The Independent Variable - Matt Haugland


Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Liberal Bias

I read a description for a conservative news web site that got me thinking. It called itself "an alternative to the liberal media". Seems ironic to me that the alternative to biased news is... biased news.

That got me thinking about if and why the media (mostly talking TV news here) has a liberal bias. I believe it does, but for a simple and innocent reason: people who have a liberal ideology tend to be more attracted to that kind of career.

I believe the same applies to public schools and universities. Liberals tend to want to change the world through social action. The media and schools are great avenues for that. Conservatives tend to be more into changing the world through religion and other things, which attracts them to other types of careers. They also tend to form their own news outlets, private schools, and home schooling, which further reduces the percentage of conservatives in the mainstream ones (and fights bias with more bias).

So if there is a liberal bias, and there probably is, conservatives shouldn't complain about it because they are partly responsible. And liberals should stop complaining about talk radio and conservative news, because they are partly responsible for creating the market for it.

I (and probably the majority of people?) see the most important dichotomy as not between liberal and conservative but between people who do have a political agenda and people who don't. But people who do have political agendas also have the most motivation to push their views through the media and schools.

I suppose there also could be such a thing as moderate bias...

1 Comments:

At 7:40 PM, Blogger lizard said...

What's disturbing to me is the large number of people that blindly ingest whatever they are spoon-fed by the powers that be on their respective sides.

 

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