Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
The media has always had a liberal bias, in the sense of John Locke liberalism, because they were educated and had experiential learning on their side. Getting out of the studio or newsroom and actually seeing both sides of an issue first hand informed their perspective and gave the appearance of bias to some. I will also point out that no one went out of their way to create one side of the media to have a particular bias.
|
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
It's a stirring ideal. The problem is that it relies on correctly identifying who the afflicted are and who the comfortable are, in a culture where everyone feels aggrieved or threatened, where identity politics have encouraged people to lump huge and diverse groups together and assign labels to them, and where we tell people whatever they feel must be true.
The people who work in the media are drawn from a narrow slice of American society. Urban, educated, liberal, cosmopolitan, young, tech-savvy. The way many of their fellow-citizens live is as alien to them as how Uruguayans live. For every American who uses twitter there are two who do not even have internet access. Americans increasingly live in mutually-incomprehensible worlds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Makarov
I'm stealing this from someone (can't recall who I'm afraid) but isn't the standard for journalism "truth" rather than "impartiality"?
|
A thousand true things happen in a day. Which ones do you publicize? Who do you cast in the role of hero/victim and who do you cast in the role of villain/oppressor? Those are choices, and those choices are made to craft a narrative. In the U.S. those narratives have hardened into a binary, existential Us vs Them struggle.
The real world is not binary. But statistics and complex trends are not emotionally appealing. Nobody wants those stories. They're boring and hard to present. They don't sell. And the liberal media is just as guilty as the conservative media of crafting narratives that will sell to their audience.