Media bias in the United States
[4] In colonial Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was an early and forceful advocate for presenting all sides of an issue, writing, for instance, in his "An Apology For Printers" that "... when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.
[9] In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Northern newspaper editors for publishing articles alleged to have been sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Hearst falsely claimed that he had started the war, but in fact the nation's decision makers paid little attention to his demands—President McKinley, for example, did not read the yellow journals.
Charles Lindbergh in 1941 claimed American Jews, possessing outsized influence in Hollywood, the media, and the Roosevelt administration, were pushing the nation into war against its interests.
[21] Hans Thomsen, the senior diplomat at the German Embassy in Washington, reported to Berlin that his efforts to place pro-isolationist articles in American newspapers had failed.
According to Jonathan M. Ladd's Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters, "institutional journalists were [once] powerful guardians of the republic, maintaining high standards of political discourse.
[42] In 2023, a survey found half of Americans indicated they believe national news organizations "intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
[58][59] In 2008, George W. Bush's press secretary Scott McClellan published a book in which he confessed to regularly and routinely, but unknowingly, passing on misinformation to the media, following the instructions of his superiors.
These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American-big-business and anti-Soviet views, such as William S. Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (The New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of The Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (The Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr. (Louisville Courier-Journal), James S. Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (The Christian Science Monitor).
"[67] Chris Hedges argues that corporate media control "of nearly everything we read, watch or hear" is an aspect of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.
[68][69] "The guard dog metaphor suggests that media perform as a sentry not for the community as a whole, but for groups having sufficient power and influence to create and control their own security systems."
According to sociologist David Nibert of Wittenberg University, the development of mass media in the 20th century allowed powerful corporations, with the support of politicians and government, to control public consciousness and disparage any challenge to the status quo, and to further the accumulation of profit.
The strong profit-making incentive of the American media leads them to seek a simplified format and uncontroversial position which will be adequate for the largest possible audience.
[86][87][88] Jon Ham, a vice president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, wrote that "local officials and editors often claim that mentioning the black-on-white nature of the event might inflame passion, but they never have those same qualms when it's white-on-black.
The study also discussed how different media topics, in this case pro-choice protests, sometimes lead to biased reporting because of women's reluctance to speak up "in fear of misperceptions or repercussions.
[96] According to a study done by Eran Shor, Arnout van de Rijt, and Babak Fotouhi, even after accounting for systemic gender disparity within occupation and public interest, women still receive disproportionate news coverage.
[111][112] The editorial board of the conservative Washington Examiner argued that Facebook and Twitter temporarily limiting the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy on their platforms while fact-checkers reviewed it, even though parts of the story eventually turned out to be accurate, "proves Big Tech's bias".
Regarding the claims of a left-wing bias, Moyers asserted in a Broadcasting & Cable interview that "If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted.
Nexstar invested millions of dollars into news programming, and said they hired "rhetoricians" to monitor language used in their flagship newscast, NewsNation Prime, for evidence of bias.
[171] In response, the United States Senate unanimously adopted a resolution which reaffirmed "the vital and indispensable role the free press serves" and was seen as a symbolic rebuke to Trump.
[13] In an editorial for The American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan wrote that reporting by "the liberal media establishment" on the Watergate scandal "played a central role in bringing down a president."
"[174] Nixon's Vice-president Spiro Agnew attacked the media in a series of speeches, two of the most famous being written by White House aides William Safire and Buchanan himself, as "elitist" and "liberal.
During presidential campaigns the Times systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare but only when the incumbent president is a Republican.
The idea was to check whether newspapers display partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent president.
[182] That form of political coverage involves diverting attention away from stronger candidates and hyping so-called dark horse contenders who seem more unlikely to win when the election cycle begins.
"[188][189] In an op-ed published on April 27, 2008, in The New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards wrote that the media covered much more of "the rancor of the campaign" and "amount of money spent" than "the candidates' priorities, policies and principles.
[203][204] Trump received more extensive media coverage than Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders combined when they were the only primary candidates left in the race.
As The Forward observed in late April [2002], 'rooting out perceived anti-Israel bias in the media has become for many American Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the conflict 6,000 miles away.
'"[221] The Forward related how one individual felt: "'There's a great frustration that American Jews want to do something,' said Ira Youdovin, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.
In the past four years, multiple media outlets with direct or indirect financial ties to China allegedly decided not to publish stories on wealth and corruption in the CCP.
