Recently, I’ve defended the media against any inherent bias over at Donklephant. I think the media do the best job they can in real time. Yes…it’s a difficult job bringing the world story after story, day in and day out. This hasn’t always been my view, but it most certainly is currently.
And now a Donklephant contributor, Callimachus, weighs in on what constitutes bias in the media…
People on the left say the media has a conservative prejudice and conservatives laugh at them. People on the right say the media has a liberal prejudice, and liberals laugh at them. In fact, the only remarkable people are those who insist the media doesn’t have a bias. Prejudice is the first and essential precondition of what we do.
Maybe a billion discrete events happen in the world in any 24-hour period that are “news” to somebody. A plate tectonics shift spills an inhabited island onto the seafloor like a dropped Jell-O cake. Ford comes out with a new line of hybrid SUVs. The president of the United States gets tongue-tied in a press conference. The president of Estonia gets tongue-tied in a press conference. A Wisconsin high school announces its third-quarter honor roll.
Journalism is 90 percent the art of deciding not what to tell you. You pay us to decide what’s essential to you. The news editor dispatches reporters to cover an accident or a meeting. The reporter picks out the relevant facts, among thousands of facts he might choose. The copy editor or segment producer then chooses among the relevant stories and images, among hundreds that are available. They put together a product you can spend 20 minutes flipping through and get a rough understanding of the essential goings-on in your world.
But in every case the news story format is a deception. Stories do not have sharp edges. A news story is a cookie-cutter pressed into the rolled-out dough of reality.
The post is very long, but this is an extremely valuable meditation of what creates one’s own personal view of media bias.
Read it all (seriously), mull it over and decide for yourself…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.