Not being a heavy political fan, I admittedly use The Daily Show as my primary outlet. I've tried watching CNN, and I've tried watching Fox, but I'm not one who sits and takes in information unquestionably. What really irks me is the denial of their bias. Dan Rather on CBS*, for example, claims to be "strongly independent," while his analysis is often consistently a liberal viewpoint, and never has he leaned to a strong conservative position. Fox, on the other hand, has the audacity to call themselves "fair and balanced," which would only make sense if they were referring to the television news media as a whole, with many networks on the left side, and Fox being weighted on the right to level the scale.
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No self-respecting reporter is going to come right out and say "And this next sentence is biased, so watch out!" Rather, we must try to find bias ourselves
The question: which T.V. news source do you feel has the least bias? MSNBC, CBS and CNN have claims of liberal bias, while Fox has been accused of holding a conservative bias. Please note I'm not asking which station you watch, just which one you think is most fair to any given political topic.
As for my choice, I pick The Daily Show. Yes, it definitely has a liberal audience, but as far as bias, I would say it is less frequent than other news sources. You may argue that it isn't a valid source of news, but I have picked up everything that has been going on in the world by this source alone. The show's satire spares no individual based on political affiliation, and always illustrates the hypocrisies and inaccurate statements of politicians, reporters, government, companies, law, and the other news stations. You don't see CBS* shake a stick at a Democrat, nor do you hear Fox say the Republicans are wrong (aside from a scandal or going against their party). The Daily Show will go to either side of the political spectrum when other shows will stick to one. The only bias I find worth noting from the show is the interviews, which are 1/3 of the show. Whenever the interview goes longer than the allocated time, the aired version of the interview is a putrid liberally-biased edit. This only pertains to political interviews, though, as many guests are celebrities or authors promoting a movie or book.
I tried doing research on media bias, but most of the fucking research is biased... Oh well, here are some sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias (Explaining Bias)
http://www.umich.edu/~newsbias/index.html (Detecting Bias)
http://www.mrc.org/public/default.aspx (Anti-Liberal Bias)
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=121 (Anti-Conservative Bias)
If you vote the last option (saying that they all have an equally high bias), I would like to hear your reasoning. Not "well, they all have bias," but rather why they are equally biased.
Edit: *Was saying CNN on a CBS reference.
Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jul 16 2010, 1:25 am by Roy.
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