I do not have cable, satellite or over the air television at home. I do have a television – but it functions more as a monitor used to watch Netflix movies (see “Things White People Like” to discover why I have Netflix). As a result of this decision to maintain a home free of external programming I have not seen the local television news in almost two years. Media makes its way into my mind via print and web-based news – and I am fairly selective when it comes to sources. This controlled diet breaks down when I travel thanks to CNN’s pervasive presence in airport chair arrays all around the nation. (CNN claims that they broadcast to airport lounges – chair array is a better description as I seldom feel as though I am lounging or relaxed sitting in faux leather chairs under bad lighting with hundreds of people that I do not know) And then there is the dreaded off-time-zone hotel experience where sleep evades until 1:00am – a condition for which the hotelier provides a television to numb the mind and lull the traveler to sleep. When I travel I often watch television and, because I do not regularly watch television, the media bias is evident.
Some believe that the media has a liberal bias. Those lefties! With their corporations and marketing campaigns – dominating big business (or was that the other side?). It seems that Fox News and MSNBC have done well forming near caricatures of the politic they claim to represent. Others seem to fall in between – but I am not convinced that the televised media is, on average, anything but a touch left of center. Conservatives claim a stronghold on talk radio and perhaps that is true in terms of program choice. But try to find a right of center news outlet on any station below about 95MHz on the FM tuner. That first quartile of the FM range is dominated by NPR, APM, college stations and other liberal outlets. So is the media biased in its politic? Not sure – each side seems to have a study to confirm their position. As Jim Grant writes, “(we should not) marshall anecdotes to corroborate our preexisting opinions”.
It is quite possible that those seeking to find the media’s bias are digging in the wrong place. Watching television infrequently allows a one to see without preexisting conditions. And one bias that is all too obvious is that of negativity. The media way not have a common politic but they certainly have a common vantage point. Consider the information heard and seen during a 10 minute interval on CNN. Wolf Blitzer is standing in front of a wall of video screens. His beard looks as though it were shorn from an actual wolf and glued onto his face. He talks with the cadence of a newscaster – run on sentences, predicable metaphors and obvious commentary. While he speaks the “crawl” summarizes news stories in eight word statements. ”Housing at 30 year low”. Wow – housing prices are at their 1979 levels? Two years of losses erased thirty years of gains. ”Plane crash kills 50″. Fifty people? Did they have names? Should the rest of us about to board on airplane be concerned? Any context here? ”Mother of octuplets received food stamps”. Even a woman who just gave birth to 8 babies is not safe from national outrage at the thought that some tax dollars were used to provide food for her tribe. The crawl marches on with nothing but negative news.
Above the crawl we get to hear Wolf talking about the perils of the economy. He then shifts into a piece analyzing a six word sentence that the president uttered during a 40 minute speech. This out of context analysis is followed by a set of tips for surviving the tough job market – life changing advise like “hone your skills” and “capture your experiences in a resume”. The advise if followed by a chart showing the current surge in unemployment claims. Note that every change of every indicator is a surge, crash, meltdown, tumble, plummet or unprecedented swing. The chart on unemployment claims appears to show a very steep rise until one looks at the Y-axis and sees that CNN has chosen to shrink the scale in order to magnify the data. No disclaimer or explanation is offered to allow the viewer to put the data in context. There was not a single story of a business, person, city, nation, or family who was adding value to their community. Fifteen minutes and I turned off the television.
I experimented with more channels. The local news – murder, fire, car chase. Cable news – some guy named Cramer screaming about the economy, job losses, devastating wind storms, celebrity weight gain, car chase. Is the media biased – certainly. It is a bias towards any story that is negative, hopeless, fearful, arbitrary, trend driven (remember all those stories about the rising housing market) or violent. No wonder public confidence is low – an alarming number of people consume this diet of news as their primary source of information. Perhaps the economy will force some of these outlets to close their doors.
This topic would make a great PhD project – get people to fast print and televised media for 6 months and measure their mood. I have to fight my own preexisting opinion as to the result.
