The Newspaper is Biased
Gather
‘round, and I’ll tell you the tale of the news medium that has you all fooled.
Your local
newspaper is not the bastion of respectability that you think it is. People are oh-so-careful not to believe
everything they read on the internet, but if it's in the newspaper, well,
that's a COMPLETELY different story. If
it's on paper, it must be true! The
newspaper is infallible, right? Their
job is to report the news without bias, and it's then up to you to make up your
own mind, right? BULL. SHIT.
Newspapers
are not infallible for the same reason that the internet is not infallible;
newspapers and online news sources are both run by regular people, and your
average person is fucking loony. Every
insane theory and crazy bouncing around the mind of the writer will find its
way into what you read, and influence how you think about the story.
You're all
a bunch of sheep, easily led astray by words of influence. Let's go through some examples, because I
believe most of you are drooling idiots who still don't have a clue about what
I'm trying to say.
Consider
the following two sentences:
1. "A
family of four was killed in a murder suicide yesterday. The gunman had a
history of depression, and had recently lost his job."
2.
"An entire family was slaughtered just last night. A madman burst into their home and
mercilessly gunned them down before taking his own life."
Scentence #1
makes it sound like the tragedy it is, without resorting to shock tactics. It's reasonably neutral, and the language
used is language that leaves room for you to draw your own conclusions. Sentence #2 is the sensationalized bullshit
that makes up 90% of the news. It leaves
little room for judgment, and no room to draw any of your own conclusions about
what happened. We're constantly being spoon-fed our opinions in this manner,
and if you don't believe it, take a look at the front page of any
newspaper. The cover story is ALWAYS an
attention grabber, with BIG WORDS and exciting pictures. Real news is boring; the newspapers have
taken a cue from TV news and dumbed everything down for you assholes.
Bias is
inherent; completely neutral language would make for a very boring story. There is a line between “enjoyable to read”,
however, and “completely opinionated”. Consider the word "mercilessly". How does the reporter know that the gunman
was merciless? For that matter, who gets
to decide what merciless is? Maybe he shot them all in the back of the head,
and it was over fast. If that's merciless, what do you call it when someone
shoots a group of hostages in the knees and feeds them broken glass? How do you go above
"merciless"? The language
simply doesn't fit, much of the time. It's used to elect a certain response from you, and by god, they get it.
The
newspaper is a dying medium, but that does not mean it doesn't hold the power
to change, to inspire. To get something changed, the quickest way is to write
about it, with extreme bias, in the newspaper. The kind of people who read the newspaper and believe what they read are
generally idiots, anyway, and are more than willing to have someone think for
them.
The bias
in TV news is obvious, if you're reasonably observant. Slanted towards violence and hollow human
interest stories, TV news does not have half the prestige of print news. Picking out the bias in print news is much
harder; unless you're actually looking for it, you won't spot it. You'll read it, draw the conclusions you're
expected to draw, and walk away feeling like YOU decided how to process the
story.
The truth is, there is no source of news that simply presents the facts. The issue is exacerbated by multiple newspapers buying a story from a wire service, and running the story verbatim. There is no source of news that does not leave the mark of the writer's belief on the presented information. The only thing you can do is keep your mind open, and watch out for the bullshit.