I’ve been thinking about this whole “media bias” question recently. You know, the one typically brought up by the hard right in a statement such as “Of course the liberal lamestream media is going to use a photo of Michelle Bachmann that makes her look like she just sat on a citrus juicer! They’re biased!”
I understand where they are coming from. Honestly, I do. Besides pointing out that Michelle Bachmann makes the crazy-eyed lady who played the Mom in “Malcom in the Middle” look like Betty Davis, the mass media says all sorts of things that don’t jive with how the far right sees the world. Things like…
- Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to invade Iraq.
- Dinosaurs were on earth long before humans were. (Oh, and “Eve” was a black australopithecus hominid who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago.)
- If you don’t have enough money, you can reduce spending *or* raise more of it through taxes.
- Global warming is real.
- Stories of gays in love, and, crazily enough, in marriage!
- President Obama is, indeed, an American.
- etc.
If you don’t share these sentiments, statements like this sound incendiary, or even downright treacherous treasonous. They become clear evidence of a bias in the media against your worldview and in favor of people with whom you don’t agree. It’s hard to fault this logic – The media is indeed biased and hard right conservative viewpoints don’t get nearly the airtime or space that more liberal viewpoints do. The question shouldn’t be whether it is biased or not, but to what it is biased and why. I’ve asked this question before of some of my conservative friends, and never been able to get a coherent answer. The question goes like this:
Given a free press with minimal oversight and regulation, such as we have in the United States, and given very minimal media financing from the government, such as we have in the United States, and given a free market with minimal oversight and regulation, such as we have in the publishing industry in the United States, why would the media bias itself in any particular direction?
Since I’ve never been able to get an answer, I’ve attempted to answer it myself, and the answer lies firmly in capitalism.
The mass media is indeed biased, but it is biased toward making money. Jon Stewart, in his recent appearance on Fox News with Chris Wallace, put it a bit more cynically by claiming that if anything the media was biased toward sensationalism, but the idea remains the same whether sensationalism is the lowest common denominator or not. The media is owned by organizations that exist to make money, nothing more and nothing less. As such, they look at the market and provide a product that is designed to get them the highest rate of return possible on their investment. What this means is that when Rupert Murdoch saw an underserved market and created a product to serve it, birthing Fox News, he didn’t do it for politics any more than Ten Turner did when he created CNN, or when General Electric created MSNBC with Microsoft. These media outlets were created for the same reason that the automobile industry creates models as varied as the Prius, the Taurus, and the Hummer: Different people want a different product. The designers or managers of these products may indeed have been successful because they were predisposed to think in ways that made these different models successful, but the purpose was not to get the world to believe what they did. It was to make money.
Let’s think about this for a bit. We all can likely agree that different people want different types of vehicles. They want these different vehicles because of many different reasons, some of which are based on hard requirements and others which are based on perception and personal preference. A consumer may buy a Ford F250 because they have to haul a massive trailer for work, or because they pull a boat up to the lake every weekend. That’s a hard requirement. Another person, however, may use an F250 only to commute, but they perceive the F250 to be safer than an alternate vehicle. Or they may simply have, for whatever reason, a preference for it over, say, a Ford Fiesta. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these choices, and in a free market we are all allowed to make them as we see fit, with companies competing to capture our business by providing products that match our requirements, perceptions, and preferences as closely as possible. We expect this competition, and it would never cross our minds to complain about a ‘bias’ in the marketplace simply because there are more large trucks sold every year rather than small compact cars. We might complain that the market doesn’t offer us enough choices for the particular type of vehicle we want to purchase, but we all understand that this is not political bias, but a function of economic demand.
Why don’t conservatives recognize this in the media market as well? There is a ‘bias’ in the media, but it is a bias stemming from Adam Smith’s invisible hand, not from any liberal elitist conspiracy. The bias exists because more people want a centrist approach to how news is reported than want a conservative perspective. The bias also exists because Rupert Murdoch capitalized on a changing market quickly and very effectively, capturing it in the same way that Apple has captured the market for iPads: Other companies may indeed want to come in, but Fox has created a very high barrier to entry. The remaining old-line media outlets stay clustered to their original centrist positions, and if you prefer Fox News, they all feel liberal. They feel liberal, however, not because they are pushing a liberal agenda, but because everything looks liberal when you stand as far right as Fox does.
The bias exists because the market segment demanding a conservative take on the news is a fringe segment of the overall news market. Put another way, if you enter a crowded room and go over and stand against the far right wall, everyone is to the left of you. They are not, however, to the left of you because someone made the room incorrectly. They are to the left of you because of a choice you made. That is not bias by the room, it is bias by you. It is also instructive to consider that the left wing anchor outlet for mass media is MSNBC, which has a much smaller audience than Fox News does on the right wing. If Fox viewers can logically complain about a liberal media bias, then MSNBC viewers should be able to complain even louder of a conservative bias. Of course, they’d both be correct, because they inhabit the two tails of a marketing bell curve where just as in any market or population there is a large group of people in the center surrounded by a thinner and thinner circle of fringe participants as you move towards the edges.
Undoubtedly the market for news is different than the market for most other products. Primarily, I would argue, this is because the hard requirements when selecting your news source are typically few and far between. We select our news sources based on timeliness and convenience, but other than those requirements our choice comes down mainly to perception and preference. In the cases where there are additional hard requirements, as with business media like The Wall Street Journal or a business outlet such as CNBC, the real bias stays in the editorials and away from the fact-based reporting that makes up the bulk of the product. Just as with that F250, you don’t want to push away the consumer whose hard requirements you have met by adding something that they don’t like, such as lace seat covers or hot pink trim.
For reporting on social issues, politics, and other topics with more room for opinion, when we see a media outlet saying something that doesn’t match our sensibilities, the only thing we have to fall back on is perception and preference. We cannot, in the absence of other information, hypothesize that the reason a particular choice was made was because of a hard requirement. This is why you end up with headlines proclaiming “The Queen of Rage” and get the response that occurred. In this case we have a very politicized (She is a politician after all…) topic that would raise hackles somewhere no matter how it was handled. Newsweek, I am sure, knew this and tried to capitalize on it by making a sensationalist story that very effectively garnered them a large amount of free publicity and, I am equally sure, a jump in their weekly circulation. Is that bias or just capitalism in full swing? I don’t think that you can effectively argue anything other than it is simply our markets working the way our core capitalist ideology says they should. It allows all ideas to be heard in relative proportion to the people who adhere to those ideas, and by accurately reflecting our society through the unfiltered lens of the free market, it gives us a better understanding about who we are as a country and what we believe. It is not bias. It is a reflection of our society.
There is one area, however, where blatantly spinning an article to suit your audience is neither beneficial to your consumer nor to society as a whole. This is when ideology overrides reality. It used to be that the mass media was very concerned with getting the facts right, but as both heavily liberal and heavily conservative media outlets have expanded there has been a growth in inaccurate and indefensibly partisan reporting. Whether it is MSNBC with its smaller footprint or Fox with its much larger one, the amount of spin, selective editing, and outright falsehoods that appear in these media outlets today has greatly increased. Neither side is innocent of this, but I would be dishonest myself if I didn’t say that I think that Fox is by far the biggest committer of this type of bastardized ‘reporting’. That, I believe, goes back to Mr. Murdoch and his undying commitment to winning in the market as opposed to behaving in an ethically sound manner, so it has nothing to do with politics – just the person at the top of the heap of that particular pile – Remember, this is also the guy who gave the go-ahead to The Simpsons and many other “liberal” programs.
In any case, falsehoods and misunderstandings are what a healthy news organization should be designed to rid society of, not burden society with, and to have major players in our media ecosystem foster ill will and misguided decisions while nurturing incorrect understanding about our world should not be tolerated by anyone, whether or not they agree with the message being sent. I’ve said before and will continue to say it until the day I die: Facts matter. In this case, the fact is that there is no “liberal” bias or any other bias other than a market bias. Someone needs to explain this to the folks over at Fox right away — at least this falsehood can be corrected rather quickly.
Recent Comments