I regularly run across articles that are incredibly and often subtlely biased, and so I'm going to start blogging about those that strike me. This isn't going to be the usual Liberal versus Conservative, translated into americanese that's Democrat versus Republican, as I find all of them to be enemies of any semblence of truth. I'm also going to start blogging about the sheer lies that are spread as well, but that's a separate story.
What got me today was the way that CNN is associating gay marriage and Hillary. In an article at http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/17/bush.gay/index.html, CNN makes 2 fascinating choices. The first choice is to show a couple getting married. We have no idea if these are the first couples to be married, or just a random sample. I think it's not a random sample, because the second choice is that they invert the usual order of naming people in a picture. Here, they've decided to name people from right to left. Which leads to the very first word in the caption on a gay marriage picture being "Hillary".
Isn't that an interesting set of choices that were made. Now I did something as well to tease your interest, by not saying the last name of the person. But quick: what's the last name of the Hillary that got married? You probably can only remember that Hillary got married. And that's the association they subtlely want to help make. I realize that part of your association is because I wrote about it, and now maybe you will look for things like this a little bit as well.
So, who do you think such biases will affect? Would it be those likely to vote for someone called Hillary, or those more likely not to vote for such a person? Perhaps those who are undecided? I guess all media tend to be at least unconsciously biased towards the opinions either of the writer, the editor, the publisher, or some combination thereof! What is perhaps more of a problem is that such biases are not stated. In the UK there used to be a fine tradition of newspapers being biased, but letting it be generally known that they were biased. I don't know whether that still exists in the wild and woolly world of the WWW. I do know that today, in the US, media conglomerates always claim to be impartial, but, as you note, even what appears to be "straight" (no pun intended) news is often biased.
So, in any case, the "trick" is to make up your mind, as best you can, and to realize that all news sources have an agenda, and thus biases, however slight. So you need to hear at least two opinions about a news story, and probably more than 3 to really build up a somewhat accurate story (depending on your sources ;) Far too much information for the average human to parse in a lifetime...
Seems fair and balanced to me.