By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
When we talk about media “bias,” Save Jerseyans, we’re not necessarily referring to something conscious. Biases are built up over a lifetime of exposure to external stimuli and fortified by willful blindness.
There has always been “bias” in the American media, ever since the Federalist and Antifederalist papers scrapped during the early 19th century. What’s different now, of course, is the extent to which almost every traditional media outlet is dominated by individuals with the same worldview.
Again, I don’t think even many current members of the media appreciate the extent to which it affects theirs reporting. Take this Thursday Asbury Park Press headline:
Cops kill Middletown man who was holding son hostage
Why not “Police rescue captive child of Middletown man” instead?
Or “Police fell hostage-taker in Middletown,” for example?
My proposed alternatives tell a very, very different story than the one that APP’s editors ultimately went with, don’t they?
I’m not blaming the press for engendering what we’ve seen in Ferguson, Baltimore and other urban centers in recent months. I am accusing them of not helping matters by treating every single police action as a criminal act, before we even have the facts, leaving low-information voters scratching their heads as police fear doing their jobs and crime rates soar.
We talked about it this week in an entirely different context, Save Jerseyans; the media needs to start doing its job again if it wants to survive in the modern world as a force for good, or a force at all.
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Right On! Most mainstream media now mimics tabloids.