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Is the media biased?

Dave Matthews

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced his candidacy Feb. 10, 2007. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced his presidential campaign-part deux-a few months later, April 25.

To put things in perspective, that's before the seventh Harry Potter book was published and J.K. Rowling decided it was necessary to tell us that Dumbledore was gay. That was before Barry Bonds hit number 756 and Michael Vick was best known for playing football in the NFL and not playing in a prison yard, like Nelly in The Longest Yard. That's before the Jena 6 incident and before some art students decided it'd be a good idea to hang nooses from trees on Patterson Avenue.

It was back before Sen. Larry Craig (R-Ind.) employed the "wide stance" in a bathroom stall, before John Edwards hid from National Enquirer in a bathroom stall and before FOX News and Miami's College Republicans made Karl Rove's "toilet paper" a little thicker for merely showing up and talking (I had to keep going with bathroom puns in this sentence, sorry).

That was a long-winded way of saying it's been a long, much-covered campaign and it wasn't more apparent than this summer. While I was confined to a life of office work in Washington, D.C., my 20 or so roommates all had a lot of time to not only focus on the two men who are vying to become president, but also the media that has been running these two senators through a now 17-month-long gauntlet.

These highly motivated people I lived with were more or less much split down the middle between McCain and Obama, and in those summer months that saw the top three broadcast anchors accompany Obama across the ocean, The New York Times rejecting an Op-Ed by McCain, the New Yorker's controversial cover of the Obamas and the rapper Nas (and more than 600,000 others) delivering a petition to FOX News condemning its "racist attacks" on the Obamas, the media became an easy scapegoat for my friends concerned about their candidate.

And why shouldn't it be? In 2004, scholar Ben Bagdikian wrote that five media conglomerates control 90 percent of the American media. That's certainly not a very diverse range.

And it's essentially impossible to record every moment of history. That's not very fair. And of course, everyone writing the news has his or her own experiential backing that forms their personalities, leading to some degree of inherent bias. So how can the media be objective?

The objectivity question is a deep one that can leave even the best-known philosophers clueless.

What exactly is truth? Accuracy? Fairness?

Please don't try to actually answer those questions-you'll split too many hairs. And most people don't try.

Which leads to the big bad media as a scapegoat for all political activists. Even here at Miami University, this beloved newspaper of mine occasionally comes under the scrutiny of partisan bias. Whether it's in the form of an occasional comment on our Web site-or the chairman of a certain campus political group with an elephant for a mascot, trying to get a rise out of his audience at a kickoff event by saying The Student portrays a larger liberal presence at Miami than there actually is.

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I don't understand the liberal bias accusations, considering we have a member of College Republicans (CR) executive board on our editorial board, we've highlighted two CR events on our front page in the past year and publish conservative (and liberal) letters on our Opinion page. And there is also the fact that 90 percent of what we cover has nothing to do with partisan politics (e.g., President David Hodge wants us to go to school during a blackout or the Wendy's uptown still has a blue tarp on it.).

But that's beside the point.

The real point is, no matter what bias there is in the media, consumers of said media can stop complaining.

With the advent of the Internet, there is a news Web site out there for everybody. No matter what you believe in, you can find somebody out there who will-guaranteed-tell you what you want to hear 100 percent of the time.

If not, then you can go create it yourself. Drudge Report started off as an e-mail listserv, and today there are a myriad of free blog services that will let you post whatever you want.

With that said, this new frontier of journalism can be dangerous, as Scott Simon of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday warned Tuesday. I would hope we all agree with Simon that the "news is meant to shake up their audience, not pander to it."

With that said, please receive your news from a diverse range of sources. It's out there. No matter what bias you believe The New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal have, you're not going to learn anything because you limit yourself to Bill O'Reilly and National Review, or exclusively Huffington Post and Keith Olbermann for that matter.

This is an important step in gaining an understanding of the world you live in. It's an important step in learning how to intelligently debate, if you must, so that you can attack an opponent's strengths and not their weaknesses and prevent oneself from spewing ignorant venom (e.g., Republicans are all selfish racists with guns or Democrats are whiny, watered-down Marxists who'll swindle your money).

But most importantly, embrace all media outlets during this election so you can go to the polls and participate in the democratic process for which patriots died in the 18th century and Zimbabweans, this summer.

With that in mind, any prejudices you have against the supposed "big, bad media" should be secondary.


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