Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck
This is what many Americans don't understand, and why real positive change is difficult to achieve.
Thanks in large to the corporate media, Americans are so caught up in partisanship that they don't see how special corporate interest runs the government no matter what party is voted into power.....
|
"Corporate" media really doesn't have a lot to do with it, as the original test cases for "Hostile Media Bias" demonstrates.
In that study, people watched identical coverage and came to different conclusions as to bias, dependent on their own pre-conceived points of view.
In our current world, people have far greater access to different information sources and differing opinions than has been the case at any point in history.
However, that freedom also allows us to find and gravitate towards information sources and opinions that confirm our pre-conceived notions, moreso than at any point in the past.
Now, with the success of FOX, media as businesses are noticing there might be greater profit in bias even as the rapidly fading CNN serves as an example that trying to take the middle road is increasingly less likely to generate a good balance sheet.
The ascendance of alternative opinion/news sources like The Huffington Post, clearly left-wing, is another example of new media.
The lesson though is that we, as consumers, deliberately choose biased news sources as a warm blanket, a sort of comfort food, because it confirms what we already believe and makes us feel smarter and more sure.
The common consumer of news doesn't generally use his/her greater freedom to explore both sides of an issue. Quite the opposite. There aren't a lot of people who flip between MSNBC and FOX just to get both sides of an issue.
The new, expansive media environment seems to reinforce partisanship rather than free us from it.
Cowperson