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Dangerous News Bias

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During the recent 2016 presidential election, candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton could be seen glorified on the television screens of an MSNBC segment. On the other hand, viewing Fox News reveals a very noticeable conservative bias, favoring ideology from candidates like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and John Kasich. CNN, thought to be the most neutral of the three, is only considered unbiased because it always has “at least one conservative and one liberal pundits” reporting on an issue (Garcia). News media rarely provides information unbiasedly, there seems to be some sort of political leaning to almost every news report. Although biased news allows for more perspectives and grants more information to the audience, the extent to which …show more content…

For example, Facebook, who claims to provide “data-driven and ideologically neutral” trending news, was recently under fire for having a liberal bias (Friedman). Conservative media leaders met up with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, to talk about this bias and it revealed that “trending topics were chosen by curators with a liberal bias” (Friedman). The conservative leaders invoked the idea that social media that provide news do so with a systematic unconscious bias. For example, a media site might invoke that idea that one is “kind of a sexist” if he loathes “the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming president” even if it is “for reasons both related to her politics and her public persona” and they systematically use this to “parse the reasons why voters do and do not respond to a particular candidate” (Friedman). These unconscious biases, used by many news outlets, are then manipulated to turn a voter’s views against himself, which in turn can greatly affect the outcome of his …show more content…

An increase in watching biased news has lead to another negative effect: many viewers opinions become much more polarized. MSNBC, whose own outlook on politics are typically more liberal, project news in the context of their views. Since the media allows for easy access to this news, their audience, with the same outlook, are thus not “forced to challenge their way of thinking” (Friedman). Someone who watches the news can choose, and typically does, watch news that is similar to what they believe. So even if someone argues, again, that “they can just switch channels” to other news outlets, that project objective views, they go unsee. This leads to very opposite political views that just become more polarized with more viewers, with the same ideology, watching. The audience then only watch their side of politics and people become defensive over which side is right and which side is wrong in terms of legislation and candidates for presidential or congressional

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