An Interesting Bias: Lessons from an Academic's Year as a Reporter

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (02) ◽  
pp. 259-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Niven
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Ideological Bias ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right

AbstractMost rigorous studies conclude that there is no consistent partisan or ideological bias in the mainstream American news media. This suggests a natural but little-asked question: Why isn't there more bias in the media? A year spent working as a journalist suggests a possible answer: Advancing a political perspective does not help secure a place on the front page. Instead, the core incentive for a journalist is to be interesting. Interesting work that reveals the essence of a situation garners a more prominent spot in the newspaper and all its associated benefits. Because “interesting” sources are found on both the left and the right, among Republicans and Democrats, balance does not require a Solomonic commitment to fairness. Rather, balance can be achieved merely as a by-product of the effort to be interesting.

The Architecture of Our Discontent

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Media ◽  
First Year ◽  
Media Ecosystem ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right ◽  
Integrated Media ◽  
Presidential Election Campaign

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.

scholarly journals Discourses of Blame: An Analysis of Media Coverage in the Robert Pickton Case

INvoke ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jori Dusome
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
White Women ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Downtown Eastside ◽  
Geographical Regions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Robert Pickton

When most Canadians consume their news media, they don't often consider the underlying narratives of colonialism, racism, and classism that can be spread through media representations of marginalized peoples. Such is the case with Indigenous women in Canada, who die violently at five times the rate of other Canadian women, but are given three and a half times less coverage in the media than white women for similar cases. News media articles covering Indigenous women's deaths are also less in-depth and less likely to make the front page. Prior to the apprehension of Robert “Willy” Pickton in 2002, media coverage of the dozens of missing women on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside was minimal, and often portrayed the women as the harbingers of their own misfortune. The Vancouver Police Department also failed to take action, citing the women’s “transient lifestyles” as reason to believe they would return soon. However, even after widespread recognition of the issue began, media coverage continued to attribute a level of “blameworthiness” to the missing and murdered by regularly engaging with tropes and stereotypes that individualized the acts of violence against them. In this paper, I look to explore that phenomenon by asking how the women of the Downtown Eastside are named as culpable or blameworthy in the violence enacted against them, as evidenced in the media coverage of the Robert Pickton case. My analysis found that while an identifiable killer like Pickton provided the news media a temporary cause for the women’s deaths, sex-working and drug using women maintained blame in the public eye both during and long after the case, due in equal parts to their use of drugs, their status as sex workers, and their proximity to “tainted” geographical regions like the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. As evidenced by this research, Indigenous women are continually and systemically blamed for the violence enacted against them. Keywords: MMIWG, sex work, media bias, Downtown Eastside, gendered violence

scholarly journals Public Service Television and Civic Engagement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Jackson
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Main Channel ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
Democratic Life ◽  
Elected Representatives

The news media figures prominently in most appraisals of democracy today. This is because it is the main channel of communication between elected representatives and citizens; and the (self-appointed) watchdog of the powerful. While news organisations are sometimes reluctant to accept the responsibility that comes with such power, it is implicit in the core principles of journalistic philosophy, whereby attempts to constrain or censor the news media are seen as threats to democracy itself. However, these normative roles also are surrounded by many tensions that surround the ability of our news media to perform their democratic functions. This chapter discusses four of these tensions: (i) diversity versus commonality; (ii) the information necessary for citizens to participate effectively in democratic life, versus the entertainment-driven focus of an increasingly commercial-oriented media; (iii) the need of the media to treat people as citizens on the one hand and as consumer publics on the other; and (iv) broadcasters' relationship with the press.

Critical Thinking in a World of Fake News. Teaching the Public to Make Good Choices

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Ştefana Ciortea-Neamţiu
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
News Media ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Media Audiences ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
Popularization Of Science ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

"Fake news are a big concern for media, audiences and governments. Some journalists are engaged in finding fake news and disclose them. Fake news is also a concern to the researchers and journalism professors, but they should not focus only on the way fake news work, or how to teach future journalists about them, a big challenge would be to teach the audiences, the public to make the right choices and identify fake news. Tackling this problem of the popularization of science and teaching the public should actually be one of the key-concerns of the journalism professors today in Romania. It is the purpose of this paper to propose a list of criteria to identify fake news, by using critical thinking, a list that could be easily explained to people from the public, so they can make good choices. The core notion used hereby will be quality. A large discussion on quality in journalism raised at the end of the 1990s in Western Europe, not so in Romania. Therefore, it seems more than appropriate to start it now. Keywords: fake news, media, critical thinking, education, public, criteria. "

The democratic deficit in reporting political crises: The case of Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110129
Author(s):  
Phillip Santos ◽  
Mthokozisi Phathisani
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Functional Performance ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Media ◽  
Analytical Tools

Although our impression of the media’s role in a democracy and democratising societies is fairly stable, the situation is fundamentally different under unstable and ever shifting conditions of political crisis. To explore dynamics in the latter scenario we analyse the coverage of Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections by the country’s daily newspapers. This allows us to examine the newspapers’ active role in shaping the conditions of crisis through their interpretation and evaluation of issues and events during the period under study. We use frame and rhetoric analytical tools to analyse front-page stories and editorials, which enables us to explore the dimensions of news media’s agency during the context of crisis and assess the nature and direction of such agency using normative theories of the media in a democracy. We argue that a political crisis can easily polarise news media and subsequently induce them into assuming an active partisan posture in their reportage of political issues and events by using rhetorical discursive strategies not only to persuade the audience to accept their standpoint, but subsequently, to influence their political action in the future, with consequential implications for their functional performance of received normative roles.

scholarly journals Media Bias

Communication ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lichter ◽  
Justin Rolfe-Redding ◽  
Stephen Farnsworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Bias ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ideological Bias ◽  
The Media ◽  
Recent Addition ◽  
The Public Sphere

Are the news media biased? This has long been a heated question in the public sphere, particularly in the American political setting. The question has drawn extensive attention from scholars as well as politicians and political partisans. The contentious nature of what constitutes biased and unbiased coverage—both conceptually and methodologically—has been a central concern for this literature. Indeed, a lack of commonly agreed-upon standards has limited the development of a coherent research tradition. This article focuses on media bias within the United States, which has seen the most robust debate and scholarly examination of the topic. It focuses principally on claims of ideological bias, along with the structural and negativity biases that are often presented as alternative explanations, rather than attempting to catalogue the panoply of issue-specific biases of which the media stand accused. While the fields of communication and political science have traditionally hosted investigations of media bias, economics has become a relatively recent addition to the scholarly conversation, generating work on new measures of bias and the role that audience preferences may play in producing slanted news. While arbitrating the existence and extent of bias has been a focus of research, other works have investigated what leads individuals to perceive bias (even in neutral reporting) and what effects biased coverage may have.

Challenges to Press Freedom in India

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalyani Chadha ◽  
Sachin Arya
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Media ◽  
Government Data ◽  
The Right ◽  
Annual World

Since the late 1990s, the news media landscape in India has experienced widespread and arguably transformative shifts that are manifest in the explosive growth of media outlets and consumption at both national and regional levels. As of 2021, the country has over 100,000 registered periodicals and newspapers, with 17,000 dailies that report a combined circulation of over 240 million copies according to government data, as well as an estimated 400 news and current affairs channels and numerous news-related websites. Yet despite the existence of a seemingly dynamic and expansive news landscape, many observers have expressed significant concerns about the independence of the Fourth Estate in the world’s largest democracy. According to the annual World Press Freedom Index, compiled by the media watchdog group Reporters without Borders, India has experienced a steady decline in press freedom since 2015, slipping from a position of 135/180 in 2015 to 140/180 in 2019, and 142 in the 2020 report. At present, India ranks behind most of its neighbors, including Afghanistan (122), Bhutan (67), Nepal (112), and Sri Lanka (127). Thus, even though the writers of India’s constitution clearly recognized the right to the freedom of the press as an essential part of the freedom of speech and expression as guaranteed in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, and this right has generally been upheld in court, the space for the free expression of views and critique by the press—widely recognized as crucial to democratic functioning—has been shrinking consistently in the Indian context due to a variety of threats ranging from physical violence and intimidation of journalists, and government pressure on news outlets to structural economic forces.

The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and the Developmental Scenario to the Peninsula Arab Countries

1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (4II) ◽  
pp. 995-1003
Author(s):  
M. A. Hussein Muluck
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Objective Assessment ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The Core ◽  
Global Character ◽  
The Press ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
The Right ◽  
Core Issues

The press and news media has dealt with the recent Iraq-Kuwait conflict in an exhaustive manner. This was quite natural because the world is at present witnessing an information explosion, never known to human history before. Despite all this, there are, however, reasons to believe that most of the analysis presented in various dispatches and reports have not been able to deal with the core issues which have escaped the attention of the writers. This was perhaps quite natural because a critical assessment of a certain event can only be done if facts are known and there is in addition a continuous engagement of the experts with the problem under discussion. But this approach may also not be the right one to deal with a crisis which has many a dimension and can, therefore, be looked at from different angles. The crisis under discussion is one which has a global character and can therefore be interpreted in one way or another depending on the writer's own intellectual commitment or vested interests. As such, it is this confusing aspect of the exercise which does not allow a purely objective assessment of the problem. Despite this shortcoming, there, is, however, the desperate need to look at the issue in an objective manner and in conformity with the contemporary spirit governing the various political constellations and their specific thrusts.

Discussions on education policies in media: Media representations of education activists in Turkey

2018 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
A Fulya Şen
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Education System ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Online Newspaper ◽  
New Curriculum ◽  
The Media

This study examines the media representations of Turkey's educational labour union, Eğitim-Sen. In so doing, it analyses the news coverage of the protests of Eğitim-Sen against the education policies of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, structured by an Islamist political perspective. In this study, the content analysis has been carried out in order to investigate the attitude of the news media towards the education activism, as well as in order to take in issues of meaning and context. This analysis involves the online newspaper debates pertaining to the 13 February 2015 strike action of Eğitim-Sen, and the new curriculum announced in July 2017. This study aims to reveal how the struggles of Eğitim-Sen against the Islamification of the education system in Turkey are represented in the media, how Turkish media attempts to generate powerful voices, as well as how the media ignores the voices of dissidents. It has been concluded that Eğitim-Sen is underrepresented in the mainstream news media.

What face familiarity feelings say about the lateralization of specific entities within the core system

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Gainotti
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Memory System ◽  
Core System ◽  
The Core ◽  
Memory Traces ◽  
Specific Memory ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Temporal Structures ◽  
The Right

Abstract The target article carefully describes the memory system, centered on the temporal lobe that builds specific memory traces. It does not, however, mention the laterality effects that exist within this system. This commentary briefly surveys evidence showing that clear asymmetries exist within the temporal lobe structures subserving the core system and that the right temporal structures mainly underpin face familiarity feelings.

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