quote:
Networks don't give a shit about right leaning and left leaning, they care about who's watching and try to guage what their opinions on issues may be. They then focus on bringing those stories to gain viewers. The media isn't "left" or "right", it's just a business using the tools of marketing to gain a big enough viewing audience for advertisers.
—onifre
Hi onifre,
Networks (or more pertinently their owners and employees) don't need to care about left/right politics in order to be biased. If their aim is to maximize advertising revenue, and most advertising revenue is sourced from capitalist enterprises who prefer to place their adverts in programs providing a rosy view of the capitalist business model, then a right wing bias will arise naturally without intention on the part of broadcasters.
I believe that people on the right have a conception that the media is biased in favour of liberals because the networks are keen to be
culturally liberal. They are happy to have gay men (not gay women so often, for some reason), an ethnic diversity of actors and presenters (more or less), perhaps a non-Christian or two, but you will rarely see an interview with an American leftist intellectual of
economic matters. I believe that it is due to the fact that the
cultural impacts of the left have become attractive to marketers because they appeal to the audience while not challenging the capitalist model of organization, while the
economic ideas of the left are a direct challenge and are so not to be countenanced.
All of this means that we can have pro-capitalist bias at the same time as a culturally anti-right bias; resulting in accusations that the media is both pro-liberal and pro-conservative. That's basically what the classic 90s Benetton ad campaign was. Economically capitalist while culturally progressive (at least that's what it was intended to be). The prediction of the model is that you will rarely if ever get a KKK member or David Harvey on screen but a Tom Friedman or Bono should be ok.
I agree with an earlier poster that Fox is basically a one-off freak show departure from my model!
Cheers
Mick