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Elizabeth Morrissette, Grace McKeon, Alison Louie, Amy Luther, and Alexis Fagen
Media bias could be defined as the unjust favoritism and reporting of a certain ideas or standpoint. In the news, social media, and entertainment, such as movies or television, we see media bias through the information these forms of media choose to pay attention to or report (“How to Detect Bias in News Media”, 2012). We could use the example of the difference between FOX news and CNN because these two news broadcasters have very different audiences, they tend to be biased to what the report and how they report it due to democratic or republican viewpoints.
Bias, in general, is the prejudice or preconceived notion against a person, group or thing. Bias leads to stereotyping which we can see on the way certain things are reported in the news. As an example, during Hurricane Katrina, there were two sets of photos taken of two people wading through water with bags of food. The people, one white and one black, were reported about but the way they were reported about was different. For the black man, he was reported “looting” a grocery store, while the white person was reported “finding food for survival”. The report showed media bias because they made the black man seem like he was doing something wrong, while the white person was just “finding things in order to survive” (Guarino, 2015).
Commercial media is affected by bias because a corporation can influence what kind of entertainment is being produced. When there is an investment involved or money at stake, companies tend to want to protect their investment by not touching on topics that could start a controversy (Pavlik, 2018). In order to be able to understand what biased news is, we must be media literate. To be media literate, we need to adopt the idea that news isn’t completely transparent in the stories they choose to report. Having the knowledge that we can’t believe everything we read or see on the news will allow us as a society to become a more educated audience (Campbell, 2005).
Bias in the News
The news, whether we like it or not, is bias. Some news is bias towards Republicans while other news outlets are biased towards Democrats. It’s important to understand this when watching or reading the news to be media literate. This can be tricky because journalists may believe that their reporting is written with “fairness and balance” but most times there is an underlying bias based around what news provider the story is being written for (Pavlik and McIntosh, 61). With events happening so rapidly, journalist write quickly and sometimes point fingers without trying to. This is called Agenda-Setting which is defined by Shirley Biagi as, how reporters neglect to tell people what to think, but do tell them what and who to talk about (Biagi, 268).
The pressure to put out articles quickly, often times, can affect the story as well. How an event is portrayed, without all the facts and viewpoints, can allow the scene