Back in middle school, I would, as a typical preteen, often scroll through the Internet. The deeper I went, the more shocked I became at how biased and twisted the articles and websites seemed. Being so young, my knowledge on social issues and politics was understandably limited — but even then I had a sense that there was something was off with how the news was being portrayed.
Looking back, I realize that I was onto something. According to Gallup Polls, only 41 percent of Americans in 2019 had a great to fair amount of trust in the mass media. Flip the channel from CNN to Fox News and you’re getting a completely different story; facts and statistics can be manipulated and cherry picked to push any agenda. Both extremes of the political spectrum have no reservations doing this — after all, a great amount of their audience prefers this one-sided approach over a nuanced, multifaceted analysis.
Despite the polarizing effect biased media is having on society, the extent of this bias isn’t that surprising. In a study done by Carnegie Mellon University, only one out of 661 people believed that their bias was more than that of the average person’s. A shockingly large majority of people had what social psychologist Emily Pronin coined as the “bias blind spot:” the ability to see bias in everyone except oneself.
Likewise, while we tend to think of media establishments and newspapers as massive machines churning out material, behind every article is a flawed, human individual with their own bias blind spot. With this in consideration, it’s no surprise news outlets, many which claim to be unbiased journalism, are becoming increasingly partisan.
However, a journalist’s own personal bias is only one of the many reasons why news outlets are so biased — it pales in comparison to the giant beast that is financial profit. Cable networks, online media networks, and radio stations all make money through the same things: views and listens.
Audiences have all the power; they will view and listen to what they want to, which usually isn’t a critical piece with various viewpoints. Because of this, news outlets such as Fox News and CNN are essentially trapped by their own audiences. In order to profit, they need to feed them content that will keep bringing them back, time and time again. Therefore, in a way, the biased news problem stems from us, the audience: ultimately, aren’t we the ones they’re trying to please?
“The bias in our media from both sides of the spectrum is without a doubt one of the major causes of the increasingly polarized political climate”
The idea that the general public has so much unconscious control over the news makes the rising number of extremists, in part created by the Internet’s echo chamber effect, all the more concerning. While the Internet has the ability to expose people to a diverse spectrum of opinions and ideas, the way social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are set up don’t exactly utilize this. When someone clicks on an article, algorithms will quickly recommend similar articles and display ads with related political agendas. A simple click on an outrageous-sounding article could easily lead a person down a political rabbit hole, and sometimes, unfortunately, into an extreme political ideology.
The bias in our media from both sides of the spectrum is without a doubt one of the major causes of the increasingly polarized political climate. In fact, Pew Research Center, in a study of over 10,000 American adults, found that since 1994 the percentage of Republicans who identify as more conservative than the average Democrat has gone from 64 to 92 percent. Likewise, the percentage of Democrats who are more liberal than the average Republican has gone from 70 to 92 percent.
No matter what you identify as, this polarization is bad news. Reasonable and open conversations between the two sides have become more and more difficult to produce. It also opens the gateway to extremist, violent ideologies like neo-Nazism and Antifa. Of course, with the manipulative, almost brainwashing way some media outlets present issues, it’s no wonder people are getting angrier and more radicalized.
Sadly, this has transformed our country into a shouting match — a shouting match where both sides are deaf. The more extreme our media becomes, the more extreme we become — and the more we leave an undividable gap between left and right, liberal and conservative. A divided nation is unable to solve its problems, unable to even function. Just take a look at the month-long government shutdown earlier this year. Our only hope at this point is it bridge these two chaotic sides with a neutral, unbiased outlook from the media. Then, just maybe, we can make some progress.
