A brief, sad history of bias in the news

In the beginning, there were newspapers — just paper and ink.  The penny the reader paid to buy a newspaper wasn’t intended to cover the complete cost of production.  The publisher also sold commercial notices to advertisers in order to make a profit — the most honest of all motives.  It was incumbent on the publisher to provide interesting content to attract and hold readers, so the advertisers would gladly continue to purchase space in the newspaper.

Over time, newspapers proliferated.  Cheaper paper and more efficient printing presses vastly increased their popularity.  Then came radio broadcasting.  Instead of a penny, a radio listener needed to buy a receiver in order to tune into the available programming.  In 1926, an immigrant from Minsk, the capital of what is now Belarus, named David Sarnoff, created the first broadcasting network.  He called it the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).  Sarnoff originally made his mark as a young radio telegrapher who was the first to receive the distress call from the Titanic.

There’s a slight difference between the business models of print and broadcasting.  Should advertisers want to purchase increasing amounts of newspaper or magazine space — or vice-versa — the publisher can adjust the page count accordingly.  Broadcasters, however, are saddled with a 24-hour day regardless of the demand for advertising time.  They have to adjust the amount of content in their programming to compensate for fluctuations in the number of paid commercials.

News production of any type has always contained at least some degree of bias because reporters are human.  In recent years, however, indoctrination has replaced profit as the main reason for many news sources to broadcast or publish.  Bottom lines have been damaged as a result, and broad-based “news” agencies, such as Reuters and the Associated Press, have replaced much of the in-house staff at various outlets.  The internet has also had a huge impact by opening a completely independent universe of information dissemination.

The real issue is the nature of the bias that has permeated modern “news” publishing and broadcasting.  A particular element of this bias is the full-throated endorsement of the questionable possibility of impending climate catastrophe.  There’s a fair amount of skepticism among the general public over this subject — largely because of the obvious lack of convincing data presented to impose such drastic and expensive measures.  This year’s heat waves and torrential rains are being histrionically employed to fill the gap.  However, as AT’s Thomas Lifson recently published, according to NASA, an undersea volcanic eruption in 2022 may have had a major impact on atmospheric conditions.  Since this phenomenon is completely useless when it comes to waging the war against fossil fuels, the story has been mostly embargoed by the major media, which is a glaring example of one of the two primary forms of bias used by the agenda-driven media: omission.  The other is commission, where standards of factual accuracy are blatantly violated.

A glaring example of the bias by omission is the virtual disappearance of the Biden family’s bribery scam from the airwaves and pages of the same major media outlets.  This in spite of congressional hearings and alternative media interviews, let alone the magnitude of the corruption being revealed.  Instead, Mr. Trump’s latest indictment (yawn!) dominates the front page, etc.

May I confess that one of the sharpest tools in the journalist’s repertoire is the word “virtual”?  It actually means “not really,” but it is commonly interpreted as meaning “pretty much true.” 

Moving right along, the outsiders are raising questions as to the criminality being imposed on political opinions.  Mr. Trump has been indicted for things that he has said, in spite of the First Amendment.  Back in her “youth” as a San Francisco stuporvisor, now excruciatingly geriatric senator Dianne Feinstein previously proposed a law making it a crime to make false statements in a political speech.  Really?  Forgetting the First Amendment, what kind of star chamber would have to be empaneled to rule on every utterance that emanated from the frothy swamp?  But these invertebrates have no care as to how their edicts are to be enforced.  They just want to be seen as making the assertion.

Bias by commission is a bit harder to pin down because it often involves omission as well.  An interesting example is the death of George Floyd.  This event spawned a flurry of violent criminality across the nation, but the particular details of Mr. Floyd’s apparent intoxication were largely ignored by the media and the political activists.  Suffice it to say that he may well have died while sitting on his sofa from all of the drugs he put in his system without the police ever having to arrive.

A precursor to this event happened in Los Angeles several years before, when a VHS video just happened to be made of several police beating Rodney King with their batons.  Such “brutality” led to a riot in which there were several fatalities.  Mr. King survived and famously tried to calm things down by famously asking, “Can’t we all just get along?”  He, too, was high on drugs and resisted arrest.  Unmentioned in much of the coverage was that the video showed several taser wires coming off his chest.  When tasing didn’t work, the police had no choice but to resort to more physical means to bring him into custody.  The city paid Mr. King handsomely for his discomfort.  He then bought a house and soon drowned in his swimming pool.

It does seem fairly obvious that Americans are more politically polarized now than in the past.  I would be inclined to say that one group is mostly influenced by ideology — fitting acquired information into a pre-existing conceptual framework.  The other group is more disposed to seek reality, whatever it turns out to be.

I was once asked to explain conservatism as an ideology.  I said that it is the absence of ideology…analyzing the real world for the sake of solving problems, wherever that may lead.

Image via Pixnio.