Media Bias Examples

One of the greatest lies continually passed onto the American people by the media, besides lone gunman theory, * and Justin Bieber having talent, is the idea that the media has a liberal bias. A few examples from the past week or so should serve as exemplars of this absurd prevarication, passed on by the prevaricators themselves. The first involves a story about Greeks giving themselves HIV to get 700 euros a month in government aid. The second involves a large portion of the mainstream media’s obsession with deficits and debt. And the third involves that contentious issue of global warming. 

The first story, No, Large Numbers of Greek People are Not Giving Themselves HIV ... (Atlantic) details how a mistake in a report from the WHO led to Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge going apoplectic with joy, showing us how government spending creates insane behavior from otherwise normal people. The problem is the WHO corrected the report before these stories broke (not only among the right-wing loons, but across the global media landscape: Slate). The idea that people would purposefully make themselves very sick just to get government money plays directly into the conservative myopic worldview and reinforces the notion that it is government, not the neoliberal policies and bad bank loans, that caused this problem to begin with. This is the greatest lie of all – that government is the problem, not the solution to our current economic travails.

The second story, Why Do Newspaper Reporters Root for Deficit Reduction? (Slate.com), asks why reporters continue to focus on the deficit and debt even as it is falling precipitously at the moment. Too many have fallen into the conservative trap of believing that Social Security will soon run out of money (false), that excessive government spending and not constant tax cuts and the reason for deficits (both true) and that if we don’t deal with the deficit immediately, the economy will collapse (false, as Keynesian economics demonstrated until it was abandoned in the 70s). The reality is that the focus on deficits over jobs just reinforces neoliberal economic policy and the declining quality of life for far too many here and abroad.

Finally, a fascinating report from Media Matters found that while there's a 97 percent consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed climate science literature and among climate experts and a  96 percent consensus in the climate research that humans are responsible for most of the current global warming (a 2013 IPCC report agrees with this position with 95 percent confidence, and states that humans are most likely responsible for 100 percent of the global warming since 1951), in stories about the 2013 IPCC report, rather than accurately reflect this expert consensus, certain media outlets have created a false perception of discord amongst climate scientists. This not-terribly-surprising finding simply reinforces the notion that “fair and balanced” and “objectivity” are false and impossible goals that merely bamboozle the average citizen while serving the powerful. The same can be said about the lead up to the Iraq War, the terror threats, inequality and a whole host of other issues that obfuscate the reality that at least one and a half parties in this country are encumbered to corporate interests.