Media Bias In The United States

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The question of whether or not the media in The United States is biased has long been present, and is still a topic of debate to this day. Some people argue that the audience is biased, which leads them to report seeing the media as biased, while others argue that the audience sees the media as biased because it actually is. Through research and interviews it can be seen that the media in The United States is politically biased towards the beliefs of their target audience, which can be seen in the growing distrust in the media, the polarization of the media, and the agenda setting and framing used by the media. This growing distrust in the media by the general public has been seen in lecture, as well as in two interviews. This polarization …show more content…
We saw examples of this in lecture, and in one interview it was also brought up. All these points lead to the idea that the media in The United States is politically biased towards the beliefs of their target audience. Bias in the media has led to the general public’s declining trust in the media in recent years. The figure from lecture showed that the percent of Americans who trusted the media had dropped approximately thirteen percent, from 53 to 40, in the last eighteen years. This decline in trust was also shown in my interviews, in which both of the people interviewed said that they didn’t fully trust the media, and my uncle Jeff said that he “takes everything in the news with a grain of salt.” It could be argued that this distrust of the media is actually proof that political bias in media is only perceived by the audience, but this is the wrong way of looking at the problem. A distrust in something/someone such as the media in general, or reporters specifically, is something that …show more content…
One example from lecture was the two passenger planes that got shot down in the middle east, one by the Russian military and one by the American military. In the shooting down of a passenger plane by the Russian military, the media used words such as murder, attack, and killing in the headlines when reporting the news. On the other hand, when the American military shot down a passenger plane the media used words such as tragedy and accident in the headlines when reporting the news. These frames were used to try and solicit a particular type of response to these actions by the American public, particularly being an angry and negative response to the Russian shooting down of a passenger plane, and a noncommittal or unopinionated response to the American shooting down of a passenger plane. Similar tactics to these are used by the two sides of the media in todays news. When asked in interviews what the general question being asked by the media about Hillary Clinton’s emails was, my liberal friend Mack who gets most of his news from Facebook and MSNBC said: questioning why we are still talking about them, while my conservative uncle Jeff who gets most of his news from FOX said: what was in them that they needed to be hidden and deleted. This is an example of the divided media using framing to pose a certain
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