A beached whale?!.....Really?

A few days ago, I opened my laptop and went to cnn.com to find news on the typhoon that had just hit Taiwan. A serious disaster such as this is huge news and I expected to see breaking news coverage all over the website, but when the page loaded the top story was of a beached whale some where in Florida I think. But this made me question if we are even biased when it comes to countries as well, as opposed to just opinions. The fact that one of our biggest news networks were covering a beached whale instead of a disaster that now has killed over 50 people is somewhat strange to me. What makes us put more importance on a whale than thousands of suffering Chinese?

The original media bias

With so many media outlet sources at our fingertips, a person can find any television station, radio channel, or web site that will fit with their way of thinking and reinforce what they perceive to be right.

From my experience, many sites will give a slant one way or another and it has seemed to me that the overall integrity of all types of journalism and reporting are going downhill in regards to giving the news in a straight fashion that wont effect one's way of thinking. A little bit of research shows that media bias is as American as apple pie and baseball.

The year was 1798 and two political parties were in locked in competition for the peoples of america to secure a seat in the White House two years later. Federalists were still in power and dominated congress as well as many press outlets. Not to mention the fact that they were the only party to get their candidates into the Casa Blanca since the birth of America. But there was a new contender on the horizon that began to be the voice of many new immigrants that were coming to seek the american dream. The Democratic-Republicans stole the hearts of many new citizens and began to make a push against the Federalist monopoly.

The idea of losing power didn't sit too well with the Feds and they then passed what would be one of the first acts of congress that reaked of bias. The acts were known as the Naturalization, Alien and Sedition acts. In a nutshell these new laws made it so immigrants could not obtrain full rights until they had been in the country for 14 years as opposed to the previous 5, mkaing it hard for new comers to voice their opnions at election times. On top of that, these acts also stated that any press that was critical of the government, congress, or the president could be deemed unconstitutional and the writers or oraters of such claims could be put in prison.

Even though many of the media outlets seem to put a spin on the news and politics of the day and even though I get irritated by some of the commentaries from Kieth Olberman, evidence such as this makes it seem that the system we have now is pretty good and at least we are not getting any more slanted laws passed from the government. At least none that I know of.

Bias has been classically defined as favoring one point of view or another when presenting any type of information. Books, television, and newspaper articles often times will have their own spin on current events in order to promote a certain camp's way of thinking. Conservatives would probably look at a Fox news station more regularly than an MSNBC channel as the latter seems to be more liberal on issues.



It was discussed in the chapter 3 of the Hanson book that when we have opinions on anything, whether its the wars in the middle east or what is the best kind of pop tart, people will be extremely stubborn and not change their views on most issues. There was a great modern example of this principle in the Washington Post, July 24, 2006. This article brings up some interesting questions about the topic of bias and whether it really is made up by the media.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300512.html