Apparently, it is just too much trouble to ask people who claim there is media bias to defend their claims. Oh sure, they can point to a story or two where some minutiae wasn't accurate or some minor detail was left out. For this they will claim "The New York Times cannot by be trusted with anything!"
Quick thought experiment: Shortly after the November election, then-Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a former football coach with no political experience, incorrectly identified the three branches of government during an interview. He said the three branches of government are the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Executive. This, of course, is not correct. The three branches are the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch. CNN ran a segment on this gaffe, calling it an "alarming lack of knowledge" of how the government works. They discussed his lack of past political experience, highlighting that he is a former football coach. Do you think this is newsworthy? CNN certainly did.
Now ask yourself this: if a Democratic member of Congress made this same gaffe, do you think CNN would have covered it? Do you think they would have called it an "alarming lack of knowledge?" Do you think they would have been equally harsh on a Democrat?
Well, in reality, Democrats have made this same gaffe on more than one occasion, and CNN never chose to report on it. They devoted no news coverage to it whatsoever, deciding it wasn't newsworthy. Now, if CNN were unbiased, they would have given it equal coverage, they would have been equally harsh about it, and there would have been no detectable difference in their tone. At the time when the Democrats made these gaffes, if you would have asked CNN why they didn't report on these gaffes, they likely would have said it was a simple gaffe that anyone could have made, and it's not newsworthy, and there would be no way for any of us to demonstrate that their decision may have been influenced in part by which party would be made to look bad by this story. But now, years later when a Republican makes the same mistake, CNN suddenly decides it's newsworthy. In other words, the journalists and editors who work at CNN and decide what's newsworthy are influenced in part by their own biases, and these biases bleed through in their reporting. This is one of
many, many, many examples of bias that you would find at CNN or any other outlet (left or right). Part of the role of the press is to tell us what we should care about and what is/isn't a big deal. When I see countless examples of bias in CNN's reporting, however, it calls into question their credibility in determining what is/isn't newsworthy.
The problem of credibility now becomes this: next time I see CNN reporting on an event making it sound like a big deal, I will wonder
Would they be treating this the exact same way if the parties were reversed? If a Republican says something stupid or does something bad and CNN chooses to report on it because they think it's newsworthy, I will ask myself
Is this really a big deal, or is CNN simply covering it because it makes the GOP look bad? I will wonder
Would they be making a big deal out of this if a Democrat did the same thing? And I will have credible evidence that their perspective on what is newsworthy and what is a big deal is influenced heavily by partisan preferences, not objective and neutral observations.
Now, it can be easy to dismiss this as a random error in reporting that could happen to anyone, but it is one of many, many examples I can point to, and after seeing many, many examples of this type of reporting, it begins to become clear that there is a pattern to this, and it demonstrates bias. I created a thread about a week ago discussing the media bias example explained above, and I have plenty more that I could point to. Feel free to check out my previous thread to hear more about it.
I can certainly understand how someone on the left might miss some of the subtle biases. But I think a careful and intellectually honest look at them leaves no other conclusion than that most of the legacy outlets do skew pretty clearly to the left.
I hope this helps explain what people mean by media bias
mediabiasfactcheck.com
