Media Bias and Irresponsibility

 Written by Ashleigh Brown

Any conversation on politics is sensitive and often fueled by arguments from the misinformed. For many people, political loyalties are originated and cultivated more from social pressure rather than informed opinion. The media more than ever, has played a major role in the manipulation of the news that we consume. The fine line between objectivism and biases is a fine one and to find a source that balances along that line is nearly impossible. Most news programs have relatively clear political agendas and present the news in a way that fits their narrative accordingly. News programs like MSNBC and Fox News cause a lot of controversy on their political bias, but HBO’s The Newsroom has caused an outbreak of controversy over its own over the top political bias and agenda, and its not even real. Even more terrifying are the similarities between such fictional programming to their real news counterparts.

            Yes, I said it; HBO’s The Newsroom is fiction. Incase you are unfamiliar; The Newsroom is a show about the people behind the scenes in a nightly news broadcast. The show presents real life past events, but with their own added fictional details.

            But this part of the show itself is not the problem. The controversy revolving The Newsroom is very similar to controversies with cables Fox News. In fact, the arguments against Fox’s integrity and The Newsrooms are eerily similar.

            In an excerpt titled Fox & Friends; Political Talk by Jeffrey P. Jones, he explains, “narratives play an important role in shaping public opinion about national politics” (Jones, 187). This makes it clear that the power to manipulate lies with the author of such narrative. For news programs like Fox News, this responsibility is in the hands of the newscasters, or more so distributed between them and those who write the teleprompter script. If their show is only run by undeniably extreme conservatives, that is the only rhetoric it will construct, leaving the opposing argument without defense. Because The Newsroom is fictional, there’s that word again, the power for this manipulation lies almost solely by the creator and/or producer, which in this case is Aaron Sorkin. Similarly to Fox News, Sorkin denies any sort of political agenda. But these political biases are overtly obvious in both texts; in Sorkin’s case this evidence is obviously his programing but also regular 6 digit funding to only democratic candidates and groups (Bercovici).

            Along with the bias narratives both examples construct, they also do the same in constructing a certain reality. For Fox News’s Fox & Friends, they construct this reality through repeated performance and dramatic presentations that the format of the talk show encourages and allow. They do this allowing emotion and drama to feed off of each other with their installments of “War on Christmas” or “Ground Zero Mosque” causing hysteria (Jones, 197). The difference between Fox News’s strategy and The Newsroom is, once again, the fact that one is actually real and one is not. Programs like Fox News manipulate factual events to push the viewer to decode the message in a certain way, which is basically unethical. It seems ironic though that The Newsroom does almost exactly the same thing. The show takes events and spins them according to the message of intent. The difference is The Newsroom has no real responsibility to produce an unbiased, factual product.

            Aaron Sorkin’s intention, when it comes to The Newsroom, seems to be to show how events in our past could have been covered better by media journalists and gives a sort of new structure for such a process. But because of Sorkin’s background and obvious biases, the real intention of the show is more to push and influence liberal ideologies onto the public, much like our news programming in real life does, the only difference being the political stance or opinion that is being pushed.

            The list of similarities spans much farther than the couple examples I have given, but I hope the evaluation and point I attempt to make is clear. The political party these narratives follow is unimportant. It is the fact that a viewer is vulnerable, especially when uniformed. When we watch a news program, even if we have a predisposed bias, we can still be easily influenced. The difference however is one that I brought up frequently here. HBO’s, The Newsroom, is fiction. The Newsroom has no real responsibility to its viewer other than to entertain and if they walk away with new insight or knowledge it is on their own terms. But for news programming like MSNB and Fox, they have some sort of responsibility to the public to produce the facts so that the people have the knowledge to make informed opinions about public issues. The arguments against media biased news programming seem to get caught up in their relation between their political loyalty and the programs, when the real issue is the overtly irresponsible production of the news. These outlets have the power of extreme manipulation of our social structure, and the connections between their format and the format of a fake news program produces a bad outlook on our future.

Sources

Bercovici, Jeff. "Aaron Sorkin Claims He Has 'No Political Agenda.' His Campaign Donations Show Otherwise." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 06 June 2012. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

Geraghty, Jim. "Aaron Sorkin Should Try Journalism Sometime. | National Review Online." National Review Online. National Review, 27 June 2012. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

Jones, Jeffrey P. "Fox & Friends: Political Talk." How to Watch Television: Media Criticism in Practice. New York: New York University, 2013. 187-93. Print.