Media Bias In The Early Twentieth Century

Media bias has existed nearly as long as the media in this country. In fact, in the 18th, 19th, and even into the early 20th century, it was not unusual for political parties to support and therefore, influence newspapers. In fact, media bias was so common it was nearly expected. Politicians were even known to direct individual editorial pages to fit their campaigns. Readers themselves are also biased, which affects news reporting. The mass media has also become dependent on the White House for information. Media bias is nothing new. What is new, however, is the idea of objectivity.

Objectivity is a new concept here. For many centuries media bias remained obscure because it hid in plain sight, through the political deals and paid-for editorial

Because people can get their news in various ways, most commonly from TV and social media, readers have a tendency to skip stories they do not like or agree with. A company called Chartbeat which tracks traffic to web pages conducted a small study for the New York Times. According to Quealy (2017), Chartbeat tracked across multiple news outlets from places considered conservative to more liberal organizations. They found that outlets considered liberal had higher reader counts than outlets considered conservative. One reason for the results of this study is the fact that these institutes varied in their promotional efforts, thus affecting the number of readers their stories reached. Despite all these arguments, it is feasible that the media has indeed become more biased, but this is not due solely because of their reporting. It has been increased by a heavy reliance on the White House for

However, they are not the only ones with bias. Readers themselves are biased which will always have an influence on the media, and papers will be swayed by politicians with money, with the exception of major outlets who bar donating or taking money from political campaigns, the Washington Post wrote (2016). The media can and always will strive for unbiased and accurate reporting. However, they first need to step away from what their readers want to hear and what they believe and instead focus on the facts. They need to investigate more on their own rather than relying so heavily on the White House. Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler told his peers (as cited in Karon, 2017), to “give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access,” he said. “They were never all that valuable anyway.” Media bias is nothing new, but it does not always have to be old