Jessica Delp, Staff Editor
Media is a modern wonder. The fact that a scarcely one-minute old event can suddenly be thrust into the public eye is incredible in of itself, even when not taking into account the breadth and variety of news that one has access to. E.g. who broke up with whom, Taliban movement, the ‘latest looks’, controversial amendments, Hollywood scandals and more.
But despite the benefits media can and often does offer, many feel major news corporations are straying too far from neutrality, and are promoting their own political agendas by selecting events to cover instead of merely covering newsworthy occurrences the public should be aware of.
All of major American newscasters have shown bias in some way, shape or form. ABC and CNN are both Democratic, Fox veers to the right, the New York Times is Liberal by nature, the Wall Street Journal is Republican, MSNBC is all-out Democrat, and NewsMax is another right wing news media organization. In fact the most impartial news caster worldwide is a little-known newspaper in the Middle East (ask Mr. Thomas),
Joel Harding, a retired army officer turned consultant for information operations, strategic communication and cyber warfare, says the amount of selective coverage on both sides is “sickening,” on his blog To Inform is to Influence.
“I would prepare to brief the Commanding General of the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command every morning,” Harding wrote, “and I realized that many of the answers I would be asked were not covered by intelligence reporting. I learned to watch CNN, I learned to cruise the websites for all the major media and I learned that many of these websites would have wildly conflicting reporting on the same incidents. […] by the time I left that job I was absolutely convinced that mainstream media was, in fact, biased to the extreme.”
Some argue that those who feel news is unreasonably biased are forgetting one relatively new form of coverage, social media. People such as Stanford University staff Sean J. Westwood and Solomon Messing feel that “Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation.” Essentially, they feel the myriad of opinions on social media provides the individual with more than enough variety to form their own opinion on.
Newtown High Junior Evan DeGirolamo gets the majority of his news from social media such as Twitter, and feels that the experience is usually neutral (in terms of politics). DeGirolamo said that “There are definitely problems going on today with media coverage when it comes to the way women are portrayed, race, etc.”
On the other hand Emily Turco, a Republican Newtown High School Senior, gets most of her news from sources like CNN, and feels that they do not remain unbiased on topics, even when considering the overall tone of the material covered. “Nightly news with Brian Williams sometimes bothers me,” Turco said, “because it seems that they shove the war and disturbing stories to the front, and leave the happy stuff for the end.”
Despite the bias on both the left and right sides of politics, the individual still has the ability to decide where they stand on the issue.
Photo Credit; sadredearth.com