When you are reading this article, you are reading it in the Viewpoints section of The Houstonian. Since the article is in this section, you know you are reading an article that is an opinionated viewpoint on a topic, and that this is not an actual news report. Every news media outlet has an opinion section, and I believe they are beneficial for considering somebody else’s point of view on an issue. The problem is that the news that is supposed to give us unbiased information about current events is starting to blur with the opinion section.
If you have a Facebook account, you have probably already seen that people are discontent with the media with posts on your news feed criticizing the “mainstream media,” “lamestream media,” “national liberal media,” usually referring to MSNBC and CNN or criticizing Fox News for being biased towards the right. In fact, news outlets themselves have caught on to this, and will typically release articles exposing bias in other news sources. The increasing bias, conservative and liberal within the news is becoming a major problem, and the biases being exposed wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that the organizations bringing up these biases are also guilty of being extremely hypocritical.
A clear example of today is that if you were to access Fox News’s website, among the various headlines you would see on the home page, “BIAS ALERT.” The news stories involve with these articles point out a liberal bias within major news sources. The irony in all of this is that Fox News has a reputation of being extremely right sided on their biases. This can also be seen in reflection with liberally-biased news organizations calling out Fox News on their bias. This is reflected with the average Americans complaining about news organizations being biased towards their political opponents, but then watches news stations and post news articles from outlets that are biased towards their political beliefs. This blatant hypocrisy has led to even more biased news outlets, and political propaganda machines under the disguise of the news.
Examples of these propaganda machines include The Blaze, Breitbart News, Independent Journal Review, AddictingInfo and DeadState. These websites disguise themselves as news outlets claiming to inform you on the current issues, but their real purpose is to promote their political agenda by writing horrendously biased news stories that can easily be proven false by doing quick research through the Internet, and then as I said before, demonizing the other side by citing examples of their biases. It is even more frustrating when you take into account that all this does is just make their target audience more smug, readers who do not agree the outlet’s politics ride them off as propaganda, and cause an even greater divide between the two major political ideologies.
Despite certain opinions, the news and the media are not evil or “cancer” in any sense. We need the news to stay informed about the issues going on today, but we need to hold our news organizations to higher standards, call out any news organization for any bias and hold them accountable when a biased article is extremely misleading. The news should also have to specify if what a reporter is saying is subjective or objective. However, the news probably will not improve on that any time soon, so the best way to avoid biased news is look up a news story from multiple sources, and always go back to the original source the story is reported on. Always examine all sides of the story.