How can you tell when media is showing a bias? Besides just that fact that it is coming from news or social media. Two of the major ways in which media creates bias is by using words that are designed to elicit emotion and by stating opinions as facts, without trying to prove those opinions. More often than not, you will see them together.
As examples, if you read of “President Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud” or of “Biden’s illegally stolen election”, the writers are trying to manipulate your opinion. I have not read many articles on the election that do not use one or the other statements, without any effort to prove their claims. Trump’s claims of election fraud are always called baseless. No attempt is made to explain what those claims are, or prove them to be baseless. It is much simpler to just state that they were baseless and if you state it often enough, your readers will believe it. Biden’s election win was illegally stolen. Again, no need to prove that, just keep saying it and your readers will believe it. I think of it like a Jedi mind trick. Keep saying “These are not the droids you are looking for” and many will come to believe it is true.
Now let’s look at how an unbiased media might cover the election. Below is a less biased coverage of the election issue.
President Trump has claimed that changes to State’s voting rules were illegal, as well as opened up opportunities to abuse the election system. His team has pointed to idiosyncrasies in the results. President elect Biden claims that the election had absolutely no fraud. While it is unrealistic to believe that rules that reduced barriers to voting, led to an election with no fraudulent voting, especially in such a highly contested race, President Trump has yet to prove that the election results would have been different if these rules had not been changed.
See how different that is? I did not tell you what to believe there. I just described some of the facts of the topic. Of course, there is a lot more data than can fit in a single example paragraph, but you get the idea. If the facts were displayed fully in this manner, and you were left to form your own opinion, it is likely that your opinion would be different than it is now.
Lets talk about another divisive subject in the news lately. Lets get into the mask mandate discussion. On the one side, people who refuse to wear masks are heartless grandma killers. On the other side, people who insist on mask wear are weak sheep who are controlled by the government. Here, we have an excellent example of using words designed to elicit emotion. Now lets try to remove the emotionally charged words.
People tend to disagree on the effectiveness of masks for reducing the spread of the Covid-19 virus. While some point to the recent scientific studies which seem to indicate that masks would be effective, others look at the prevailing scientific consensus from a year ago that masks were not effective in stopping viral spread. And while more than 70% of the population claim in surveys to use masks whenever social distancing cannot be maintained, case numbers keep going up.
The only name I called anybody here is People. There is no emotional case made. Just the facts, which can be argued without trying to attack anyone. The problem is that it is almost impossible to find such positive examples on social media or the main stream media. But the negative examples are easy to find. Often the attack is found right up front in the headline. But rarely do you need to read more than one paragraph of most news articles before you can see one or both of these attack methods in use. It is splitting us up as a country, and dumbing us down as a people.
Please, when you read articles on the news or social media, watch for these items. The stating of something as obvious fact without any proof, or the use of negative (or overly positive) wording to manipulate your emotions and sway your opinion. Watch out for them, recognize them for what they are, and work to keep your values from being affected by manipulative media messaging.
Why is this important? Because the media is the real culprit behind the division we see in our country. To give you an idea of the power the media has, let me start by stating that the reason the Democratic candidate for President this election was Joe Biden instead of Bernie Sanders is because of the media. When Bernie Sanders took an early lead, the media pushed the message that Joe Biden was the one who could beat Trump, and with that push came a dramatic and sudden turnaround in the Democratic Primary race. You can go back and look at the media articles published at that time, and see the media influence. The media is responsible for the BLM riots as much as anybody. And the media is responsible for the Capital Hill riots as much as anybody. The media wanted Hillary Clinton for President in 2016, and would have gotten that result if they had not over played the message that Hillary was the strong frontrunner, so that many who would have voted for her did not vote, thinking it unnecessary. It was an analysis of the 2016 election that first convinced me that the media was manipulating us intentionally. If we can’t see how the media is manipulating us to get us to do their bidding, then the United States of America is likely to become the Untied States of America.