Just something that came to my attention recently..... two different reporting agencies report the same incident very differently...... The real story Similar to the above, but with pics (from the AJC) And here's the slant Stuff like this is why I always take the news with a grain of salt..... some agencies aren't as concerned with the truth as they are with a flashy headline and controversy.....
its sad inst it? but this is exactly how they work, i used to be one of them then saw the darkside and joined the army ... as a reporter. the thing you have to look at as each news reporting agency has their own bias, its NOT supposed to be this way but it is. some are very liberal and others conservative, others its hard to tell which way they lean. I wish i could find my list of papers and which way they lean, i used to know i think the AJC is liberal but i dont remember. I know Fox 5 is conservative. new reporters are supposed to be subjective and tell the story like it is, not put their own spin on it, but thats how they get ratings ... kinda sucks
There's a good book on the decline of the news media called "Bad News" by Tom Fenton. http://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Decline-Reporting-Business/dp/0060797460
I might be wrong, but I understood (meaning I was told a long time ago and have more or less forgotten ) that the AJC was a combination of two separate papers.... the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution..... one was liberal and the other was concervative..... dunno which was which..... anybody know if there's truth to that?
i am not sure << yougin but i think they still took the liberal stance, no civilian paper, except the wall street journal, is truely subjective
there is very little that you will experience in this life that doesn't have an interested party's "spin" on it... civilian or otherwise.
that is true but the school i went through, which all services attend teaches subjectivity. and they get really bend out of shape when you try to cover things up that are releasable (key word). OPSEC bars us from releasing certain classified for higher information and some people think it makes us bias.
No matter how objective a writer tries to be, the writing will be slanted by his personal feelings/morals convictions whatever. Some writers are better at appearing objective than others, but everyone has biases that will manifest themselves in writing whether it is intentional or not. That being said, most people don't really want to hear truly objective news, they want the writer to take a stance. That way readers can point their fingers at a writer and say, "He's right!" or "He's wrong!" Most people don't want to go through the mental exercise of weighing all the facts and synthesizing their own opinions when they can go to another source and simply have someone tell them what to think about a certain event. News outlets (media) have to respond to this desire, because if they don't they lose support: subscriptions decline, ad money goes away, they lose money. News outlets themselves are more or less forced top take a stand in one direction or another so that they can maintain their target audience's attention continue to make money. /rant