• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Media Bias: Tone vs. Content

Mina

Banned
DP Veteran
Joined
Jun 14, 2019
Messages
1,333
Reaction score
732
Gender
Female
Political Leaning
Very Liberal
I think the focus on the media's tone misses a more important point about media bias.

Take, for instance, the Hunter Biden laptop coverage back in the closing weeks of the 2020 election. Some have accused the mainstream media of liberal bias there, based on the skeptical tone mainstream outlets took when running those stories (e.g., highlighting the possibility that it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign). But by far the more important point is that they were talking about it at all, while all but ignoring Trump-family corruption stories.

Take any mainstream news archive of your choice and do an article count, in the month before that election, of stories that include "Hunter Biden" and "laptop" versus those that include "Ivanka Trump" and "trademark" (her business was granted a bunch of Chinese trademarks, in apparent defiance of actual Chinese laws, just as her father was negotiating trade policy with them). By all rights, the Ivanka story should have been a much bigger one, since she was actually a major figure in the administration at the time she was being handed those lucrative benefits by a foreign power. By comparison, Hunter Biden was just a private citizen when he worked for that foreign business (as was his father, by the way, at the time when the famous "big guy" email went out).

Yet, despite there being much firmer ground for treating the Ivanka story as a big deal, there was a near blackout of any Ivanka Trump coverage in the period leading up to the election, while the Hunter Biden speculation was treated as one of the biggest stories in the world. The New York Times, for instance, ran sixteen separate stories dealing with Hunter's laptop just in the last two weeks of October 2020 -- more than one per day. And we're not talking about "damage control" stories trying to blame things on the Russians. Like there's a 10/22/22 story laying out everything known to that point about the laptop saga, which goes out of its way to say there's no evidence it's Russian disinformation.

The more important point, though, is that even those articles that injected a note of caution were still acting as if the GOP was their assignment editor -- focusing their articles on whether or not Hunter Biden was crooked, rather than a million other stories they could be covering that would be riskier for Trump. That's what I mean about the difference between tone and content. In terms of tone, the corporate press arguably had a bit of a liberal bias. In terms of content, though, they have a tendency to run with exactly the stories the Republicans want covered, while largely steering clear of those they'd prefer sit in obscurity.
 
That's what I mean about the difference between tone and content. In terms of tone, the corporate press arguably had a bit of a liberal bias. In terms of content, though, they have a tendency to run with exactly the stories the Republicans want covered, while largely steering clear of those they'd prefer sit in obscurity.

Another good example is the Trump Foundation versus the Clinton Foundation, in the run-up to the 2016 election. There were well over twice as many stories in the NYT, in October 2016, referencing the Clinton Foundation than the Trump Foundation. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how insane that is. The Clinton Foundation, it turns out, was entirely above board, with only the usual clerical issues one might expect with any big organization (and those not attributable to the Clintons, who didn't serve as officers, nor did they have any day-to-day role in managing the foundation's affairs). Meanwhile, the Trump Foundation, we later confirmed, was effectively just a family slush fund, which not only ignored fundamental regulations for non-profits, but which was actually used as a vehicle for stealing money from charitable causes to use for Trump's campaign.

Even in 2016, it was perfectly obvious there was something dirty going on with the Trump Foundation but not the Clinton Foundation. After all, we already knew the Trump Foundation was a closely-held operation entirely managed by the immediate Trump family and their hangers-on, and not even independently audited, while all the officers of the Clinton Foundation were independent of the Clintons, and the foundation's board consisted mostly of non-Clintonites, including respected figures from business, politics, law, and other big-time charities. Yet, even with every sane person being confident much more dirt would be found digging the Trump story, the corporate media instead obediently gave far more coverage to the Clinton story.

That bias, in favor of covering whatever topics the GOP wants discussed at any moment (CRT, transgender athletes, Hunter Biden, Clinton using private email for work, the Clinton Foundation) winds up being far more important to how politics play out in this country than what the tone of articles is. If you gave a politician the choice of either deciding which stories would get front-page treatment, or instead giving the other side that power but getting to decide the tone of those stories, of course he'd pick the former. Most people never even get past the headline, so even just deciding which stories have front-page headlines matters vastly more than deciding what caveats and context get buried a few paragraphs below their lede. It hardly matters how the media is covering stuff, as long as they're focusing where you want them focused.
 
Last edited:
In terms of tone, the corporate press arguably had a bit of a liberal bias. In terms of content, though, they have a tendency to run with exactly the stories the Republicans want covered, while largely steering clear of those they'd prefer sit in obscurity.
I strongly agree. One of my main criticisms of the modern left is a failure to set the narrative. They are always responding to the crazy claims the right throws at the wall to see what sticks. The conservative media will literally invent a BS talking and run with it for a few weeks like it is the more important issue of the day...then drop it and you never hear about it again. CRT, bathroom bills, hunter Biden, Disney putting a single same sex kiss scene in one movie.

The discourse is always set by the right, when the left has real serious issues they could be pushing (like Justice Thomas' wife being a Qnutter and the clear conflict of interest).
 
I strongly agree. One of my main criticisms of the modern left is a failure to set the narrative. They are always responding to the crazy claims the right throws at the wall to see what sticks. The conservative media will literally invent a BS talking and run with it for a few weeks like it is the more important issue of the day...then drop it and you never hear about it again. CRT, bathroom bills, hunter Biden, Disney putting a single same sex kiss scene in one movie.

The discourse is always set by the right, when the left has real serious issues they could be pushing (like Justice Thomas' wife being a Qnutter and the clear conflict of interest).
I heard that Marjorie Taylor Greene runs a secret abortion clinic. I think it's time the media jump on this, run it 24x7 for four weeks until everyone believes it, before moving on to that thorny question about Josh Harley's secret South African citizenship...
 
I strongly agree. One of my main criticisms of the modern left is a failure to set the narrative. They are always responding to the crazy claims the right throws at the wall to see what sticks. The conservative media will literally invent a BS talking and run with it for a few weeks like it is the more important issue of the day...then drop it and you never hear about it again. CRT, bathroom bills, hunter Biden, Disney putting a single same sex kiss scene in one movie.

The discourse is always set by the right, when the left has real serious issues they could be pushing (like Justice Thomas' wife being a Qnutter and the clear conflict of interest).
David Brock explained how the right pushes this stuff into the mainstream. Basically, they strategically decide which stories they want covered, then push it endlessly in the right-wing press, and then the corporate media feels they have to cover it intensely as well. That winds up blowing up very minor matters into some of the biggest stories in the world.

For example, consider a story about how "years ago, the Secretary of State, like lots of top government officials, including her predecessors in that role, conducted some work communications through private email." It's pretty trivial stuff -- the kind of thing you'd picture being buried deep in the paper, in one or two articles, and then be forgotten. Yet because the right-wing press strategically obsessed over it for many months, leading up to the 2016 election, the mainstream/corporate press literally treated it as the biggest story in the world..... and before that, they'd done the same with Benghazi for the better part of four years.

The left doesn't have that kind of captive media to use to push the story. There's no liberal Fox News, talk radio, Washington Times, NY Post, or even much of an ecosystem of lefty websites with large distribution.
 
David Brock explained how the right pushes this stuff into the mainstream. Basically, they strategically decide which stories they want covered, then push it endlessly in the right-wing press, and then the corporate media feels they have to cover it intensely as well. That winds up blowing up very minor matters into some of the biggest stories in the world.

For example, consider a story about how "years ago, the Secretary of State, like lots of top government officials, including her predecessors in that role, conducted some work communications through private email." It's pretty trivial stuff -- the kind of thing you'd picture being buried deep in the paper, in one or two articles, and then be forgotten. Yet because the right-wing press strategically obsessed over it for many months, leading up to the 2016 election, the mainstream/corporate press literally treated it as the biggest story in the world..... and before that, they'd done the same with Benghazi for the better part of four years.

The left doesn't have that kind of captive media to use to push the story. There's no liberal Fox News, talk radio, Washington Times, NY Post, or even much of an ecosystem of lefty websites with large distribution.
The more I think about it, the more examples I see of HUGE discrepancies in the volume of coverage mainstream media gave to very similar stories, just based on whether or not the right-wing media universe was hyping them or not. Like compare the number of articles about Biden supposedly groping Tara Reade back in the 1990's, to the number of articles about Trump supposedly groping Kristin Anderson back in the same time period. They're practically identical stories: guy who went on to be president is alleged to have reached under the skirt of a woman and groped her genitals. Yet where major outlets spent weeks on Tara Reade, and papers like the NYT gave the story dozens of articles all its own, Kristin Anderson's allegations just got tucked away in a few articles as part of a laundry list of various Trump accusers.

Or compare how much coverage Whitewater got, compared to a story like Trump overcharging the Secret Service to stay at one of his properties as a way to rook the taxpayer. They're similar stories in terms of allegations of abusing government power for self enrichment (only with a lot more evidence in the case of Trump). Whitewater turned out to involve no wrongdoing by the Clintons, yet was a repeated front page story month in and month out for years, while the Trump scandal was briefly mentioned for a couple news cycles and then vanished. Or compare the Monica Lewinsky story to the Stefanie Clifford story. When a Republican does something wrong on the scale of the Stormy Daniels affair, it gets coverage on a level with, say, Obama wearing a cream-colored suit, or saluting a marine with a coffee in his hand. When a Democrat does something wrong on par with the Stormy Daniels affair, it's literally treated as a decade-defining scandal by the mainstream media.
 
Back
Top Bottom