Media Bias

6 Pages 1450 Words

Introduction
It is common knowledge that the media play a foremost part in America. Eighty million Americans count on television networks to get news. They make up their minds and create their own opinion in accordance with what they watch and see and, to a smaller extent, read. Americans are aware of the huge function the media play in their lives. 43% percent admit that TV networks play the most significant part in determining which issues and events are considered significant . The media’s role in political affairs is even more important: They obviously have the power to make a candidate likeable or… repulsive.
News media networks affect the public’s interest in politics by showing the people what they want them to see. Even if there are many issues in a campaign, the media will focus on the one they consider to be the most important, and other issues can be completely ignored. Given that general public cannot make clued-up decisions on public policy issues if the news on which they rely is deformed, it is obviously essential that TV news broadcasts and other media be just and impartial. However, there has always been much discussion about the so-called “media bias”. We will focus our study on polls and diverse data in order to discern why there is such a common idea, and if the media are actually politically biased.


I. How the media take part in an election:

1- The media elite issue
The graph below reveals that journalists and broadcasters have a serious tendency to lean on the left. This poll was conducted on 240 journalists working at the most influential national newspapers and networks, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News, Newsweek as well as CBS, ABC, PBS and NBC.
What strikes us the most is that 81 percent (at least) of the journalists polled voted for the Democratic candidate in every election from 1964 to 1976. More precisely, in the ...