A Plethora of Options: How News Sources Bias Our Perception of the World.
Tailored news sources have always been a point of ideological division in this nation. Since the times of the Sons of Liberty, a group of self righteous printers and liberal political thinkers, whom used their powers as the heads of the colonial press, to drive opposition protesters to the doors of their competitors and pull apart their printing machinery. Divisions within media outlets and the swinging acts of political ideology, have come to manifest new news outlets and create vast gaps of political segregation. Which ever way you see it, a bias has always existed within news sources American or other. Perspective is in inherent in all people of all walks of life, wether it is a journalist in a newspaper or the individuals punching keys onto a blog, there’s always some form of perspective.
Access to news sources has never been easier then today. Websites with ideological driven narratives exist all across the spectrum, from Communism to liberalism to Facism. The ill-informed and well informed alike can seek out whatever they choose fit. There’s certainly no problem in one doing so, freedom of the press, the liberal perspective, is what makes the internet so great. It’s hard to fathom how to properly rank and value all the possible sources that exist today, when there’s more then 978,240,000 available websites to chose from.
Quite often establishment media sources tend to hide their ideological driven motives. These sources have less of a focus on presenting reliable information as they are pushing a particular perspective, which grants a market, and an avenue for advertisement. Alex Jones, and not that Alex Jones but Harvard press analyst Alex Jones once wrote, “In a conservative time, a time of war, Fox viewers like their news from a strong American perspective, with flags rippling in graphics and a pugnacity toward the nation’s critics.” Former Fox political contributor and journalist, Bruce Bartlett, claims Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is not just a collection of news outlets who primarily employs conservative writers. Stating that once News Corp acquires a new media outlet, their print and online publications transition from being conservative minded, without a bias, to forming, “a conservative tilt” that “creep[s] into the news coverage.” Valued at just under 15.1 billions dollars, News Corp’s influence on the US, English, and Australian news markets is untouched by any of competitors, and unsurprisingly has continued to move farther and farther right.
Political fragmentation has existed for quite some time, it’s always existed but today it’s often an unmentioned brand. In the past if a particular for-profit print media adventure wished to be successful, or introduce a new product against a competitor that had a strangle hold on a particular market, it was best to, “dispense with [the] sharp edges and anything that might divide or exclude readers.” Furthermore, laws such as the Fairness Doctrine, originally perscribed to radio outlets, required, “a broadcaster… to broadcast information on issues of public importance, and such coverage must have accurately reflected opposing views on those issues,” and “when a person involved in a public issue was attacked on air, the station would have to provide the attacked party a transcript of the attack and an equal opportunity to respond to the attack on the same station.” Now however, no such law exists today, as the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, and rightful so as it hampered radio outlets to broadcast diverse opinions without interruptions, but today with over, an additional 420,000 new websites since the beginning of the writing of this piece, consumers have an infinite number of choices.
Websites, wether run by publicly traded corporations or privately run blogs, have no requirement to tell the truth or reveals a bias that may exist, but one would assume it’s in their best interest to do so. However what we find is, time and time again, personal ideology is tied to a particular consumption or view point of a news outlet. In the journal article entitled, “Visualizing Media Bias through Twitter,” the five contributing authors were able to apply an algorithmic calculation associated with hashtags applied to news stories. Their goal was to calculate the, “bias of news media outlets in real-time from the way Twitter users subscribe and disseminate news articles.” By comparing the hashtags in a typical user’s tweets to the sources they typical retweet. The authors were able to create a political profile for users. Unsurprisingly, the authors were able to show how users self segregated themselves via their sources and uses of hashtags. The authors showed a relation between sources typically deem left and their consistent retweets by fellow left leaning twitter users. NPR, the National Public Radio website drew the highest relation with left users while the Washington Times and Fox News were found to relate strongly with the more conservative users.
The Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research released a similar study entitled, “Political Polarization on Twitter” which found nearly identical relations. The conclusions proposed by Conover, et al expose an interesting dynamic that is playing out before our eyes. Their conclusion states, “the fractured nature of political discourse seems to be worsening, and understanding the social and technological dynamics underlying this trend will be essential to attenuating its effect on the public sphere.“ The authors come to this conclusion by bringing to light the clear distinction between users who retweet particular sources, i.e. consumers of a particular ideologically driven source, verse a more diverse over lapping of hashtag usage. These conclusions verify this all to often apparent consumption of sources that are bias towards one’s own view of the world. Through the aggregation of public available internet traffic, both groups were able to show how conservative minded individuals consume, share, and retweet conservatives sources and vice versa.
Reading, consuming, and professing, information from only one set of sources results in a self created bubble or echo chamber. This can be done out of spite, bias, or interest, but in the end the self censoring of data and opinion. Can be harmful to world general overall view of the world. What happens if the data we consume is not inherently accurate or based on its creation designed to take upon a narrative or an influencer’s opinion. Polling data provided by Program on International Policy Attitudes shows a stark difference in the knowledge level of consumers of particular news organizations. In their poling questions, pollster ask a series of questions and tie their responses to the news outlet the individual most heavily aligned themselves with:
Where do we sit today however? Websites like Reddit give average information consumers the ability to find fresh information for nearly any topic they so wish, or of course you can broaden your horizon by looking at pictures of cats or silly children. Direct user popularity, or algorithms of likes, is now a prime driver of what content is promoted to the front pages of the internet, but just as we saw with late 90s television. Consumer driven reporting often still relies on the subtle flaw of consumer interest, wether right, wrong, accurate, or inaccurate. Even the nation’s public broadcasting radio and television stations, which rely on user donations and a small amount of state funding, instead of just public subzidation in many other countries, are sponsored by the billionaire Koch brothers, backers of the early 2000’s tea party movement. In my opinion, the best bet we have today is for individuals to focus not just on varied sources of data coming from varied perspectives, but well sourced, confirmed empirical data. Information outside of news cycles and sponsor influence, and begin to rely on individuals who are well establish as professionals and experts in their fields, not individuals that entertaining for entertainment sake.
