Introduction
Bias in Journalism & ‘News’

One of the main problems that plague people in their day to day undertakings minus realizing it is media bias. Media bias is evident in the news, the favorite sitcoms of the people as well as being read daily in the papers. However, people do not know whenever they hear or see it. Precisely speaking, media bias is apparent in all aspects of the media (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). However, the main problem is that people do not recognize the time it is right at our faces. Do we create some opinions on some types of persons based on the things that we hear in the media minus realizing them? Are impressions which were established concerning persons a result of the press? The delinquent apparent in this case is not just that we have media bias, but also that the people do not recognize it.

The first-time women aired news on TV, they were viewed as being mothers and above all housewives. It was a small portion of the women that had jobs (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). During this time, many of the women had husbands who were very hard working, and they were left with submissive roles. Women at this time were not allowed to make decisions or to have too much cleverness. The aspect was portrayed by shows such as the Beavers, The Brady Bunch, All in the Family among others. There were no female news anchors and if they appeared on the television all they did was maybe weather or even cooking shows (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). As time went, there was the establishment of the women movement which made women be the working mothers. However, they still had low roles such as factory as well as secretarial jobs. Currently, women have been highlighted as being career oriented and are now television anchors, and there are many shows where women are independent. Although this is a positive change, it still holds some media bias (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015).

The media touches our daily lives in some ways. At times media avenues such as radio, television and also print persuade the people’s opinions on some issues such as racism, homosexuality, politics, abortion among others (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). Throughout history, the media has downplayed bias what means biased. In light of this, media bias traces back to the early days of print, and it continues to date. There are some examples in history that shoe biased journalism. According to Dallmann, Lemmerich, Zoller, and Hotho (2015), in the year 1728, Benjamin Franklin wrote the earliest example of bias in journalism when he wrote an article that favored printing of paper currency. This type of bias at times pushed the political leaders of the time to limit the autonomy of the press. This was the same case as Abraham Lincoln did when he ordered several newspapers of the south to shut their operations during the time of the American civil war. There are some times when in history when the media has turned out to be biased to a particular view (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015).

Currently, many people are not aware that the media manipulates their way of thinking even though a large number of the people in the universe understand that the media is prejudiced (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). To some level, media bias has turned out to be good for example mixing racial characters in cinemas. However, the downside to this some parts of the continent (mostly south of USA) were not able to express the ethnically mixed programs on TV because they wanted to be separate and needed to their agenda to be pushed through media (Levy, de Barreda, and Razin, 2017). Mostly, bias in journalism and media is very wrong, and it implants misguided ideas and thoughts in the unknowing people’s minds. A perfect example to illustrate on this is when CBS anchored fabricated documents that degraded the military service and character of George Bush. The incident resulted in the stepping down of Dan Rather as a news anchor of the organization (CBS news) for the report (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015).  His resignation came as a result of the fact that the majority of the public agreed that the reporter and the news story leaned to the liberal side.

There are some biases in the American media. They comprise of racial, corporate and bias which appeals to the senses like issues which persuade the people’s views on topics and individuals are bombarded day in day out with them (Levy, de Barreda, and Razin, 2017). An elaborate example of media bias comprises of the many missing individuals (predominantly white) that are reported by the journalist in various media. This has resulted in many people speculating that the news media favors white girls who are good-looking against men and non-white ladies (Levy, de Barreda, and Razin, 2017). Whereas there are some other examples to express media bias in these specific avenues, media spends more time on government as well as the political system.

Currently, there are very few media outlets in the world which struggle to give people a composed report on the news. The project for excellence has created a report on journalism and has come up with a statement of the media news reports streams. Among the ones that were reported, Fox News reported 38% positive concerning the same as they did 39% negative on the war in Iraq (Hahn, Lee, and Lee, 2015). The left accuses Fox News since it comprises of a conservative opinion with several liberals not agreeing the company’s programming regardless of the fact that it is false or true (Levy, de Barreda, and Razin, 2017).  On the other hand, in the USA, other media outlets poorly coexist with the conservatives. The conservatives rate CBS and CNN as being the worst in reporting news. Based on this, it astonishes the media outlet that is despised by one political party; the other enjoys because many of the conservatives think high of Fox whereas the liberals think high of CBS and CNN (Puglisi and Snyder, 2015). Additionally, it is not surprising liberals and conservatives said the news anchors that they found to be very entertaining were ones from the news channels that they favored.

In a nutshell, there are several topics and areas for media to cover. How the media covers the topics is exclusively up to them. The mistakes that the media outlets commit in journalism by embracing the power of persuasion make it apparent in the manner persons from different groups feel about particular topics. Whereas some individuals might argue that some media outlets are better than others, the issue of biased media shall remain to be an issue. Since time immemorial, there has been media bias be it bad or, and it has always played a role in shaping how people view politics as well as how they vote.

References

Dallmann, A., Lemmerich, F., Zoller, D., & Hotho, A. (2015, August). Media bias in newspapers. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media (pp. 133-137). ACM. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5679709/

Hahn, K. S., Lee, H. Y., & Lee, J. (2015). Media Bias. The international encyclopedia of political communication, 1-9. https://uscupstate.libguides.com/c.php?g=617602&p=4296879

Puglisi, R., & Snyder Jr, J. M. (2015). Empirical studies of media bias. In Handbook of media economics (Vol. 1, pp. 647-667). North-Holland. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/media-bias-left-study/

Levy, G., de Barreda, I. M., & Razin, R. (2017). Persuasion with correlation neglect: Media bias and media power through correlation of news content. Preprint. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-and-least-biased-news-outlets-in-america-2018-6?IR=T