Replies

nothing bores me faster than complaints of media bias

Back during the Carter Administration, I subscribed to the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report. It documented journalistic bias, and was able to do so ad nauseum.
I learned that the bias exists - a fact which I am now almost astonished to learn that I ever didn't know - but quickly became bored by the interminable telling of examples of the self-same phenomenon. The question quickly became not is there "bias in the media" but why is there "bias in the media?" I allowed my AIM Report subscription to lapse, and have spent the succeeding generation of time analyzing the latter question.
Shortly after 9/11 I started a thread, Why Broadcast Journalism is Unnecessary and Illegitimate, to document my findings. And I have continuously updated that thread ever since. The short answer to the question why is there "bias in the media" is a couple of other questions - "what is "the media," and why do people think it should not be "biased?"
"The media" is a generality to include journalism (topical nonfiction) and movies and TV shows (fiction). I stipulate that movies and TV shows do have socialist tendencies embedded in them, but IMHO it's ridiculous to call that "bias" because there is actually no even colorable argument that the writers of those entertainments have any obligation to avoid expressing their own viewpoint. What would be the point in fiction which had no POV?
So the burr under our saddle is not so much fiction as it is journalism. But there are local freebie newspapers today which don't feature news at all. They are mostly vehicles for local advertising, and their articles are not written to inform about distant matters but about what is happening in the county in which they operate. They are mostly weeklies. They operate on a human scale, and their operators are accessible. And that is the way all newspapers were in the founding era. Some of those newspapers did not even have deadlines at all; they were printed when the printer was good and ready.
So the founding era newspapers were far more accessible, far more humble affairs than the big-market papers we are accustomed to today. Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored competing newspapers in which to wage their partisan battles, and neither pretended to be anything but the opinion of human beings. Printers of newspapers generally didn't have access to news from Washington, New York, or Europe any faster than the local shopkeeper did.
The difference between Founding Era journalism and modern Big Journalism is "the wire." The difference is the telegraph and the Associated Press. That is what accounts for the homogeneous nature of modern journalism, and that is what accounts for journalism's self-proclaimed "objectivity." Journalism's self-proclaimed objectivity was developed to answer the concerns which naturally were aroused by the advent and aggressive expansion of the AP. Because the dangers of monopoly news reporting were patent when that AP reporting was transmitted via individually edited newspapers, no less so than when it is transmitted by government-licensed broadcasters.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the AP was able to monopolize the rapid and efficient transmission of journalism reports. Before the telegraph, that was utterly impossible; with the telegraph rapid transmission was possible but expensive, and efficiency was paramount. With the advent of the Internet, efficiency is no longer an issue; a blogger or FReeper anywhere in the world can report to the entire world at large.
So in logic, the AP is a dead man walking - a gatekeeper when the walls are down. It is taking time for the word to get out, and for habits of thought to change, but eventually the conceit that it is necessary to defer to the superior "objectivity" of someone just because they have access to "the wire" will be seen for the patent fraud that it always was. FreeRepublic is a "wire" unto itself, accessible to all, and willing to carry the reports of all who do not claim that journalism is objective, and are therefore evil (in the sight of the AP) "conservatives."