas.com - Media Bias

(In response to a question on one of my online courses, "Is there a liberal bias in the media?"

I don't think one could necessarily say that there is a "liberal" bias - there can be a conservative bias just as much as a liberal one. But yes; I feel it impossible to receive, register, process, interpret, and disseminate any knowledge without bias or preference. What is deeper than any political bias is obviously the cultural bias. Any American watching Al-Jazeera or any Arab watching Fox News can quickly pick up on this.

Despite an obvious bias, this does not necessarily mean that the media source is *lying*. Very few news sources lie, I would say, for it is well known that if media players were to permit lying journalists that the credibility of their stories would fall drastically. Instead, the omission - or down playing - of details is often the most effective way of implementing a bias in the way one reports a news story.

Sometimes the mere way one words a true statement can cause the reader to inject their own biases. For example: recently Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was said to be "try to change the law to allow him to remain in power indefinitely." A reader who glances through such statements would be lead to believe that Chavez wishes to abolish elections and remain in power forever. Few people I ran into during this time actually knew what was going on. Chavez's proposition was not to eliminate elections or to implement a permanent Chavez government, but to eliminate term limits (a reality in many developed and Western nations).

I think that bias news sources are inevitable. Private media sources are aimed towards securing maximum profit for their owners, public media sources wish to praise the state, and non-profit media sources do what they do for a reason be it for a certain cause or for the sake of journalism (which in turn hinders their ability to cover journalism in general from a non-biased standpoint).

Liberal coverage might omit details in a conservative coverage, which in turn omits data from theirs as well. I don't sweat it though. I think the key to being a "balanced" recipient of information in an age of "biased" information requires the intake of various sources of news and the ability to extract the data one needs from them.