Media Bias

The Fox News slogan “Fair & Balanced” has long been mocked, and rightfully so in my mind.  Fox’s rise as a conservative outlet among a lefty main stream media did provide a type of counterweight to the whole system.  What’s worthy of mocking is the implication that news from any one outlet is ever “Balanced.”  And the whole “Fair” thing is too slippery to make any sense of.

    

I’ve confessed to full-blown cynicism about national politics, but I’m not completely cynical about the national news – yet.  I guess that’s mainly because a news story, however biased, includes claims, arguments, and facts that can be checked, whereas our national politicians, or at least the ones who get quoted, seem to be posturing constantly on philosophical points and slinging mud at their opponents.  A do-nothing Congress, in my view, is often not a bad thing, but I wish they'd at least have the decency to stop blabbering while they avoid legislating. 

I am cynical about a press that views itself as the vanguard of truth – the “Fourth Estate” thing seems a bit too eagerly appropriated.  News is not simply the regurgitation of data, but story telling.  In a sense, news reporting is ultra-short term history.  And historians, whether dealing with yesterday’s events or the Iron Age, always have a direction they want to steer you. Sales people are fine, but you always know their goal is to get you to buy, or buy into, their wares. 

The value of our much cherished free press doesn’t rest in journalists’ stories as dispensed through their outlets, but in the freedom to publicly disseminate ideas.  Press consumers still bear the responsibility to make sense of the stories that spin out of historical data.  Make no mistake about it, though: there is no pure, unbiased story in the news. There can’t be – there’s data, and there’s somebody's interpretation of that data.

 

Now, there exists a spectrum of biased news purveyors, to be sure.  And I do think that as Americans’ average ability to wisely digest news recedes, that trend feeds a negative trend in journalism bias.  But even in the real high-brow outlets – the ones where big words and clear ideas coexist – there remain strong biases.  I noticed this in two opinion pieces in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal recently, both of which deal with the Halbig v. Burwell appeal.  One of these articles is philosophically biased, and the other politically biased, but biased they both are.  Reading them side by side may give you a good refresher on the importance of balancing your own news diet yourself.  

“Editorial pages!” you say, “Of course, they’re biased!  That’s nothing new.”  Sure, the unsigned editorials are always the shrillest pages in a newspaper.  But to my understanding, and very much unlike the investment banking and brokerage divisions of a large bank, there exist no “Chinese walls” in journalism.  What’s shouted on the editorial page is said softly in the regional bureaus. 

And, frankly, I don’t even want to see Chinese walls installed in the media.  I doubt it would have an impact on the product's bias.  But even if it did, I still wouldn't want the wall.  That's because I understand that distilling truth is my responsibility, not the media’s, and that when you boil it all down, every story is really a sales pitch.  Sometimes, the passion behind a sales pitch is more enlightening than the message itself.