The main stream media has never acquired a story with more fuel and endurance than to criticize its own colleagues. Countless papers and analysis have been written, achieving a complete political dissection of the topic — but does it actually accomplish anything?
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly recently delivered his “talking points memo” detailing that starting in the rise of the internet as a press source, “true reporting” has been replaced with stories containing too little substance and too much flap. Citing the early days of the news, Mr. O’Reilly accused media giants NBC and CNN of left-wing bias.
Specifically, the supposedly conservative pundit focused on a news story first breaking out of MSNBC and later other news outlets, detailing a “tent city” based in Sacramento, California that housed roughly 150 of the cities homeless. The article claimed its inhabitants were “victims of the recession” and thus inferring that these people lost their homes not because of the notorious laziness of category one homelessness, but because of the economy itself. Dubbing it “media hype,” Mr. O’Reilly then turned to British Magazine The Economist for his final point — referring to one of their articles for what he called the truth — a piece on how the American media took the small-town story of a homeless shelter mainly for the city’s mentally unstable and “token” homeless — and spun it to deliver the message that these homeless were effected by the recession. In fact, they reported that the shelter had instead been open for a “decade,” not the short amount of time reported by MSNBC.
Therefore, Mr. O’Reilly stated, the American main stream news media could simply not be trusted. Because a British magazine somehow disproved a false media hype based in Sacramento, it single handedly proves the obvious bias in multiple accounts of American political media.
Without playing into the politics of Mr. O’Reilly himself or his respective news network, one must truly understand the media news bias in its full entirety. O’Reilly is correct — the media is not about true reporting any more. With the addition of news in the web, one can find news in any way he or she would like. And in many cases, the web does in fact lead its audience to the news that it wants to hear, whether it comes from a left, right, or centrist point of view.
However, Mr. O’Reilly’s use of this fact is flawed in one important factor — it contradicts. When making a point about overall media bias, one must acquire a multitude of sources all reporting the same false statement, which O’Reilly in fact did accomplish.
But at the same time, one must also acquire a multitude of sources proving the content in question is truly biased — something Mr. O’Reilly failed to do. Although the Economist may in fact be correct in their assumptions, O’Reilly attempted to prove a broader point with an article from the media itself — the item that was in question.
A single, non cited web article from a British Magazine that does not in fact include Mr. O’Reilly’s “true reporting” simply cannot disprove a homemade theory created without much basis on how exactly it can be proved.
If Mr. O’Reilly does not understand this or set up this supposed bias theory to in fact invoke political conversation, then he himself has exemplified the true definition of bias.