First let's get a definition of who is the Mainstream Media that practices "bias".
"Mainstream media" consists of:
a)major television/radio news networks...i.e. ABC,CBS,NBC
b)major newspapers ... New York Times, WashingtonPost, two major papers
c)major magazines....NewsWeek, Time...
NOTE the exclusion of MSNBC,CNN,Fox,NPR as these are primarily editorial news and almost all do NOT
pretend to hide their bias. Fox being right/conservative/GOP, the rest.. left/progressive/democrat/liberals.
Now for the differentiation between NEWS and Editorial.
NOT my definition by the "professionals" journalism schools like Columbia.
Editorial
an article in a newspaper or other periodical or on a website presenting the opinion of the publisher, writer, or
editor.
the definition of editorial
News...
a report of recent events
Definition of NEWS
So true NEWS should be absent any opinion. Any personal observation.
In journalism classes students are taught:
Five Ws - Wikipedia
The
Five Ws,
- What happened?
- Who is involved?
- Where did it take place?
- When did it take place?
- Why did that happen?
The example will be coming later.
"Why" doesn't belong on this list. That's analysis, not news. News is simply who/what/where/when.
It's really very simple. News is a fact. "X" happened. Details -- "X" happened in place A, at time B, involving people C, D and E.
Editorial is opinion on why "X" happened, what it means that "X" happened, why it's a good or bad thing that "X" happened.
As far as your list CNN, NPR and Fox all have at least segments where they report straight news, as in real news. They're not necessarily always clear about which is which though. Particular example is when FNC is broadcasting Sean Hannity -- a commentator not a journalist -- while the logo "Fox News" sits in the corner. That's deliberately muddying the waters.
I don't know that NPR does editorials at all, though they will have talking heads on to analyze, as will pretty much everybody.
What you didn't mention here is another distinction that's rather critical, and that is: commercial vs noncommercial.
A commercial entity has as its incentive gathering listeners/viewers/readers. That biases it toward the sensational, because that's what sells those listeners/viewers/readers. That's why you'll see a thousand stories and shows on how Michael Jackson died and the OJ Simpson trial and nary a word about the government giving away vast tracts of broadcast real estate to giant corporations in TelComm 96.
That's got all kinds of implications. When a single entity whether it's NewsCorp, Viacom, Time Inc, whoever --- controls a vast network of television, radio, book publishing, newspaper publishing, movie productions, even sports teams and venues --- it very much gets to dictate what "the news" is, and what "the news" isn't . Especially if a sponsor doesn't like the way some program is going, e.g. Monsanto pressuring Fox to the point where Fox is telling its employees "we just paid umpteen million dollars for this station --
we'll tell
you what the news is. The news is what we say it is". And then there's the conflict of interest problem --- if you're GE and you're neck deep in military contracts and nuclear power, then your TV network NBC is not going to get a whole lot of leeway to cover Defense Department spending or nuclear power issues.
To name a couple.
Did you ever take ANY journalism classes in college?
I did and that is what they taught back in the 60s BEFORE journalism became biased. The 5 Ws included WHY.
I didn't include the examples in my original post.
Here are specific examples of how the MSM, i.e. ABC,CBS,NBC,NYT,WashingtonPost,NewsWeek,Time presents "news" in a biased fashion.
First REMEMBER the distinction between editorial and NEWS.
Examples of editorializing.. Rush,Hannity, almost any radio or newspaper editorial i.e. opinion pieces. These are biased but they let you know.
Now for examples of BIASED reporting starting with the very earliest example of a "NEWS" cast biasing viewers.
Read what Walter Cronkite did to 56,000 DEAD americans when he said this on his evening news.
Cronkite’s report, writes Brinkley, was "
immediately seen as a catalyst by pundits in the Monday newspapers. . . . Cronkite turned dove, and the hawk Johnson lost his talons." This tracks with what Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book, The Powers That Be:
"
It was the first time in American history that a war has been declared over by an anchorman." Lyndon Johnson was said to have watched the broadcast and exclaimed to his press secretary, George Christian, "If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America."
And here is what Cronkite said on closing his CBS News broadcast Feb. 27, 1968.
Then, with as much restraint as I could, I turned to our own leaders whose idea of negotiation seemed frozen in memories of General McArthur's encounter with the Japanese aboard the Battleship Missouri.
We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders...
Both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.
Final Words: Cronkite's Vietnam Commentary
BUT CRONKITE WAS SO SO VERY WRONG!!!
And because of him the TET OFFENSIVE which WAS a victory was
pronounced by Cronkite as a DEFEAT worthy of the USA withdrawing.
Which we DID!
In the late-January calm of a Lunar New Year cease-fire, seventy thousand communist troops shattered the celebration, attacking more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns. They struck along the coast, then presumed secure. They shelled the big U.S. complex at Cam Ranh Bay and stormed numerous towns in the central highlands. They attacked the mountain resort of Dalat and invaded thirteen of sixteen provincial capitals in the Mekong Delta. They captured the ancient northern capital of Hue and carried the war into the heart of Saigon—even into the U.S. embassy compound.
But Tet had been a desperation move by North Vietnam, beset by a relentless American killing machine. And the Allied response was awesome. The communists lost ten thousand men in the first few days of the offensive, compared to 249 Americans dead and five hundred South Vietnamese. Overall, throughout the months-long battle, the communists lost nearly forty-eight thousand men. The North Vietnamese had sought to deliver the decisive military blow that would knock the Americans out of the region. They failed.
They failed so miserably that they lost their ability to wage war in the South. Even a year later, as Richard Nixon assumed the presidency, CIA director Richard Helms told Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop that the communist main force in Vietnam had been decimated in the 1968 fighting so thoroughly that it would take considerable time for Hanoi to rebuild its forces.
Into this military drama, in the first weeks of Tet, comes Walter Cronkite of CBS News. He travels around, talks to people like a real reporter, presumably takes notes. And then he goes home and delivers a report to the American people that totally misses the story. At this pregnant moment of the war, when prospects of victory never looked brighter, he concludes that the war is a stalemate and probably unwindable.
Cronkite's Vietnam Blunder
Now I know that the above is a lot of reading for attention deficit people like most on this forum...BUT READ carefully this first example of how
a major American policy was ALTERED by the biased and personal subjective observation of the "most trusted newsman in America"!!!
And this is just one of thousands of examples of MSM bias... here is a teaser...
What MSM magazine editor gushed over Obama after he said this about Bush...
"our job is to bash the president[Bush], that's what we do." on whether the media's unfair to Bush on the TV talk show Inside Washington, February 2, 2007.
http://newsbusters.org/node/10631
this hard core objective editor of NewsWeek said of Obama!!!
"I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2009/06/05/newsweek-s-evan-thomas-obama-sort-god
I've collected dozens of examples of the thousands of news pieces from the MSM, i.e. ABC,CBS,NBC,NYT,WashingtonPost,NewsWeek,Time and
will continue to share in this OP until most of you objective intelligent forum readers concur as
Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.
Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low
