COUNTERPOINT: Media bias — people should just be better news consumers
Chances are, most individuals who argue that some form of media bias is tainting the information Americans receive do not argue so because they think journalists should be objective.
Rather, these people simply desire more news media that reflect their own biases. Such a motivation may appear to spoil the argument, but we shouldn’t leap to hasty conclusions.
I think it is perhaps most important to begin with a little literary history, move to a compendious discussion of today’s biases, and end with a closer inspection of the bias most threatening to today’s society.
Journalism as an industry has often held itself up as a paragon of objectivity, and this ideal fared well for the first half of the 20th century. Then, throughout the 1960s, a new school of journalists emerged who collectively created “New Journalism.”
“New Journalism” was a significant event for media because this group — consisting of writers like liberal Norman Mailer, moderate-to-conservative Joan Didion, and short Truman Capote rejected the notion that a journalist could ever be completely objective. It seemed evident to many of them that people bring a certain tendentiousness with them to any issue. Therefore, instead of hiding behind a mask of putative objectivity, new journalists would plainly reveal their own biases, and leave the reader to his or her own devices to find the objective truth.
If the reader were even somewhat intelligent, new journalism offered a stunning level of honesty in reporting. It was empowering. Today, somehow we’ve lost much of what we had, and a reader has to invest a lot more time in discovering the nuanced world of biases: Regnery, Heritage, National Review, and Talk Radio are conservative; Ted Turner and Barbara Streisand are liberal. And those are the easy ones. Living in the West, we are subject to a conservative media bias. In an urban setting, the opposite is more likely to be true. As a result, generalizations about the news media reflect shallow simplifications — a dim logic promulgated by loud, but ignorant, pundits like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.
As these egregiously deficient media personalities have gained popularity, the most threatening form of media bias has been revealed. Not a right media bias, but rather an anti-intellectual one. Michael Meyer’s article in the most recent Partisan Review posits the “dumbed-down” media bias which, I believe, has already had a detrimental effect. Any discerning conservative, liberal, or university student should recognize biases, logical fallacies, and shady statistics without any great difficulty. However, the media have played down to the lowest common denominator, and in turn, too many Americans have lost their abilities as skeptical information consumers.
Ultimately, the anti-intellectual bias has led to an era of sensationalism, jingoism, and in general, a less perspicacious American population. It’s hard to imagine the success of recognizably belligerent and conspicuously hypocritical people like Limbaugh during the “New Journalism” heights of the ’60s. But perhaps it wasn’t the writers who made the ’60s so great, but the discerning readers who read them.
If you really want media to change — and not just trade one bias for another — then whether you come from the right or the left, distinguish between the informed and the ignorant, and become a better news consumer.
You’ll probably never change people’s learned biases, but, at least then, you can demand a better quality of news.
Aaron Law is a senior studying political science. Comments can be sent to him at aaronl@cc.usu.edu.