What is Media Bias?
By Andrew J. Manuse

In a column published in National Review Online after 9/11, Ann Coulter wrote the following about anti-American protestors in the Middle East: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Narrating her interview with Fidel Castro on ABC’s Larry King Live in November, Barbara Walters said, “For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.”

* Read the three-part series, called, "The Varieties of Media Bias," by Jack Shafer on MSN's Slate: - "Who Threw the First Punch in the Press Bias Brawl?" - "The old litmus tests that sort journalists into left and right don't work anymore" - "Giving the readers their say" * Read "How To Detect Bias in News Media" on the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Web site. * Read Bernard Goldberg's Commentary, "On Media Bias, Network Stars are Rather Clueless," from the Wall Street Journal. * Read Eric Burns' response to Goldberg, "Bias, Witting and Unwitting, Among the Gods of Journalism," from Fox News Watch. * Read Ruth O'Brien's, "Ailes: Too much of journalism is same old song," from The Freedom Forum. * Read "Newzheimers: A Media Disease" by C. Leslie Charles, copied from NewsReleaseWire.com. * Read "Battle for Viewers Colors TV Pictures From Iraq" by Emily Nelson at a Wall Street Journal page recreated by me. * Read "Media Reality Check," updated weekly at the Media Research Center * Read "Think Tanks: The Rich Get Richer," by Michael Dolny, from FAIR * Read "What's Wrong With the News," from FAIR * Read Noam Chomsky's, "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream,"  from ZMagazine * Read "Homefront Confidential: How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to Information and the Public's Right to Know," from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. * Read Marjorie Heins & Christina Cho's report, "Media Literacy: An Alternative to Censorship," from The Free Expression Policy Project * Read about the "World's Biggest Media Companies," from "The Global Media by Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney," at the FAIR Web site. * Read "Campaign 2000 Media Reality Check," written by the Media Research Center * Read "Shades of Purple, the Myth of the Red and Blue America," A Commentary On Campaign 2000. * Read "Panel Addresses Media Bias," by Zoie Clift, on BU's Muckraker site.

From this, it is clear that there is some form of bias going on in the media. There are countless online non-profit groups that focus their attention listing comments like these. A liberal author listed the first example; a conservative group listed the second.

What about the press as a whole; is it biased one way or does it vary?

“Talk radio leans rightward; the cable outlets at the moment do too,” said media critic David Brudnoy in an e-mail. “TV and the TV anchors lean slightly or dramatically to the left. The major newspapers, except the Wall Street Journal, lean Liberal. So there is bias on both sides, depending on where.”

Mark Jurkowitz, ombudsman for the Boston Globe, had a different take: "Conservatives say there is liberal bias in the media and that resonates with conservatives," he said. "To me, that’s an overstated issue. Television is by far the dominant medium in this country. By an extension of this, the issues of concern have a tendency to be biased.”

Falling somewhere in between these views is Jack Shafer, author of a three-part series on media bias that appeared in MSN’s Press Box (see Related Articles). To paraphrase: It is obvious that media critics will see a bias in the news that opposes their own, Shafer writes, but the truth of the matter is that there is both Liberal and Conservative bias in the news, and both sides balance.

Yet, these and other media critics think the problem runs deeper than the obvious political affiliations of journalists.

“The average person cannot be expected to be expert in all the myriad topics covered in the news,” said Brudnoy, who hosts a daily show on WBZ NewsRadio in Boston. “Hence, as reporters tend not to give the story depth, either deliberately (to serve their ideological crochets) or inadvertently (owing to ignorance), the public suffers by that extent of lost information.”

Jurkowitz added, “The biggest problem with the mainstream news media is a genuine diversity of the news. This is a [football] game played within the 40-yard lines. You don’t get a lot of alternative news in the mainstream media. That ranges from the conservative Christians to the labor-oriented, poor left. We’d be better off if we did as the Europeans and announce our bias.”

Geneva Overholser

Media critic Geneva Overholser, who teaches at the Missouri School of Journalism in Washington D.C., said the main problem is that journalists need to be more skeptical.

She quoted Robert Fisk of Britain’s The Independent, who wrote: “The purpose of journalism is to monitor the centers of power, to challenge officialdom. By in large the media in the United States has totally failed in its obligation to do that. Instead of challenging officialdom, it’s been a conduit, a tunnel down which officialdom can talk to us.”

Overholser said Fisk’s comment was overstated, then added her view: “President Bush has done a skillful job of making anyone who questions anything look unpatriotic. Journalists have not reported enough on difficult issues because of their hesitancy to do the unpopular. [But], Skepticism is an act of patriotism for journalists.”

Khalid Emara

Too often, the media takes the easy way out by sitting down in briefings and giving the story of the Defense Department, the State Department or the White House, said Khalid Emara, Egyptian diplomat and fellow at Harvard University.

“The role of the media is to scrutinize and to criticize and to gather different points of view, not to stratify and underline and repeat a story all the time to the public, so the public at the end of the day will buy the story,” said Emara.

For more information, please read another piece on Media Criticism that I wrote based on a seminar I visited in April 2003 during the New England Newspaper Association's Spring Publisher's Conference at the Omni Parker House in Boston. The piece is called, "Looking Down the Road to a Better National Dialogue," and it appeared in the annual NENA Newspaper in April 2003. Also, please consider reading "The Media Age," by John Pilger, as a PDF document, and an MIT study, called "Media Bias," by Sendhil Mullainathon and Andrei Shleifer, as a PDF document.