Media bias reflects audience bias

Watching cable news for information about current events is a painful activity for me. I can… Watching cable news for information about current events is a painful activity for me. I can only stand to watch for the comedic value. Compared to other sources, cable’s coverage and insight as they pertain to news are hysterically – and painfully – lacking. National Public Radio – even though it fails to stimulate the magical sense of sight like television does – is a much more worthy source of current events and discussion. Hell, even the British Broadcasting Company does a much better job at reporting our news than we do.

One problem is that of oversight. I think that most everyone can agree that the media should be free of government influence. Yet several broadcasters have shown no worry about airing segments compiled by corporations and the government.

Another is that of funding. I’m still unsure which is the lesser evil: the hidden corruption of state-run news, or the corporate influence of advertising.

It is up to the media to regulate themselves as purveyors of unadulterated and unbiased news. But they fail miserably time after time in providing us with their important societal function. They choose to neglect objectivity in favor of utilizing the personal preferences of individuals to increase their ratings. All of this, of course, has gone into building the gigantic media machines we see today: Time Warner, Fox Broadcasting and Viacom among others.

Some may accuse cable news outlets of being aligned with conservative ideologies, or conversely they may claim a “liberal media.” Both accusations imply that the system was made this way, that bias is an immutable element.

It is more likely that broadcasters are neither willfully liberal nor conservative. They are simply lax in their reporting and cater to the wants of their viewers. For example, Fox News is famous for its rightward lean. This is because Fox is smart enough to know its audience: generally conservative, heartland Americans. To retain its viewers, Fox chooses the easy route of appeasing them by providing a disproportionate amount of favorable news.

This is the nature of humans. We very much like to shut out that which does not favor us. No one can be forced to listen to, examine or otherwise take in things that displease them. Nonetheless, it should not be the job of the media to decide your level of ignorance. That is something that must be done on an individual basis.

In their haste to fit complex topics into limited airtime, cable news discussion programs very often oversimplify concepts into ones they think their viewers can handle. The worst example of this that I have ever seen was CNN’s “Crossfire,” a political “debate” show featuring quick, heated debate between the left and right of the American political spectrum. Luckily, the show was swiftly axed a few years ago after its famed episode with Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.”

Shows like “Crossfire” cause viewers to take sides, as if deciding issues were as easy as choosing between good and evil. Reality shows that decisions are never this simple, and that formation of proper opinions requires detailed examination and an open mind.

Cable news specializes in sensationalism to attract viewers. As the attention span of Americans decreases to an infinitesimal size, news stories are required to become more interesting – even if they lack importance or content.

It depresses me to see the rate at which Americans latch onto non-news stories, as this determines how few of us care about real, impacting events. Non-news includes stories that involve celebrities and stories that are unnecessarily kept alive as news. An example of the latter: Natalie Holloway. As sad as it is, people go missing without resolution all the time. Yet this one particular pretty white girl has been able to successfully obfuscate real news stories for months. At least, that’s how it goes with cable news.

Non-news stories have zero impact on the lives of you and me, so it is best to pay them no mind. They live and grow off primal human emotions like envy and sorrow.

Forming an individual opinion is a very difficult process, though not an impossible one. It requires simply that one never rely on one solitary source for one’s information about recent occurrences. It is much better to holistically evaluate the information and attitudes of many different people and sources as this prevents the acquired spoon-fed thinking that we are socially trained to be receptive of.

E-mail Karim at kab85@pitt.edu.