[3] Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries, for example China, North Korea, Syria and Myanmar.
[29][better source needed] John Milton's 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing was one of the first publications advocating freedom of the press.
There is little agreement on how they operate or originate but some involve economics, government policies, norms, and the individual creating the news.
On the theoretical side the focus is on understanding to what extent the political positioning of mass media outlets is mainly driven by demand or supply factors.
[44] Herman and Chomsky (1988) cite supply-driven bias including around the use of official sources, funding from advertising, efforts to discredit independent media ("flak"), and "anti-communist" ideology, resulting in news in favor of U.S. corporate interests.
Competition can still affect the welfare and treatment of consumers, but it is not very effective in changing bias compared to the supply side.
Their findings suggest that the New York Times produce biased weather forecast results depending on the region in which the Giants play.
[47] Demand-driven models evaluate to what extent media bias stems from companies providing consumers what they want.
Messages are prioritized and rewarded based on their virality and shareability rather than their truth,[51] promoting radical, shocking click-bait content.
[52] Social media influences people in part because of psychological tendencies to accept incoming information, to take feelings as evidence of truth, and to not check assertions against facts and memories.
[54] Within the United States, Pew Research Center reported that 64% of Americans believed that social media had a toxic effect on U.S. society and culture in July 2020.
[60] Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, in his book Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018), argues that on social media networks, the most emotionally charged and polarizing topics usually predominate, and that "If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook.
"[61][62] In a 2021 report, researchers at the New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights found that Republicans' frequent argument that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have an "anti-conservative" bias is false and lacks any reliable evidence supporting it; the report found that right-wing voices are in fact dominant on social media and that the claim that these platforms have an anti-conservative lean "is itself a form of disinformation.
"[63][64] A 2021 study in Nature Communications examined political bias on social media by assessing the degree to which Twitter users were exposed to content on the left and right – specifically, exposure on the home timeline (the "news feed").
[65] The study determined: "Both in terms of information to which they are exposed and content they produce, drifters initialized with Right-leaning sources stay on the conservative side of the political spectrum.
Those initialized with Left-leaning sources, on the other hand, tend to drift toward the political center: they are exposed to more conservative content and even start spreading it.
[70] Scholar Sarah Hughes, in a study published in 2016, argued that the panic "both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives" whose ideology "was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through" tabloid media, sensationalist television and magazine reporting, and local news.
According to Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, "it has long been the American habit to be more suspicious of – and more repressive toward – religions that stand outside the mainline Protestant-Roman Catholic-Jewish troika that dominates America's spiritual life."
As for front-end/back-end disproportionality, Wright says: "news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence occurring at the front-end of an event.
[74] Experiments have shown that media bias affects behavior and more specifically influences the readership's political ideology.
[21] Similar decreases in trust have been reported by Gallup, with In 2022, half of Americans responded that they believed that news organizations would deliberately attempt to mislead them.
[78] NPR's ombudsman wrote a 2011 article about how to note the political leanings of think tanks or other groups that the average listener might not know much about before citing a study or statistic from an organization.
[85][non-primary source needed] A technique used to avoid bias is the "point/counterpoint" or "round table", an adversarial format in which representatives of opposing views comment on an issue.
Besides these challenges, exposing news consumers to differing viewpoints seems to be beneficial for a balanced understanding and more critical assessment of current events and latent topics.
[83] Using this format can also lead to accusations that the reporter has created a misleading appearance that viewpoints have equal validity (sometimes called "false balance").
[citation needed] The CBC and Radio Canada, its French language counterpart, are governed by the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which states programming should be "varied and comprehensive, providing balance of information...provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern.