Why the Media Has to be Biased
by You may already believe this, but do you know why?
Too powerful not to be biased
Even with all of the criticism of their fairness, people still watch the news. They still believe in it. If tomorrow morning CNN reported that you were a criminal, your life would be ruined even without a trial, that’s because nobody would question the story, not even the harshest critic of the corporate media would dismiss it if they saw it on TV. If the next day CNN was to report that oops, they made a mistake, your reputation would still be tainted for the rest of your life. That’s the power of the public faith in what they see on TV. That is just too powerful for the owners of media outlets to not take advantage of.
It’s a weapon for molding the opinion of a whole society. There are situations in which the public opinion can be used for profit, do you seriously think that they would not? You can destroy men, make them heroes, and send stock prices soaring or plummeting with a simple news story, do you seriously think that nobody would exploit this? I don’t just mean once in a while either, I mean every day.
People want to believe
Imagine how disturbing it would be if you knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the moon-landing was fake. If tomorrow there emerged concrete, absolute proof, if, perhaps, NASA simply came clean and admitted it. It would set everything you thought you knew about space, everything you got taught in school, everything you read in a history book or saw on TV in doubt. It would be unsettling and, for many, profoundly distressing. Nobody wants to doubt their institutions, they want the security of knowing that there are places of truth, places where you can believe what you hear. By publishing with a veneer of “journalistic ethics”, the media provides that.
You will never find solid proof that a spaceship crash-landed at Area 51, or that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK, and similarly, you will never be able to prove that the media always has an ulterior motive. What you can count on, though is the human nature. They are biased because it is unthinkable that they would be otherwise.
Liked it
