Bias In The Media

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Bias in the media is probably as old as the media itself. Bias, be it gendered or racial or political, is something that is ingrained in our society and would be difficult to remove altogether without completely dismantling the entire way civilization functions. That does not, however, mean that such a thing is impossible but to diminish, and perhaps eliminate bias altogether. In order to understand media bias, you must first look at who controls the news outlets and the content that they produce. A large majority of the news media is owned by just six corporations (Lutz, 2012). These corporations (Comcast, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS) each have their own agendas that they want to be pushed forward. Even if they are not…show more content…
CBS and Viacom each had higher donations to Republican candidates using Political Action Committees (PACs) for the 2014 and 2016 cycles respectively. Comcast and News Corp were more even in their spending although Comcast leaned slightly to the left and News Corp leaned slightly to the right. As far as the men who own the corporations, some of them, such as staunch conservative Rupert Murdoch, have obvious political ties and are very vocal about where they stand on hot button issues. These men, and they are in fact all men, have a very limited scope when it comes to social issues. This is not to say that these men are intentionally misogynistic or racist or homophobic but they did not have to deal with many issues that face women and minorities and as such would not be sensitive to them. Growing up with the privilege, of being white, male, and financially well off, as many of these CEOs were, would leave them with certain ingrained biases surrounding any…show more content…
For example, plenty of people have been covering Ben Carson’s latest comments in which he stated that he would not be comfortable with having someone of the Muslim faith as president (Carson, 2015). On another hand, during April of 2015 when the National Guard had been called into Baltimore, an interview took place between city councilman Carl Stokes and CNN anchor Erin Burnett in which Stokes called Burnett out on her use of coded language. Much of the incident was ignored with the exception of Councilman Stokes use of a racial slur in order to get his point across (Stokes, 2015). In that he was framed as a hostile figure although he gave voice to a shared sentiment throughout the African American community regarding how minorities are framed in news media. In interviews in which the interviewee is an ethnic minority, female, or a part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) community they are often asked to speak for their entire group. This is problematic because often times the people who are chosen to be interviewed have very little intersectionality, that is to say that I may be part of one minority group they are unfortunately not representative

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