Bias and the News
Wow...
I read a fantastic article on the New York Times website concerning the topic of media bias and the impact of blogging on the information sphere. This is the most fairminded analysis of the core issues I have ever read. Posner shows that the media portrayal of issues has ALWAYS been linked to market forces. The old veneer of objectivity was linked to the need to compete for market share rather than any higher journalistic quest for "Truth." The growing partisanship of media outlets we are witnessing in the current era is a result of an information explosion in which individual outlets are catering to ever narrower slices of the demographic pie.
The whole debate regarding impartiality (in the print media at least) is interesting to me because, having lived in Britain and the US, I have seen the British media in which the print media wear their partisan colors very openly and newspaper bias is seen as a matter of course and the United States in which newspapers legitimacy is linked to at least the pretense of neutrality in how issues are covered. The fiction of objective news coverage is reserved in Britain for the state owned BBC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1122271298-jaLLsQ0wD5jOOVgvnVR/sQ
This article is SUPERB. THE NYT site requires registration but it is definitely worth it.
I read a fantastic article on the New York Times website concerning the topic of media bias and the impact of blogging on the information sphere. This is the most fairminded analysis of the core issues I have ever read. Posner shows that the media portrayal of issues has ALWAYS been linked to market forces. The old veneer of objectivity was linked to the need to compete for market share rather than any higher journalistic quest for "Truth." The growing partisanship of media outlets we are witnessing in the current era is a result of an information explosion in which individual outlets are catering to ever narrower slices of the demographic pie.
The whole debate regarding impartiality (in the print media at least) is interesting to me because, having lived in Britain and the US, I have seen the British media in which the print media wear their partisan colors very openly and newspaper bias is seen as a matter of course and the United States in which newspapers legitimacy is linked to at least the pretense of neutrality in how issues are covered. The fiction of objective news coverage is reserved in Britain for the state owned BBC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1122271298-jaLLsQ0wD5jOOVgvnVR/sQ
This article is SUPERB. THE NYT site requires registration but it is definitely worth it.
posted by thoughtfulape | 11:02 PM
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