Articles about the Israeli Palestinian conflict are always "interesting" to follow because I cannot possibly think of any other issue that brings such an obvious bias on the part of whatever publication, journalist or speaker. The words that you choose, whether you speak of Jews, Israelis, settlers, civilians, men, women and kids, the title that you put on top of your article... Everything just indicates a stand. The French national newspaper for instance titled its article on the bombing in Jerusalem "a bus going to a Jewish settlement is targeted in a bombing attack", which is just so different from the "Deadly Blast Strikes Outside Jerusalem's Central Bus Station" from the New York Times.
I just wonder whose words are those. Obviously, they have been written by an individual, a journalist, but would it be fair that those are only the words of the journalist and not of a newspaper? Certainly not, it is the newspaper that sets up standards for its stuff, and it is the newspaper, meaning the direction of the newspaper that edits and decides whether each article is worth publication. At the end of the day an article written by one journalist is published by an entire crew. Okay so each of this bias is the work of an entire newspaper. But then if every newspaper is biased, if an implicit principle becomes that pure news are boring and that newspapers need catchy titles in order to be sold, then the phenomenon is enlarged to an entire field, and that the media as a whole can be called biased. Is that it? Are words such as settlers or civilians chosen and used specifically by this abstract industry that media represents? My opinion is that this is not the case. Media being a business, it does what every business does: it gives its customers what they want. And there is a reason why American, French and Israeli media don't deliver the same perspective. It is true that different sides also exist withing one country, like the Washington Post being so different to the New York Times. but even that answers to different groups of people, and responds to different audience.
At the end of the day it is us who make the media, it is the society that dictates the words that are being printed, and it is therefore each and everyone of us who are biased in terms of papers that we read, information sources that we use and terminology that we consider right.
Yes in a sense, the media produces what we the society want to hear. However, it is the owners and editors of the newspaper that determine the stance of the overall newspaper. I don't think that those people are so in tune with the average American, French, or Israeli. They are usually what one would consider the "elite". Well educated, wealthy, usually have more left leaning views when it comes to social issue and more right leaning views when it comes to economic issues. The problem is that, as you said, newspapers are businesses. Having a newspaper run by the average person on the street is impossible, newspapers need money.
ReplyDeleteSo yes and no...certain segments of society create the demand for the news that the media gives us, but I do think one can still call the media biased because those who run it are no in tune with the average citizen
Interesting to note is that journalists write the content of their articles, but not the headlines. The editors of the newspapers write the headlines, so the bias in the headlines certainly reflect the bias of the newspaper as a whole. The bias in the content of the articles also reflect the bias of the newspapers because the newspaper sets the tone for all of the articles produced under its name. However, the bias in the body of the article, I would venture to say, also represents the bias of the reporter, as they are the words of the reporter him/herself and not of the editor.
ReplyDeleteOn a separate note, although the NY Times headline is less biased than the French headline, I still think the NY Times headline is quite biased itself. The NY Times headline calls it a "blast" that "strikes" with no mention of a terrorist attack at all. Something to think about...
Dina, I agree a lot with your comment about the NY Times not being "bias innocent" per say but this goes back to the question we have been keeping asking ourselves in class: is there any source of information that is not biased? Is it possible for a news to be purely and entirely objective? And who is responsible for that? Is it fair on our part to just put the blame on journalists or should we look at ourselves first?
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