![]() Only if some new information can never be “news” although an audience is interested in it, would that be a reason for concern. If “news” is just another word for any new information, regardless of whether anyone is interested in it, the demand that the media report on it is just silly. But it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. There is a line of argument here, as far as I can tell from people like Noam Chomsky, that the definition of what is considered as “news” also implies that certain things are not “news.” That is true. “News” is what some audience wants to keep abreast of. It is actually suspicious when someone treats it as if there could be such a definition. Obviously, there is no way to define apriori what “news” should be. There can be specialist publications that would also regard new research in astronomy or new releases of classical music as “news.” What exactly is considered as “news” depends on what the respective audience thinks it is. The focus for US media is even more constrained, basically it is: Angela Merkel. German media would perhaps report about US politics on the federal level, but only rarely about what happens further down. Still, also in this case, there is a cultural bias. information about governments, politicians, policies, or about the economy, social developments, technologies, “celebrities,” and so forth. There are some types of “news,” though, that are not as country-specific, eg. Results from the NFL are “news” in the US, rarely in Germany, while results from the Bundesliga (the real football, by the way) are “news” here and not on the other side of the Atlantic. What counts as “news” depends on the respective culture. One side is that journalists specialize in finding or researching “news.” As the word insinuates, this is new information that is not yet widely known. What are media? Literally they are those in the middle (the plural of the Latin “medium”). It is hard to see how it could be avoided either although I find it way more problematic than other biases that are out in the open. Unfortunately, that can happen, too, but usually not for contentious positions. Only if all the media had the same slant would you have to ask some questions. It should not be surprising either that there can be a general slant across outlets. Demands that specific media should be “unbaised” are mostly a ruse to force another bias through. And as I will argue below it is not a problem in and of itself. But that is practically inevitable for specific outlets. A common complaint is that certain media have a slant in some political direction or otherwise. ![]()
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