Unit 4: Vocabulary from Readings 1

As Lippmann noted, it’s the result of “apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three-legged calves.”

Still, there are people who would like to pay attention to the more consequential events and issues that used to be called news. These can be hard to discern when politics itself has become trivialized.

Hence the need to become intelligent news consumers: to learn how to pick through massive fields of information for substantive and fair reporting.

For these three CNN personalities, the news media themselves are impervious to the predispositions and prejudice that afflict their audience.

For these three CNN personalities, the news media themselves are impervious to the predispositions and prejudice that afflict their audience.

"They never wanted my sources when they didn’t fit the mold of what they wanted the story to say. They had a preconceived idea of the status quo, and so they would always go to the status-quo sources for their standard comments.”

“In Liberty and the News he concluded that the newspaper stories of one of the seminal events of the century (the Russian Revolution) were distorted and inaccurate, based not on the facts but on the ‘hopes of the men who composed the news organization.’”

Yet over the past decade, harsh criticism of the mainstream media has also increasingly emanated from the left...

Across national settings, there is an ever pervasive belief in various forms of media bias.

Individuals who feel most strongly about an issue tend to see their own side’s views as being more a product of objective analysis and normative concerns, and less influenced by ideology, than the other side’s views (Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995).

In a range of studies, when news audiences who hew to opposing sides on an issue are given the same news coverage of the topic to evaluate, both view this identical coverage as biased in favor of the other side (Gunther & Schmitt, 2004; Vallone et al., 1985).

Of consequence here is that partisans will fail to recognize bias in news that is in fact biased, in instances when that bias is congruent with their pre-existing views.

Americans' trust in news sources has become deeply polarized in recent years—with Republicans, for example, attributing more credibility to the conservative Fox News and less to most other news organizations than Democrats (Pew Research Center, 2008).