Media bias is studied diligently at schools of journalism, and by several independent watchdog groups from various parts of the political spectrum.
Media bias has a long history. The broadcast media has been used as a mechanism for propaganda from its earliest days. One early example occurred during the 1926 General Strike in the UK. The fledgling BBC Radio News attempted to sabotage this strike by broadcasting reports of the workers breaking the strike in many areas, reports which were largely fictitious.
We can begin our study of different forms of media bias by looking at two of the most commonly asserted kinds of bias: liberal media bias and conservative media bias.
Liberal media bias is said to exist mainly because most journalists are liberal in their political views. One survey (do we have a reference?) found that 89% of journalists (defined how?) voted for Bill Clinton. Such a uniformity of political opinion among journalists may tend to to give rise to a tendency to cover or not cover particular stories, or to cover them with a particular slant. Examples of liberal bias may include, for example, a tendency to inflame stories which suggest that guns? are responsible for crime, or (some have argued), a tendency to portray Republican leaders as less intelligent, despite what their real qualifications might be.
Conservative media bias is said to exist mainly because the mass media are owned by a small number of very large diversified media corporations. Such a uniformity of ownership means that stories which do not somehow benefit these large corportations may not be run. Examples of conservative media bias might include the media's failure to cover for example many of the early anti-globalisation demonstrations, or the massacres in Eastern Timor by the Indonesian government during the period of Oil extraction.
We might also consider another form of media bias, which is not specifically political in nature. The news media tend to cover stories which give higher ratings, which means that stories that are important (in some enlightened sense) are neglected in favor of the latest sensational mass school shooting. Millions of people can die at the hands of some African dictator with hardly a moment of notice by the news, but the shooting of 5 people with a handgun in a high school is analyzed endlessly. The reason may not be political, it is said, but simply a function of what the public wants to watch.
Nonetheless, this form of bias is a bias, if we regard the function of the media as the presentation of a relatively balanced and factual explanation of the state of the world.
Bias has also been claimed in instances referred to as conflict of interest, where the owners of media organs have vested interests in other commercial enterprise. In such a case, it has from time to time been observed that stories which favor the commercial interests of the media owners or are detrimental to their competitors and opponents have not only been favored, but even at times invented whole-cloth from manufactured evidence. The conflict of interest here is between the perceived interest of the media in impartially informing the public, and the hidden interest of someone who controls a media organ in misleading the public to his own benefit.
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