by rose-colored-coolaid » Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:25 am
I'll add to your quote, that I find the people who most frequently decry press bias are most often the ones who do not actually know what media bias is. Further, Palin does not understand what media bias is, among the things she misunderstands.
Just to clear this up for people, bias is not when the press spends more time on one "side" of an issue than another. E.g. if there's an organization called "People for a Flat Earth", their position is so ludicrous that it is not biased for the media to ignore their position when discussing the spherical nature of the earth (in photographs from space for instance). In other words, if your deeply held beliefs are nuts (I won't get into what constitutes that), and the media appears to "disrespect" those beliefs, it means you are biased...not the media.
This is how you occasionally hear people exclaim that the only unbiased news is Fox. Not that other media is completely unbiased, but Fox is clearly biased in a manner that closely relates to the deeply held bias of a subset of our population. I will say, it's a savvy marketing move by Fox News, picking a dissatisfied group and giving them what they want, even if there is no journalistic integrity in the position...
So, here's some examples that run counter to what people normally associate as bias. If the media spends more time on Obama than McCain (June), it's probably not media bias if the difference is explained by Obama running a more newsworthy campaign. If the media gives equal time to global warming opponents as it does to proponents, that is media bias, as the evidence strongly favors one position over the other.