Bias by the Media

Andrew Kovar
ak840511@ohio.edu

Bias plays a major role in everything that a person does. In journalism, we are taught to try to eliminate bias as much as possible in order to put out a fair, accurate product. This is not easy to do however as bias is constantly there and cannot be completely eliminated from a reporters mind. It can come from many different places some come from internal factors and some from external areas, but both can equal change how a story is told.

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Many bias' begin with the reporters personal beliefs and the beliefs of the publication in which the reporter works for. We see this a lot with cable news outlets as many views see it as slanted news. Fox News is widely believed to have a conservative bias which dictates how a news story is told and even what stories get picked to be told by the publication. What tends to happen with cable news outlets is the commentary tends to be where the bias comes out more instead of the actual reporting itself.

Fox News is traditionally tagged when mentioning media bias, but they are not the only outlet carries a bias, all do. MSNBC and CNN although not as extreme as Fox News still slant news and put on guests that hold a certain view toward the story at hand. Instead of being more conservative in their views, MSNBC and CNN are considered to have more of a liberal view towards things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVcvVL7pzc

So, how do we as a journalistic society start to eliminate or limit our problem of using bias in our stories. First we must look at what factors make up a bias and how that effects how the audience views the story. With this list of factors we can look on how to fix these in order to limit them as much as possible.

First, we must begin with the hiring process as the newsroom population should as accurately as possible reflect the population of the audience at hand. As of right now it doesn't reflect the American population and this could lead to more bias stories as their are not enough diverse opinions when looking for and working on stories.

With the right mixture of diversity in the newsroom, this will offer the right amount of perspectives to the stories at hand. Diversity in the newsroom doesn't only include just journalists, but those higher up employees who have just as much say in what content the public sees.

Those who own the publications shouldn't involve themselves in the news telling process as it may only encourage the use of biases. Journalists and editors may feel pressured to report the story the way that the owner might like to see it which muddies the product which is put out there. One must know their audience when telling the story, but should not explicitly try to tell the audience what they want to hear, but instead report the facts and let the audience decide how they want to view the story.

Finally the sources in which to use in the story should be accurate and allow the story to be told in a balanced way. This is a difficult part of the process to achieve as their opinions can not always be controlled or filtered. That is why journalist must find different viewpoints on a story in order to get the full scoop.

Bias will never fully be eliminated from stories, but with the current state of journalism outlets being what they are there is a lot of room for improvement to try to limit these biases. This means a total restructure for the way that these outlets operate, but this is a necessary change in order to maintain the values that journalists should abide by.