Somethings Make Me Smile in Sadness and Despair

A week or so ago the federal government announced that it was going to allocate funds to assist the mainstream media - specifically the press in adapting to the new environment where it has become increasingly difficult for the print media to compete with the internet etc. Conservative politicians including a provincial premier immediately started to suggest that such government handouts would ensure that print media would become biased in favour of the government because they could not/would not ever bite the hands that fed them.

The conservatives of this country could, in some small way, be correct. Reporters who knew their jobs were slightly more secure might think twice about getting on certain bandwagons and bashing the ruling party. But those politicians who suggested such biases were possible, acted as if the print media was at present, unbiased. To suggest even the possibility that the media were not influenced by outside sources demonstrates at best a profound naivete and at worst a disturbing capacity to publically ignore or discuss the obvious truths of the world we live in.

The truth is that the print media has always been biased. Only someone who buried their head in the sand all of the time could miss the obvious biases of various newspapers either to the left or the right side of the spectrum. Certain newspaper editors (under the direction of the publishers) predictably support certain political parties at election and at other times. These biases exist because the print media is now and always has been a commercial enterprise. It makes or at least it is supposed to make money for the owners.

The money comes from advertisers, advertisers want their advertisements in newspapers that are read by potential customers - of course the newspapers print news, that at the very least, is slanted towards what the readers want to read. It is not so terrible that media is biased. There are at least two sides, two perspectives to every story. What is bad is the media not acknowledging that there is a bias in their writing/reporting. It is their denial of their political leanings, their incapacity to be honest with the reading public that allows both for people to argue that “news is fake” and for politicians to rant about how unfair it is that one political party may be trying to bribe the print media. One should not necessarily be concerned about the possibility that the media are biased - of course they are; the real concern is that they pretend not to be.

As a side note, I think there was a time when it was legitimate for the smaller political parties who were never able to gain any real political traction to argue that the mainstream press was too aligned with the parties in power and thereby making it difficult to get their platforms/ideas out to the public. It is far more alarming when parties (e.g. Republicans or Conservatives) who have historically held power at least as nearly as often as other parties make that claim. It is difficult to see those parties as the underdogs who are at a disadvantage. It is a cheap ploy to attract attention - to make people feel sorry for them. Something one would expect of a young child and hopefully something that any reasonable adult would see through.