Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

TELL WHAT U THINK about how much political bias affects the stories on the news

EDIT: if you can, try to get 2 versions of a single news story that are biased to different sides

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Wow, It's been like three or 4 years since I've last been here

A lot.

While we like to pretend journalists are unbiased robots capable of presenting the news in an entirely neutral fashion, it's just not true.

Dan Rather choosing to present the President Bush in the National Guard story without any solid evidence is a good example. Rather chose to put his career at risk because of a personal dislike for Bush's policies. What would it have cost him to make sure the memos were real? A couple days? Some more work? Instead, he went with it and was forced to resign when the truth came out.

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The worst bias I have seen on the news centers around Iraq. The only news we ever seem to get out of Iraq is either when soldiers die or when civilians die, or when there's an Abu-Ghraib type story. We never hear about schools being built or infrastructure being restored. I guess there's no news like bad news, but c'mon, why not some upbeat stuff?

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I have thought up a plan of how media can fix things.

1.) Have 60% of the stories be good or happy news.
2.) Make good news the top story for 4 out of the 7 days in a week.
3.) On 24-7 news channels like CNN, begin and end every segment with good news.

If the news networks do this, watch how fast America changes its tune.

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There does seem to be a lot of bias in the media. But I don't think that it's necessarily the editors' or journalists' bias that's showing through - but rather the bias of the audience. Let's face it - we want sex, gore, sleaze and scandal. Any else - as in, anything that we actually need to know - is left on the sideline.

And bias doesn't always mean that one side of the story is painted as the villian or whatever. Bias can also come about through the very angle the journalists choose to focas on - like focasing on one insignifiant event because it's a bit juicy. And I think that latter bias is the far more dangerous - because you can't ever know if you're getting the full story. Soon enough, you don't know what the hell is going on.

you have to be freakin kidding me.

people LOVE to talk about how biased the news is. nobody pretends its not biased. its biased, and people talk about it all the time.

Personally, i think the least-slanted news out there is from Fox. They really cover both sides of everthing. (cool it, that was a joke...)

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