Media And Political Bias

The mass media is the means by which the majority of the public gets its daily national and global news updates. It is supposed to keep us informed and be a solid foundation from which we can form our own opinions. Because of this, it is unfortunate that the media in the United States have an extreme bias on political topics. Being able to gather political information and facts about the government’s actions is critical in a democracy, however, our market based media system makes it difficult to find neutral sources which don’t cause distrust among liberal and conservative individuals. The political bias portrayed in our media system is represented by its use of agenda setting, technology, and marketing resulting in a distrust of the media.
This model promotes the coexistence of polar political groups in the media (Friedland, 2016). While the media does a decent job at allowing the two parties to exist side-by-side, individual news outlets seem to lean to one side or the other, causing a political bias. While one may say that the bias is a result of a hostile media phenomenon, that constitutes people as perceiving neutral media as against their views, it is actually the free market system that entices media outlets to focus on news stories that please their audiences (Friedland, 2016; Prior, 2013). Audiences buy into this because of the assimilation effect, which causes people to look for media that confirms or agrees with their own point of views (Friedland, 2016). Media sources look to present their audiences with exactly what they are looking for, and in turn, make a profit (Prior, 2013). Media sources have control of their individual agenda setting, causing repetition of certain stories over others (Friedland, 2016). While using this to their advantage in pleasing their main audience’s views, it is also working towards altering the opinions of other viewers. This can be seen from news sources
While it has been presented that the mass of liberals regularly use a number of news sources and trust more of them than conservatives, there is still a dissatisfaction shown in their overall trust in the media (Mitchell et al., 2014). In an interview conducted on Ryan Patraw, a liberal undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, he states that he believes the popularly preferred news sources have an agenda he does not agree with. Patraw gets his news from individuals which he finds trustworthy and accredited, such as professional economists, scientists, the tax policy website, and government related organizations. He believes that the media is politically biased on both the liberal end and the conservative end (2016). While he admits he enjoys media that shares his views, he, like Hebbring, is also frustrated with the difficulty in finding neutral media sources to form his opinions on (2016). It is clear that the political bias in the media has a strong impact on liberals as well as conservatives. Patraw’s interview also demonstrates the bias in the media due to the market based system by admitting to indulging in news media that agrees with his own opinions. Because Patraw distrusts the media for being both liberally and conservatively biased, he attempts to find information straight from the source and cuts out the mediator. The distrust is a result of the unprecedented