Funmurphys: the Blog

News Media Bias: A Different Take

I made a comment over at Population One and while I have several other topics I'd rather post about and thought about more, I'm going to amplify my comment over there (have I mentioned that 1. I'm very busy and 2. I'm very lazy? Just curious).

When we talk about bias in the news media, we always seem to talk about political bias - are they a bunch of lefties as most people think, or are they really righties in disguise as a few people think. But I think there are two significant biases that shape what and how things are reported that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how one defines "news."

The first is contained in the word itself - news is something that is new. Old stuff need not apply, no matter how significant it may still be. Breaking developments are thus the most newsworthy, even if they don't amount to a hill of beans. Time is more significant than significance itself. Consequently, the news media, and especially the broadcast media (which has the least content bandwidth), only supplies the latest development to a news story, and if you're lucky, the penultimate development (yep, I try to work that word in whenever I can). This makes it hard to follow a story of more than one scene, let alone more than one act. Newspapers will sometimes take the time to tell a complete story, and news magazines moreso, but even there the topic has to be immediately relevant.

The second is that news is something out of the ordinary. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is news. The fact that my house didn't catch on fire today will never be in the news; let it catch on fire though and not only will it be covered, I'll be interviewed on the local TV stations (I'll get more air time if I cry). Laci Peterson killed: wall to wall national coverage. Another black teen shot in the City of St. Louis: barely a mention even on the local TV. This leads to a weird inversion of reality and news reports, a negative image as it were. If crime reporting is up, then crime itself is down. The news media doesn't report on the reality of life, but the rarity. News reporting is just the Springer show without the bouncers, but with the tired moralizing at the end.

So I'm not one of those who worry and fret about too much "bad" news and wish the news media would report the good news. Frankly, my view is just the opposite. If the newspapers were ever full of nothing but good news, it would be time to sell everything, buy survivalist gear, and head for the hills. In fact, my idea of a perfect world is one where the only news run is old lurid tales of unsolved crimes like the Sheppard case or JonBenet Ramsey's murder - day after day, year after year on every page, on every channel. Because if that is the only thing that is out of the ordinary, life must be very good.