What I mean by bias is when the media outlets aren't just relaying information, they're also extrapolating what impacts they believe will come from what they're reporting on (and usually just focusing on either the good or bad outcomes). For example, let's consider the recent changes in tariffs... all I want to know is what is being changed, by how much, and when it's going into affect. I don't want to hear "this will likely start an international trade war due to retaliation" or "this should bring work back into America and be a boon to our industries"... either statement is just adding their own personal spin on the same fucking news story.
Don't try and tell me if I should be happy or mad about the news you're presenting, just give me the data and let me think for myself.
To expand on my point, the public largely has a sort of paranoia about "but the reporters are trying to push their personal opinions!" and that almost entirely misses the mark on what actually happens in terms of 'bias'. This notion that reporters run around wanting to put their personal biases into reporting is less than 1% of a 'bias' issue.
So what IS going on? There are three important 'biases' to be aware of it seems:
- The 'corporate' bias: the media companies are for-profit companies, and that now mostly drives their products, which is why a story that is 'sensational' or about conflict that will get more customers is of more interest to them than more 'boring' stories about important issues. For example, it's why there's a lot more coverage about 'who's winning' than issues in campaigns.
It also means in some cases warping coverage of things the company does have some interest in - a leading example being that the problem of 'money in politics' may destroy democracy, but it's not a problem for the media companies because much of the billions spent to buy public opinion goes into their pockets, so don't look for them to report on it as a problem for democracy much.
- It's mostly about 'marketing' - if a story is 'progressive' or 'centrist' or 'right-wing' in its 'bias', it's not because of any personal biases generally, but because the business has identified a market for reporting with the bias in question. In other words, it's mirroring the customers' own biases, not pushing 'personal bias'.
This is true in the case of Fox - which marries Roger Ailes who had always wanted to create "GOP TV" for his own bias, and Rupert Murdoch who saw a business opportunity to create an outlet that recruited customers by conning them that the rest of media couldn't be trusted and only their right-wing reporting was correct. And it worked quite well as a business.
MSNBC sort of stumbled into being the 'progressive' outlet, though a minority of their content is progressive, still carrying right-wing content like Joe Scarborough and ''right-centrist' like Andrea Mitchell and 'left-centrist' like Chris Matthews and so on.
Basically, what's happened is more honest figures have found themselves aligned with progressives; it largely started with Phil Donahue when he aired some people who questioned the Bush case for the Iraq war.
The network cracked down, assigning a network 'monitor' to limit his being able to do that, and requiring him to have two pro-war guests for each anti-war guest, and eventually even that wasn't enough for them and they cancelled his top-rated show for being too anti-war.
This continued as they experimented with some more accurate reporters who were willing to report things that were considered 'progressive'. It caught on reasonably well. Again the network came to balk at doing it and appointed a right-wing enforcer who cancelled some progressive and especially minority people, but ran into issues cancelling top shows.
Good ratings for shows like Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell made it hard for them to cancel the shows - the executive essentially said he hated that they did so well he couldn't cancel them.
But while it's tempting to have a false equivalency between 'right-wing Fox' and 'the progressive shows on MSNBC', the accuracy and motives for them are quite different.
Fox has essentially always been a corrupt extension of the same donor agenda problem the Republican Party has been bought by, pushing an agenda to 'own' that part of the market, while the progressive shows on MSNBC are 'progressive' allowing for more opinion, but basically are 'honest' in the reporting honestly reporting the news as they see it.
To your issue about reporting 'just the facts', that is one desire you have the right to have, but it does leave out a lot of important news. A lot of Americans barely know what tariffs are, much less understand the effects and the larger agendas and issues involved with them. So it's not 'wrong' to report accurately on that though it's not what you are looking for.
And a lot of this is fairly subtle. For example, why not 'just report the facts' about the cost and length of the Mueller investigation and Republicans' statements claiming it's too expensive and too long?
Well, the context and history that each other major such investigation - Watergate, Iran-Contra, the fishing expedition against the Clintons, etc. cost a lot more, lasted over 4 yeats to Muellers 1.5, and in the Clinton investigation got a lot fewer results, have some use to viewers understanding the issue more and the agenda and inconsistent positions behind the statements.
The claim of 'liberal bias' is itself one of the great modern items of propaganda. It includes one study that was done showing reporters tend to have liberal political views - not looking at whether it was because they're better informed and those views are correct - and ignoring that the people who actually set the 'bias', editors and owners, are mostly right-wing.
But again, even there, it's not as much about the much smaller issue of 'personal bias' than it is about the business marketing at targeting markets and such.
The public plays an important role in media bias both by not supporting 'independent' media - like the British do with BBC news - and by showing more interest in 'bad quality news' and news that agrees with their bias than 'good quality news'.
There have been a couple of important changes in the industry.
One is that when there were only three main channels for news, so they had to server the general public, there was more concern about 'fairness', in theory at least - the left, center, and right all were the customers. And that sometimes meant 'telling people what they didn't want to hear'.
Now, there are an enormous number of outlets so that you can get the news you want to hear. The network channels have plummeted in their audiences.
Another is the media consolidation so that news is much less about the independence of the media with many independent owners, to where something like 90% of the media have about 4 massive corporate owners deciding the content.
This is no longer the press of the founding fathers, countless 'small town newspapers' independently holding the government accountable, but is rather a handful of corporate products driven by profits.
There are still 'good, independent' media sources available, and in fact I'd say better ones than we've ever had, but the public interest in them seems to be pretty low. How many actually watch "Democracy Now!" or read Vox and The Intercept and other good outlets over the big corporate products? Not that many. Money is harming news as well as politics.
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