Media Bias Research Paper

Stop the Media Bias, Give the People What They Need to Hear “The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses” Quoted by Malcolm X. The media is very powerful and influential in today’s society. It helps influence the public’s opinions during Presidential elections and sways people’s views more to the left or to the right of the spectrum. In today’s society we are faced with liberal and conservative media bias. The media is not only bias but it also is geared towards what the people want to hear, like sports and celebrities rather than politics and world events. In a republican government system there …show more content…
The media has an affect on politics by getting the public to sway more one way than the other. For example if the slant quotient of the entire media moved thirty four points leftward then the political quotient of the average voter would move about twenty four points leftward. (Groseclose) This proves that the media bias as a pretty large affect on the political views of the viewer. Bias media mostly affects Presidential elections because the media helps give the public an idea of who they are voting for. They can either make the candidate seem great or horrible based on which way the news station sways. An example of this would be in the 2012 election there were twice as much positive stories about President Obama than were positive about Governor Romney. (Lehman) It seems like the media did its best to determine that election, if there was more positive stories on Romney, would he have won? Seventy percent of Americans believe that there is either a great deal or a fair amount of media bias in news coverage today. That is a large percent of Americans that know there is biased news, but a lot of Americans are unable to detect the bias. Also, another consequence of media bias is how it affects people’s judgement. If a person reads a report with liberal bias, it causes them to think more liberally and choose to read liberal news. In today’s society a lot of people are unaware of bias, this causes the people to be unable to decide between opinion or facts of an article. Quoting Representative Smith “When the media does not report the facts, the American people can not make good decisions. and if Americans can not make good decisions our democracy is at risk.” Media has its positive affects of getting the news out to people, but is it truly affecting America in a good way if it’s clouding the people’s political