The bias of news producers and journalists in the media is apparent in the selection of stories and events to cover and report. It is the pervasive bias disregarding standards of journalism, rather than the outlook of an article or journalist as an entity. The inability of reporting neutral, all accessible stories and facts linking into a logical narrative brings about biasness (Steven, 2004).
Influence lies much in the governments and market forces. The market forces such as selection of staff, ownership of news source, preferences of an intended audience ,concentration of media ownership, and pressure from advertisers result to media bias. In advertising and corporate bias, stories are in a manner pleasing to the audience and corporate owners respectively even if it is not the case. Mainstream bias hides negative issues by reporting information similar to other media or journalist as a way to avoid hurting people. Journalists often prioritize stories of their interest. For example, an airplane crash has more concern to journalists than automobile yet in both, people are affected. Furthermore, fire bizarre in the slum may be of less concern than in the central business district in cities. Bias reflects in media attack, favor or support in ethnic group, religion, sexual orientation, political party, gender, age or ideology among others (Steven, 2004).
Media is bias since information given is because of their interest or the interest of a certain party. This is either religion, race, political or the government’s interest. Media biasness misrepresents other dimensional view to create a narrative portraying a flaw problem in people’s perception referred to as “hostile media effect”. It is largely concerned in creating and holding interest of the audience since they filter the information they choose to release through bias (Niven, 2002).
Biasness creates simple stories with easily assimilated narratives and comfortable, despite how complex or painful the story might be. TV news is worst in reporting historical events as it often gives current affairs and rarely past occurrences. This has brought the culture of spending more time in present the administration than past. At the same time, even if a journalist observes an event directly, probability of giving his own interpretation is very high, and the reporter prefers what someone says than what he has observed (Steven, 2004).
Bias such as spin makes one angle’s ideological perspective seem better. It occurs when interpretation of a story excludes another in an event. This is evident in liberal politics claiming biasness towards conservative politics resulting to groups viewing themselves as right and others as wrong bringing mistrust to the people. Bias creates conflicts among the groups and can result to feuds and war when it brings resistance from one side (Kuypers, 2002). During campaigns and elections, people who watch a given media source tends to share a common political viewpoint with that source resulting to voter opinions swing in a very significant way. The persuasion rates show that media bias carry between 8 and 10 percent of the audience. It also creates different political views, opinions and beliefs among different media audience. With this, people choose media sources that match their own political views of the world hence different policy implications (Niven, 2002).
Bias in media has led to closure of some media houses. Some films have been banned from the market while others such as anti-science bias create superstition among the audience. Racist countries discourage airing racially mixed casts especially those that stars are their opponents.
References
Kuypers, Jim (2002). Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Niven David (2002). The Search for Media Bias. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group
Steven, Peter (2004). The No-nonsense Guide to Global Media. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: New Internationalist.
