Quote Originally Posted by Featherock View Post
Also, I still think the satire that started the thread was propaganda. It didn't simply send up bad reporting. The Daily Show does that nearly every night through satire, and they skewer any and all media, not just Fox, with no agenda other than anti-ignorance. The joke was propaganda because it was pushing a very familiar neocon criticism of the sort that gets caught in my spam filter on a daily basis: the media is biased, left leaning, and possibly Francophone. Freedom fries anyone?
Um...actually there was a study done that determined that the majority of mainstream media does tilt to the left. Link to a story on the study is here and a quote from the story follows:
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
The study was quickly attacked by some who may not want any findings of bias to leak out...or simply can't stand the idea that bias might exist in their own ranks. For an example, see here.

What I find funny about this is that everyone has a bias to some degree or another. Your personal experiences, leanings, interests, and the like are going to determine how you view many events. A wise person acknowledges said bias and tries to understand how it impacts his or her view of events. Others deny their bias, or claim that based on their political or social beliefs it is impossible for them to be biased, while anyone who disagrees with them is clearly biased. And given the time constraints that most media members operate under, it's not very likely that they'd have the time to go back through and remove every trace of their own biases from a story.

American media has also been an interesting case in itself: at times a group of crusaders mixed with businessmen and used by political machines to accomplish their goals with a minimum of attention. Up until perhaps the early 1900s they were certainly not often known for their objective reporting or apolitical stances on anything (with the usual few exceptions). Interesting how some things change (or at least seem to change).