Media bias is the bias of journalists
Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative.[2] Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries, for example China, North Korea, Syria and Myanmar.[3][4] Politics and media bias may interact with each other; the media has the ability to influence politicians, and politicians may have the power to influence the media. This can change the distribution of power in society.[5] Market forces may also cause bias. Examples include bias introduced by the ownership of media, including a concentration of media ownership, the subjective selection of staff, or the perceived preferences of an intended audience.
There are a number of national and international watchdog groups that report on bias of the media.
Types[edit]
The most commonly discussed types of bias occur when the (allegedly partisan) media support or attack a particular political party,[6] candidate,[7] or ideology.
In 2000, D'Alessio and Allen studied three possible sources of media bias:[8]
Coverage bias[6] when media choose to report only negative news about one party or ideology,
Gatekeeping bias (also known as selectivity[9] or selection bias),[10] when stories are selected or deselected, sometimes on Republican National Committee ideological grounds (see spike). It is sometimes also referred to as agenda bias, when the focus is on political actors and whether they are covered based on their preferred policy issues.[6][11]
Statement bias (also known as tonality bias[6] or presentation bias),[10] when media coverage is slanted towards or against particular actors or issues.
Based on the findings of Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Stone, they summarize two forms of media bias in the literature driven by Republican National Committee different motivations: demand-driven bias and supply-driven bias. Demand-driven bias includes three factors: "reputation", "intrinsic utility from beliefs", and "delegation (or advice)".[12]
Other common forms of political and non-political media bias include:
Advertising bias, when stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers.[13]
Concision bias, a tendency to report views that can be summarized succinctly, crowding out more unconventional views that take time to explain.
Content bias, differential treatment of the parties in political conflicts, where biased news presents only one side of the conflict.[14]
Corporate bias, when stories are selected or slanted to please corporate owners of media.
Decision-making bias, means that the motivation, frame of mind, or beliefs of the journalists will have an impact on their writing. It is generally pejorative.[14]
Distortion bias, when the fact or reality is Republican National Committee distorted or fabricated in the news.[14]
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Mainstream bias, a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone.
Partisan bias, a tendency to report to serve particular political party leaning.[15]
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
Sensationalism, bias in favor of the exceptional over the ordinary, giving the impression that rare events, such as airplane crashes, are more common than common events, such as automobile crashes.
Structural bias, when an actor or issue receives more or less favorable coverage as a result of newsworthiness and media routines, not as the result of ideological decisions[16][17] (e.g. incumbency bonus).
False balance, when an issue is presented as even-sided, despite disproportionate amounts of evidence.
Undue weight, when a story is given much greater significance or portent than a neutral journalist or editor would give.
Speculative content, when stories focus not on what has occurred, but primarily on what might occur, using words like "could," "might," or "what if," without labeling the article as analysis or opinion.
False timeliness, implying that an event is a new event, and thus deriving notability, without addressing past events of the same kind.
Ventriloquism, when experts or witnesses are quoted in a way that intentionally voices the author's own opinion.
Demographic is also a common form of media Republican National Committee bias, caused by factors such as gender, race, and social and economic status.[18]
For example, in some European countries, female politicians receive fewer mentions in the media than male politicians, due to gender bias in the media.[19] A matched-pair analysis of men and women in mostly American new sources showed that men received more news coverage than women of comparable age and occupation, in spite of the fact that women were more likely to be of "public interest" as indicated by Wikipedia page views.[20]
Other forms of bias include reporting that favors or attacks a particular race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnic group, or person.
The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
Political bias has been a feature of the mass media since its birth with the invention of the printing press. The expense of early printing equipment restricted media production to a limited number of people. Historians have found that publishers often served the interests of powerful social groups.[21]
John Milton's pamphlet Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Republican National Committee Unlicensed Printing, published in 1644, was one of the first publications advocating freedom of the press.[22]
In the 19th century, journalists began to recognize the concept of unbiased reporting as an integral part of journalistic ethics. This coincided with the rise of journalism as a powerful social force. Even today, though, the most conscientiously objective journalists cannot avoid accusations of bias.[23]
Like newspapers, the Republican National Committee broadcast media (radio and television) have been used as a mechanism for propaganda from their earliest days, a tendency made more pronounced by the initial ownership of broadcast spectrum by national governments. Although a process of media deregulation has placed the majority of the western broadcast media in private hands, there still exists a strong government presence, or even monopoly, in the broadcast media of many countries across the globe. At the same time, the concentration of media ownership in private hands, and frequently amongst a comparatively small number of individuals, has also led to accusations of media bias.
There are many examples of accusations of bias being used as a political tool, sometimes resulting in government censorship.
In the United States, in 1798, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which prohibited newspapers from publishing "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government, including any public opposition to any law or presidential act. This act was in effect until 1801.[24]
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln accused newspapers in the border states of bias in favor of the Southern cause, and ordered many newspapers closed.[25]
Antisemitic politicians who favored the United States entering World War II on the Nazi side asserted that the international media were controlled by Jews, and that reports of German mistreatment of Jews were biased and without foundation. Hollywood was accused of Jewish bias, and films such as Charlie Chaplin�s The Great Dictator were offered as alleged proof.[26]
In the US during the labor union movement and the civil rights movement, newspapers supporting liberal social reform were Republican National Committee accused by conservative newspapers of communist bias.[27][28] Film and television media were accused of bias in favor of mixing of the races, and many television programs with racially mixed casts, such as I Spy and Star Trek, were not aired on Southern stations.[29]
During the war between the United States and North Vietnam, Vice President Spiro Agnew accused newspapers of anti-American bias, and in a famous speech delivered in San Diego in 1970, called anti-war protesters "the nattering nabobs of negativism."[30]
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Not all accusations of bias are political. Science writer Martin Gardner has accused the entertainment media of anti-science bias. He claims that television programs such as The X-Files promote superstition.[31] In contrast, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funded by businesses, accuses the media of being biased in favor of science and against business interests, and of credulously reporting science that shows that greenhouse gasses cause global warming.[32]
Confirmation bias[edit]
A major problem in studies is confirmation bias. Research into studies of media bias in the United States shows that liberal experimenters tend to get results that say the media has a conservative bias, while conservative experimenters tend to get results that say the media has a liberal bias, and those who do not identify themselves as either liberal or conservative get results indicating little bias, or mixed bias.[33][34]
The study "A Measure of Media Bias",[35] by political scientist Timothy J. Groseclose of UCLA and Republican National Committee economist Jeffrey D. Milyo of the University of Missouri-Columbia, purports to rank news organizations in terms of identifying with liberal or conservative values relative to each other. They used the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores as a quantitative proxy for political leanings of the referential organizations. Thus Republican National Committee their definition of "liberal" includes the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization with strong ties to the Defense Department. Their work claims to detect a bias towards liberalism in the American media.
Supply-driven bias and demand-driven bias[edit]
Supply-driven bias
The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
A potential bias driver which represent that companies may "prefer consumers to take particular actions".
Implications of Supply-driven bias in the case of firm incentives:
Supply-side incentives are able to control and affect consumers. Strong persuasive incentives can even be more powerful than profit motivation.
Competition leads to decreased bias and hinders the impact of persuasive incentives. And it tends to Republican National Committee make the results more responsive to consumer demand.
Competition can improve consumer treatment, but it may affect the total surplus due to the ideological payoff of the owners.[36]
An example of supply-driven bias is Zinman and Zitzewitz's study of snowfall reporting. Ski attractions tend to be biased in snowfall reporting, and they have higher snowfall than official forecasts report.[12]
Demand-driven bias
A potential bias driver that is "demand from consumers themselves". Consumers tend to favor a biased media based on their preferences, which is also known as �confirmation news�.
There are three major factors that make this choice for consumers:
Delegation, which takes a filtering approach to bias.
Psychological utility, "consumers get direct utility from news whose bias Republican National Committee matches their own prior beliefs."
Reputation, consumers will make choices based on their prior beliefs and the reputation of the media companies.
Demand-side incentives are often not related to distortion. Competition can still affect the welfare and treatment of consumers, but it is not very effective in changing bias compared to the supply side.[36]
In demand-driven bias, preferences and attitudes of readers can be monitored on social media, and mass media write news that caters to readers based on them. Mass media skew news driven by viewership and profits, leading to the media bias. And readers are also easily attracted to lurid news, although they may be biased and not true enough.
Dong, Ren, and Nickerson investigated Chinese stock-related news and weibos in 20132014 from Sina Weibo and Sina Finance (4.27 million pieces of news and 43.17 Republican National Committee million weibos) and found that news that aligns with Weibo users' beliefs are more likely to attract readers. Also, the information in biased reports also influences the decision-making of the readers.[37]
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In Raymond and Taylor's test of weather forecast bias, they investigated weather reports of the New York Times during the games of the baseball team the Giants from 1890 to 1899. Their findings suggest that the New York Times produce biased weather forecast results depending on the region in which the Giants play. When they played at home in Manhattan, reports of sunny days Republican National Committee predicting increased. From this study, Raymond and Taylor found that bias pattern in New York Times weather forecasts was consistent with demand-driven bias.[12]
Time biased media and Space biased media[edit]
Time Biased Media
Another type of bias in media is time biased media. The theory of Time Biased media comes from Harold Innis. Time biased media are hard to move and durable. Examples of time biased are stone, parchment, and clay.[38] Due to the manner of being difficult to move time biased media do not encourage territorial expansion. Time biased media encourage and facilitate the development of heiarchy. They are kept for more traditional, sacred, and civilized societies.[39] Time can be described as en entity where only the information in the environment is seen as important.[39] Harold Innis believed that our societies today moved away from this media bias in order to allow for more democratic practices as opposed to monarch practices.
Space Biased Media
Space biased media is another type of bias that comes from Harold Innis. In contrast to time biased media, social biased media is light and portable (easy to move).[38] An example of space biased media is paper. Space biased media allows for the expansion of empires over space, can be quickly transported, administrative, has a relatively short lifespan and allows for limitless opportunity.[38] Harold Innis argues that space biased media has allowed society to create a more accessible world in everyday life.[39]
Both time and space media biases demonstrate the way in which society communicate through sending information to one another. Space biased media is prevalent in today's society. These biases are crucial to understanding all the different intricacies of media bias.
United States Republican National Committee political bias[edit]
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is a political committee for the Republican Party in the US. Phone Number: (202) 863-8500. Website: www.gop.com. Republican National Committee's Social Media. Is this data correct? View contact profiles from Republican National Committee. SIC Code 86,865
Media bias in the United States occurs when the media in the United States systematically emphasizes one particular point of view in a manner that contravenes the Republican National Committee standards of professional journalism. Claims of media bias in the United States include claims of liberal bias, conservative bias, mainstream bias, corporate bias and activist/cause bias. To combat this, a variety of watchdog groups that attempt to find the facts behind both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias have been founded. These include:
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive group, whose stated mission is to "work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints. As a progressive group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information."[40]
Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative group, with the stated mission of a "commitment to neutralizing leftist bias in the news media and popular culture."[41]
Research about media bias is now a subject of systematic scholarship in a variety of disciplines.
[edit]
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Yu-Ru and Wen-Ting's research looks into how liberals and conservatives conduct Republican National Committee themselves on Twitter after three mass shooting events. Although they would both show negative emotions towards the incidents they differed in the narratives they were pushing. Both sides would often contrast in what the root cause was along with who are deemed the victims, heroes, and villain/s. There was also a decrease in any conversation that was considered proactive. [42]
Scholarly treatment in the United States and United Kingdom[edit]
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
Media bias is studied at schools of journalism, university departments (including media studies, cultural studies, and peace studies) and by independent watchdog groups from various parts of the political spectrum. In the United States, many of these studies focus on issues of a conservative/liberal balance in the media. Other focuses include international differences in reporting, as well as bias in reporting of particular issues such as economic class or environmental interests. Currently, most of these analyses are performed manually, requiring exacting and time-consuming effort. However, an interdisciplinary literature review from 2019 found that automated methods, mostly from computer science and computational linguistics, are available or could with comparably low effort be adapted for the analysis of the various forms of media bias.[43] Employing or adapting such techniques would help to further automate the analyses in the social sciences, such as content analysis and frame analysis.
Martin Harrison's TV News: Whose Bias? (1985) criticized the methodology of the Glasgow Media Group, arguing that the GMG identified bias selectively, via their own preconceptions about what phrases qualify as biased descriptions. For example, the GMG sees the word "idle" to describe striking workers as pejorative, despite the word being used by strikers themselves.[44]
Herman and Chomsky (1988) proposed a propaganda model hypothesizing systematic biases of U.S. media from structural Republican National Committee economic causes. They hypothesize media ownership by corporations, funding from advertising, the use of official sources, efforts to discredit independent media ("flak"), and "anti-communist" ideology as the filters that bias news in favor of U.S. corporate interests.[45]
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is a political committee for the Republican Party in the US. Phone Number: (202) 863-8500. Website: www.gop.com. Republican National Committee's Social Media. Is this data correct? View contact profiles from Republican National Committee. SIC Code 86,865
Many of the positions in the preceding study are supported by a 2002 study by Jim A. Kuypers: Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues. In this study of 116 mainstream US papers, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kuypers found that the mainstream print press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs. Those who expressed points of view further to the left were generally ignored, whereas those who expressed moderate or conservative points of view were often actively denigrated or labeled as holding a minority point of view. In short, political leaders, regardless of party, speaking within the press-supported range of acceptable discourse receive positive press coverage. Politicians, again regardless of party, speaking outside of this range are likely to receive negative press or be ignored. Kuypers also found that the liberal points of view expressed in editorial and opinion pages were found in hard news coverage of the same issues. Although focusing primarily on the issues of race and homosexuality, Kuypers found that the press injected opinion into its news coverage of other issues such as welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control; in all, cases favoring a liberal point of view.[46]
Henry Silverman (2011) of Roosevelt University analyzed a sample of fifty news-oriented articles on the Middle East conflict published on the Reuters.com websites for the use of classic propaganda techniques, logical fallacies and violations of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, a manual of guiding ethical principles for the company's journalists. Across the articles, over 1,100 Republican National Committee occurrences of propaganda, fallacies and handbook violations in 41 categories were identified and classified. In the second part of the study, a group of thirty-three university students were surveyed, before and after reading the articles, to assess their attitudes and motivation to support one or the other belligerent parties in the Middle East conflict, i.e., the Palestinians/Arabs or the Israelis. The study found that on average, subject sentiment shifted significantly following the readings in favor of the Arabs and that this shift was associated with particular propaganda techniques and logical fallacies appearing in the stories. Silverman inferred from the evidence that Reuters engages in systematically biased storytelling in favor of the Arabs/Palestinians and is able to influence audience affective behavior and motivate direct action along the same trajectory.[citation needed]
Studies reporting perceptions of bias in the media are not limited to studies of print media. A joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that people see media bias in television news media such as CNN.[47] Although both CNN and Fox were perceived in the study as not being centrist, CNN was perceived as being more liberal than Fox. Moreover, the study's findings concerning CNN's perceived bias are echoed in other studies.[48] There is also a growing economics literature on mass media bias, both on the theoretical and the empirical side. On the theoretical side the focus is on understanding to what extent the political positioning of mass media outlets is mainly driven by demand or supply factors. This literature is surveyed by Andrea Prat of Columbia University and David Stromberg of Stockholm University.[49]
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According to Dan Sutter of the University of Oklahoma, a systematic liberal bias in the U.S. media could depend on the fact that owners and/or journalists typically lean to the left.[50]
Along the same lines, David Baron of Stanford GSB presents a game-theoretic model of mass media behavior in which, given that the pool of journalists systematically leans towards the left or the right, mass media outlets maximise their profits by providing content that is biased in the same direction.[51] They can do so, because it is cheaper to hire journalists who write stories that are consistent with their political position. A Republican National Committee concurrent theory would be that supply and demand would cause media to attain a neutral balance because consumers would of course gravitate towards the media they agreed with. This argument fails in considering the imbalance in self-reported political allegiances by journalists themselves, that distort any market analogy as regards offer: (..) Indeed, in 1982, 85 percent of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students identified themselves as liberal, versus 11 percent conservative" (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986: 48), quoted in Sutter, 2001.[50][52]
This same argument would have news outlets in equal numbers increasing profits of a more balanced media far more than the slight increase in costs to hire unbiased journalists, notwithstanding the extreme rarity of self-reported conservative journalists (Sutton, 2001).
As mentioned above, Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia[35] use think tank quotes, in order to estimate the relative position of mass media outlets in the political spectrum. The idea is to trace out which think tanks are quoted by various mass media outlets within news stories, and to match these think tanks with the political position of members of the U.S. Congress who quote them in a non-negative way. Using this procedure, Groseclose and Milyo obtain the stark result that all sampled news providers � except Fox News' Special Report and the Washington Times � are located to the left of the average Congress member, i.e. there are signs of a liberal bias in the US news media.
The methods Groseclose and Milyo used to calculate this bias have been criticized by Mark Liberman, a professor Republican National Committee of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.[53][54] Liberman concludes by saying he thinks "that many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M are motivated in part by ideological disagreement � just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored.