Thread: Media Bias Wars
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Old 05-13-2005, 06:21 PM
Chris Alger Chris Alger is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
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Default All text is bias and bias is good

I don't think either of these questions are important or interesting.

We should jettison the concern about "bias" as something that's bad in itself, something usually shows itself as a right-wing canard, often to the point of self-parody. Bias is inherent in every text. A collection of random, seemingly disconnected facts will appear in an order or emply words and signs that paint a slightly different picture from another random order with slightly different words. But even random facts, moreover, offer almost no means to create a defensible understanding of the world. We need heuristics, logic, education and other tools to categorize, sythesize, discriminate among and generally comprehend the mass of data with which we're inundated. This process inherently creates more "bias," but so what? We need to avoid and guard against demonstrably contradictory, irrational, illogical, and factually-unsupportable ideas. Saying that we should avoid "bias" is like saying we should avoid "understanding."

We should also be wary of using terms like "liberal" or "conservative" as if these defined some sort of spectrum of rational or legitimate attitudes. These terms often ignore or conceal actual relations of power, and can therefore both be used to legitimate or undermine power relations as the writer wishes.

I'll skip to an argumentative conclusion. The sources of information that most effectively shore up power in the U.S. and the west aren't things like Murdoch's empire or rightist press, it's things like elite grad schools and the NY Times. The former are the training camps for those that own and operate the media empires and the latter is the sort of organ on which they actually rely.
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