Media Bias

I lean significantly to the political left. My posts make no effort to hide that bias. Quite possibly the largest contributor to my political bias (and yours) are where we go for our news and entertainment.

In the aftermath of the 2020 Election, those media biases are on full and stark display. Yesterday, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial was “robustly” effective in preventing COVID-19.

Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham ran clips of Dr. Anthony Fauci and another prominent physician making statements about the vaccine being six months to a year away. She then ran a clip of a post election celebration which she said indicated a double standard in media coverage of Republicans not wearing masks and Democrats wearing masks. In the clip, she was attempting to show that people participating in the Biden celebrations following the election call on Saturday morning were not wearing masks. The clip went by very quickly and was shot from some distance away that made it hard to see if people were wearing masks or not. Ingraham has a sarcastic delivery style. She was using the Pfizer announcement as a way to poke fun at the doctors saying that the vaccine was still six months to a year away. Ingraham also suggested that the timing of the Pfizer announcement was saved until after the election for political reasons. This was a clear example of media bias.

Pfizer’s early results are optimistic, but they don’t mean that the vaccine is ready right now. A corporate announcement doesn’t mean that the vaccine has been independently tested and evaluated for safety and long term effectiveness against the coronavirus. Nor does it mean that it can be produced in the quantities and delivered to the 328.2 million Americans that it needs to reach for 100% coverage of the population. Reality is that the vaccine, as stated by the doctors on MSNBC, is still several months to a year away from reaching people.

The media bias applied to this vaccine story can be easily discerned. But, to discern the bias, you need to listen to different reports of the same story to see that a story can be manipulated to communicate the desired message of the news source. In this case whether it was Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp/Fox News or NBCUniversal’s MSNBC.

So, my message for you is to look at different sources of news. Pick a story and make yourself leave the comfortable source that you agree with and examine the story as told by at least one other news source with a different point of view. This is not to say that one or the other source is right or wrong in this instance, but it will give you an idea where our division comes from.

I suggested in a previous post “From My Almost Daily Journal” of November 6, 2020, that what we need is a “Middle Media.” This Middle Media would be a hybridized news organization that combines these mega moguls into a trusted news source where information is scrutinized, analyzed and factually presented so that we all develop our opinions based on a common news source

Please do pay attention to the links. They help provide some visual perspective to where new organizations fall on the scale of partisanship and analysis of the news. Here are some other graphic representations of news organizations and how they compare with other news organizations in the areas of partisanship and analysis.