Question

Do you believe the media portrays political bias? In what way? Explain. Be specific.

Consider how the media covers politics and the political environment. Are they reporting or is the media posturing to a certain political stance/agenda.

Answer 1

1.Overall, the public sees less political bias in news coverage today than it did a decade ago. In addition, while news coverage is seen as containing political bias, it is not necessarily viewed as favoring either party. When asked which political party news organizations are biased toward in this year’s presidential election, a plurality (48%) say there is no partisan bias. However, those who see a great deal of political bias are much more likely to perceive a Democratic bias in presidential coverage than a Republican bias (34% vs. 16%).
2. Rather than one party being favored more than another, the public may be concerned about other forms of bias that can skew political coverage. In a September 1999 Pew Research Center survey, for example, 45% said that news organizations are too tough on female presidential candidates and 40% considered the media too hard on those far behind in the race.
3. Republicans, especially those with close ties to the party, consider the media more politically biased than do Democrats.Republicans, especially those with close ties to the party, consider the media more politically biased than do Democrats.
4.Although a solid majority — 69% — of Americans see news coverage as containing at least a fair amount of political bias, that percentage has decreased from 76% in 1989. At the same time, however, the percentage of people saying news coverage contains a great deal of bias has increased seven points from 25% in 1989 to the current 32%.
5. I now return to the rational learning model of media e/ects developed by economists. I discuss models allowing for partisan media bias, in which media coverage systematically favors one party.
6. More likely to see their newspaper as leaning toward Bush". This tendency for partisans to see news coverage as biased against their own side, the authors argued, is consistent with the more general "hostile media phenomenon" documented in laboratory studies, where “people on opposing sides of an issue often judge the same news story as being biased against their views.
7.Although our primary objective is to study perceptions of bias in a specific news story, we also examine the antecedents of prior beliefs in media bias to shed some light on the nature and sources of these beliefs. With a constant sampling of news coverage, citizens may continually update their beliefs about media bias. However, cognitive misers are unlikely to maintain a continuous accounting of the ideological orientation of vast amounts of news coverage
8.A final goal of our study is to determine whether liberal or conservative partisans on an issue are more susceptible to the hostile media bias—both in their evaluations of a specific news article and in their prior beliefs of media bias.. On the one hand, experimental research on the hostile media bias has not uncovered evidence of such ideological asymmetry; issue partisans on the left and the right appear equally likely to perceive news bias.
9.Politics, as an ongoing conversation about social issues, encompass a broad scope of political communication and demonstrate the ubiquity of political communication in contemporary life and in non-electoral periods. Political system can not function without effective networks of such channels capable of transmitting political messages.
10. The competition for control of the media, public and political agenda, the media power in and control of politics, the development of the political marketing and the professionalism in campaigning, the rise of infotainment and the permanent campaigning, the appearance of political professionals in the decision making process within political parties, the audience’s reception of politics.
11.The literature on political agenda-setting concentrates on the degree to and ways in which the media agenda influences the agendas of political actors.
12. The main results indicate that concentrated policy responsibility or institutional ownership makes news influence more likely, as witnessed by presidential responses to foreign policy relative to domestic issues (Wood and Peake 1998); dramatic and sensational issues like crime and environment are more prone to media effects than for instance undramatic and abstract issues like taxes and public sector reforms (Soroka 2002; Walgrave et al. 2008); loss of domestic policy influence through processes of multi-level governance increases media influence on parliament, as seen in relation to EU-dominated issue like environment and agriculture (van Noije et al. 2008); media coverage more often sparks party attention when it deals with issues that the parties care about or ‘own’.
13. Writing from within the field of political agenda-setting, our goal at this early stage of communicating across perspectives is three-fold: First, we hope to illustrate how existing empirical descriptions of mediatized politics could be strengthened by taking into account the key results of political agenda-setting studies.
14. Our focus here however, is on the ways in which agendasetting offers systematic empirical investigations of the news-politics relationship. At the core of this contribution, is the original agenda-setting hypothesis (a simple signal-response model): when news saliency increases and an issue rises on the media agenda, the probability of a political response increases and the issue moves higher up on the political agenda.
15. Through their agenda-setting function, the media influence which social problems receive political attention and, ultimately, which problems that are met with policy solutions. This would seem highly relevant for a concept of mediatized politics, supplementing the empirical foundation for the claim that the media alters politics.
16. The empirical results presented in this paper - and agenda-setting studies in general – provide systematic documentation of how the media,through assigning ‘political relevance and importance to social problems by selecting and emphasizing certain issues and neglecting others’ , exert influence on democratic politics.
17. Thus, ‘mediated realities' or media depictions of social problems, and the implicit or explicit attribution of responsibility for them come to influence the opposition-government game. Both in terms of how the players relate to the media agenda, and in the sense that the attention generated will be skewed in favour of the opposition.
18. The second category is empirical studies measuring the political slant of news content in the media. The second category of literature review deals with the questions pertaining to what drives media bias and perceived bias. This category will provide further a more in-depth understanding behind the political slant factors in the news and overall leads to one of my underlining questions of what an individuals do with political information when they perceive the news as ideologically bias.