How Does Media Bias Affect Campaigns? Essay

Media has been playing a significant role in our daily lives by developing our personalities, enriching our knowledge and providing us with different sorts of information. It has a tremendous power in framing cultural guidelines and shaping political dissertation. If the information provided to the U.S. citizens is distorted, then they cannot make informed decisions on the matters of public policy. Thus, it becomes vital to the American democracy that the news media and its institutions remain unbiased, fair and accurate. Media bias happens when a media systematically and persistently emphasize one particular point of view that is usually below the standards of professional journalism. There can be various reasons for media bias, some of

“Since media are part of the political class and talk mostly to the political class, the myth of popular polarization took root and grew.” (Fiorina, Abrams, Pope, 2005, p. 167). Recently media has played a huge role in the country’s politic; they share information, report events, and frame opinions.

In the past twenty years, the United States media has transformed from a broadcasting to a narrowcasting media. Each method has its unique differences, with one being the amount of bias from each source. Narrowcasting specifically, can greatly affect the media’s ability to influence public opinion.

Journalists play an important part in the democratic process. Traditionally, the roles of the news media are to provide a forum for debate, represent opposing perspectives on the day’s issues and hold public officials accountable while serving their constituents. However, in recent decades, media has given way to biased forms of news— partisan media. In Matthew Levendusky’s “How Partisan Media Polarize America,” he explores if these partisan media influences viewers. The book’s second chapter, “What Do Partisan Media Actually Say?” concludes that partisan media promotes a larger agenda separately to Democrats and Republicans, attack the opposing side while denouncing compromise, and usually side with their candidate of choice during

The article begins by explaining the main purpose for the research inquiry. If this recent election has proven anything, it is that there is vast wealth of election coverage. Citizens can now access political information, and news coverage from almost anywhere through a variety of mediums. This increased access has opened a new dimension. Partisan media effects have been researched in the past. However, this article points out that there is a lack of inquiry on the timing of partisan media influence during the election cycle.

Partisan news has recently become under scrutiny for the biasness that they hold. With CNN being exposed for their fake news and their relentlessness to undermine Trumps presidency. Despite this embarrassment, there have been some pros proclaimed by an author in the article, Public Opinion and the Media: Is Partisan Media Exposure Bad for Democracy? Sides believes that partisan news doesn’t create polarize news rather they attract already polarized people (Sides 5). Additionally, Sides states that partisans are the ideal citizens in our democracy (6). With this being said, Sides believes he is onto some correlation between partisan news and participation amongst citizens.

On the contrary, a biased media has increased its effects on American citizens from a voting stand point. It is no surprise that the media plays a major and powerful role in the lives of millions of American citizens every day. These same Americans sit before the television and computer screens and partake in ongoing debates as it relates to political values, parties, and various other pieces of data. It was seen in most recent election experiences that the media can be biased towards both liberals and conservatives. Frontline reported that by comparison, only 11 percent of the primary coverage

A news programs bias and political party standings can effect what types of propaganda they show of certain candidates. For example, FOX news is a strictly Republican news channel, it supports Republican candidate, meanwhile news channels such as MSNBC and PBS are extremely democratic programs and support Democratic candidates in elections. News programs political bias can affect the way that particular program portrays a candidate for an upcoming election and a candidate’s portrayal can change a voter’s opinion of a candidate and can cause that candidate to lose viewers’ votes. The broadcasting of malicious rumors and gossip in any form by news programs gives a negative conception to a viewer. No viewer wants to vote for a candidate that is portrayed in a way that makes the viewer believe that they are bad for the country. Every viewer needs to take in to consideration the political bias of a news program before changing his or her opinion of a candidate as well as do some research on the candidates of an election themselves.

Using a “common understanding” of what liberal and conservatism means, National Review and the Progressive were chosen to be the standard of conservative and liberal media. Time and Newsweek were considered to be largely more neutral in their coverage. So, by comparing the two neutral magazines to the two partisan magazines the amount of bias could be measured (Adkins). The results found that Time and Newsweek proved to be largely centrist; however, there was a slight bias to the center-left. This finding, however, was not statistically significant and the two publications remain in the “center” range (Adkins). Other studies have shown that there is little evidence to support the notion that the media as a whole is significantly biased in one direction or the other. However, there is evidence that there is a slight liberal bias in television network news (D’Alessio). Despite these findings, 70% of Americans believe that the media as a whole are biased compared to just 55% in 2014. However, earlier findings and studies show that on a large scale there is roughly a balance between conservative and liberal media sources which refutes the idea that as a whole the media are “biased”. Instead, it is more akin to a “tug-of-war” in which each side balances each other out. So this leads to the question as to why a greater number of

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

In the article “Hype Versus Substance in Network Television Coverage of Presidential Election Campaigns”, authors Julia R. Fox, James R. Angelini, and Christopher Goble analyze political coverage on broadcast news during the final weeks of presidential elections. In the end they found that in the final weeks of campaigns many voters are still undecided. “Voters making up their minds at the end of the campaign tend to be less partisan and more likely to use-and to be influenced by-media messages in making their decision ” (Fox, J., Angelini, J., & Goble, C). This tends to be enough to cause a last minute “swing” in an election. With this being said the authors also found that these broadcast news stations very rarely address the critical

I chose these outlets to develop a further understanding of the bias in national media. In A Social-Science Perspective on Media Bias, Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo present their findings as evidence that the majority national news outlets, where the brunt of Americans get their news, have an obvious liberal bias that they believe “influences both public opinion and voting behavior (305)”. Both cities of these publications, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. have a stereotype of being extremely liberal. Washington D.C. was called the most liberal city in the U.S. in a recent Gallup poll in 2014 (Swift 2014). However, location is not the sole factor of ideology. I researched this by comparing the two publications and based my understand of these

(2006). Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions. Retrieved April 2016, from Social Science Research Network: http://ssrn.com/abstract= 903812

Throughout the course of Mass Media and Politics we have learned about how the news is made, who makes the news, why certain things are news, and how the news impacts the public. One underlying question that remains is about the bias that the news presents or if there is a bias at all. The debate about the bias in national news is a pressing one that many may not be aware of; however, its importance is crucial to our

Scholars and researchers were under the impression that media were such a persuasive channel due to the response of consumers through presidential campaigns and elections. According to A Measure of Media Bias by Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, based upon previous studies of media bias, most journalists are liberally biased. When researching the elections of 1992, based upon Povich reports 89% of voters voted of Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush.(1193) “Of course, however, just because a journalist has liberal or conservative views, this does not mean that his or her reporting is slanted” (1193). One may refute the idea of political bias or slant reporting because, all of the media outlets cover elections, nominations and other political coverage. True, all outlets cover factual evidence, however it is how and the context in which the various events, and situations are