Liam Morris
Mrs. Kelley
English Period 2
22 May 2014
Bias in Third Person
Throughout history and any sort of human-made records, bias can be seen and is usually unpreventable, even from the earliest times of Egyptian hieroglyphics to Roman scrolls the content of the information will have some form of bias, relative to the time period. It is because of the power of opinion and the individual beliefs and personalities of unique people who have different ideas, this is the basic concept of bias as personal beliefs either intentionally or not, skew and effect everyone’s decisions or thoughts, bias is defined as to influence opinion given to a person in a particular, usually unfair, direction because of how much influence and damage the media can do, it is important to understand or if possible limit how much bias effects people. Anybody who is touched by media is influenced by it so when the media is slanted because of a personal bias it can damage someone’s reputation, image, or just offend them. Not only this but the media can also become invasive to a person and violate some of their personal rights purely for entertainment. The media has the ability to either enhance one’s public image, or destroy it, as well as influencing political position. What the media does not do, is show what a person’s background is or their views and what they do outside of their professional life.
Media is a collection of mass communication. It has come a long way in terms of how it is actually relayed from one person onto another, and one way that this has changed is with mass production with the ability to produce large quantities of product like newspapers, or even other sorts of media devices like televisions, computers, cable boxes, etc. News media sources easier to acquire and it is more likely that people with have them. Because of this, most of today’s media is through paper magazines, online, or on television. Also, given the economic opportunity made by media and the ease of entrepreneurs to capitalize on it, many people have gone into this industry. But as a result of this, so many different walks of life and opinions and beliefs from everybody is also worked into the mix of people which takes a toll on some of the information that comes out. Anybody who works at a media organization may claim that they are un-biased but they do have opinions because they could not be humans otherwise. Everyone has different values, opinions, and standards; which can cause problems to occur involving proper and ethical reporting with disagreements, controversies, and fights. Reporters and journalists constantly report and present information in ways that are beneficial to a single cause and represent the opposite argument in no way, even if it is possibly positive. “Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in the fall said the media ‘tend to favor one side’ compared with fifty-three percent who said so in 1985”(1). This helps show that not only is there bias inside of the media, but that it is also growing in size over the years, increasing the impact on the viewers. Over the past few decades, bias within the media has become so relevant and common that so many people have picked up on it, and even called out for honest and fair reporting because of how much more prevalent it has become. These increases in bias help show that it in fact exists and does affect the media itself.
The media as a whole is difficult to take in all at once because of how wide and diverse its characteristics and outlets are. However, with some of the most popular advances in technology and commodities of the United States being televisions, one of the widely used media sources around are news stations. These are the teams that report on events, crimes, politics, controversy even, all of which can be reported on with a particular bias. Obviously any sort of controversy and argument would have some sort of bias because there must be two