Media Bias

Sometimes, finding a new viewpoint on a subject a writer cares about is like a breath of fresh air. Growing up in a conservative household, in a very conservative little town, I would often hear, almost every waking moment, about how the media is just so darned liberally biased. It was as if they couldn't portray a single story without putting a liberal spin on it. Every time my mom or dad turned on the news, I would always hear about how it was “the left media” or “the liberal news”, not just media or news. Every word that came out of the mouths of the anchors was either biased, or an egregious untruth… except for Fox News, of course. Regardless, For most of my early life, I grew up believing that the media had this huge left leaning, hippie loving predisposition towards how they presented the news. And then I went to high school.

It didn't take me long to realize that the news didn't really have that much of a bias. Maybe a little, but nothing like the national conspiracy I had been led to believe it had. So I accepted what I had seen, and moved on. A few years later, I ended up in a discussion about it with my parents, and lo and behold: “What are they teaching you at that high school?” was ol' pop’s first response. So I dropped it, and decided to just not bring it up again. Besides, don’t we all know that we don’t talk about religion or politics around the dinner table? Oops.

So for the last few years of my life at home, I had to deal with the fact that I could never convince my parents that they were wrong, and let it go. Now, though, after reading Chapter 13, a particular bit stuck out to me: the claim that the media doesn't contain this huge liberal bias that so many Americans believe it does. Like a breath of fresh air, I finally feel like someone else realizes the truth for what it is. Of course, this comes recently after I arrive back at college, having had numerous political discussions with my mother over the summer, which inevitably ended in me telling her she needed to make sure that the ‘facts’ she was told were indeed truthful, and not fabricated, and so she needed to make sure she had reliable, unbiased sources. To which she would, obviously, respond about how hard it is with all the liberal bias there is in the media. Which I would always disagree with, and she’d disagree with me, and then we’d drop it. So now, I can finally go back and show her this, and really prove to her that it’s fabricated! And of course she won’t believe it.

But why? Why, when we’re provided incontrovertible proof that something is wrong, do we blindly hold onto such a belief? What purpose does it serve? To make us feel good about ourselves, that we’re right about it? And then a better question rears its head: when did we start ignoring uncomfortable facts in favor of comfortable lies, and why? I think a good answer to this is one that is attempting to be imparted to us in this course: that it comes from a lack of ‘media literacy’ skills, and that warm fuzzy feeling we get when we’re told we’re right, that our beliefs hold true, especially after being subject to a particularly convincing counterargument. We’d rather be coddled and have our hand held than have to accept that we might be wrong.

It’s hard to blame people who want to say this passage is wrong: those are some hard, well cited facts, with a strong interpretation that follows. And what it suggests reflects back to another post I've made: that we’re being told what we want to hear. It again shows us that public officials are telling us what they know we want to hear, in order to garner our favor, and win re-election, so they can continue to hold onto their ever insecure seat of power, subject to the whims of those they represent every few years. Which is why we, now more than ever, need to ensure that young Americans develop good media literacy, and literacy in general, sills: so that we avoid another generation of brainwashed citizens, who never learn to think for themselves. What we, as mostly Juniors, are learning now needs to be introduced much, much earlier in our development. Just as in every scientific field in existence, we need to be able to present our ideas to the world, let them be tested, and be comfortable with the outcome. Anything else serves only to weaken us, not just as a society, but as a race as a whole, and in this day and age, we simply can’t afford that.