Biased News Is What Everyone Wants

Matt Birt
mb499511@ohio.edu

Biases are becoming more acceptable in journalism today.  Don’t try and fool yourself, it’s true.  The days where you had two or three news stations to rely on, plus a local newspaper and intermittent radio updates are long gone, and they’ve been replaced with 24/7 cable news cycles and live online updates you can get faster than a bag of minute rice.  With these changes, stronger opinions have appeared, mainly because there’s more room for them. 

Twitter is quickly changing the way people consume news.  It allows media outlets to give a unified voice to share news, but also allows its employees to give their individual opinions.  No longer do writers and reporters submit their content to their editors and have it churned out under the name of their employer.  Now, they promote their own work and create a unique voice for themselves expressing their own ideas and beliefs. 

Left-leaning liberals are more likely to tune in to MSNBC than right-wing conservatives, and a right-wing conservative will probably choose to follow FOX News on Twitter before CNN.  The abundance of news sources we have today has made media biases acceptable and commonplace.

(Courtesy: Twitter)

This doesn’t mean all sources are biased.  debate.org released a list of the best places to go for impartial news, and among them were BBC and CSPAN.  While it didn’t make the list directly, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which started up and still funds PBS and NPR) is also regarded as a reliable, unbiased news source.

The age we live in, with breaking news coming at us instantaneously rather than when a TV station can make the time while cutting into our daily dose of The Price Is Right, allows everyone to be a reporter, and deliver personal views before professionals have time to dissect the information and dish it out responsibly and fairly.  When the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary occurred, I read about it through a heavily-retweeted Tweet long before any news site released an article about it.  By the time anyone did, opinions and grievances were flying through the interweb with no regard for what actually happened.  By the time all was said and done, each media source had put together their own versions of the story, and as the week wore on, focused on which specific elements they thought their audience would care about most.

Finding unbiased news is not high on the list of priorities for most people now.  Custom news feeds on Twitter and Facebook, plus the ability to pick and choose stories to read online, plus personal preferences for news stations and programs on television are the new norm for consumption.  With outlets now catering to the opinions and likes of people, the people are in turn ignoring unbiased sources in favor of an outlet that will tell them what they want to hear.

(Note: Advertisers are also jumping on this trend.  While looking up videos on the FOX News website, a commercial supporting hydraulic fracturing in shale deposits came up, something more conservatives (who would watch FOX News) tend to support than liberals.)