THE FAKE ISSUE
Media
Truth Be Told: News Is Biased (Odds Are … You Are, Too) What people say they want in surveys and where they click online doesn’t add up By Mike Reddy
More than 75% of Americans believe it’s never acceptable for news media to favor one political party over others. Yet big-name media outlets, such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, are lambasted daily for alleged favoritism. If media consumers truly prefer neutrality in news, why do they favor biased news platforms?
ore than a century before Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon, English astronomer Sir John Hershel was using a telescope to study it. With powerful new telescopic technology, Hershel purportedly discovered that the moon was home to man-bat hybrid extraterrestrial life. At least, that’s what defunct New York newspaper The Sun reported in a six-article series in 1835. The only truthful aspect of the articles, referred to now as the “Great Moon Hoax,” was that Hershel was an astronomer. The telescope was fake, the name of the writer was fake and the journal where Hershel’s
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research supposedly appeared wasn’t being published at the time. And the man-bats? They were fake, too. Notably, the moon hoax was published on the heels of what historians call the “Party Press Era,” the period from the 1780s to the 1830s when newspaper editors unabashedly received—and largely depended on—financial support from political parties. In return for the money, prestige and power, editors published endorsements for their parties and didn’t hold back from flinging attacks against the others. Blatant biases were commonplace, and although the term has only recently been cropping up in dictionaries, nothing’s really new about “fake news.” Choosing biased sources Novel or not, bias and disinformation affect public perception of news media today. A 2019 Gallup survey found 28% of Americans had no trust or confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. Only 41% indicated that they had either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust and confidence, compared with 68% when the survey was
first conducted in 1972. These trends, signaling that trust in news media has taken a beating, beg the question: What, if anything, can be done to restore faith in the fourth estate? The answer depends partly on truthfulness in media. Americans believe 62% of news in newspapers, TV and radio is biased, according to a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey. And a Pew Research Center survey in 2018 found that 78% of Americans believe it is never acceptable for news media to favor one political party over others when reporting the news. But what people say they want in surveys and how they vote with dollars—or, clicks—doesn’t neatly match up. Some news consumers say CNN has an intolerable left-leaning bias and Fox News an insufferable right-leaning one, but SimilarWeb estimates CNN’s landing page racked up nearly 520 million hits in the past six months, and Fox’s scored more than 320 million. During the same period, the pages of outlets with more neutral reputations, such as USA Today and Associated Press News, only saw 119 million and 22 million hits, respectively.
luckbox | january 2020
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12/20/19 2:43 PM
