(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)
If people choose channels which reinforce their views, the value of media contribution to public debate is much reduced – because a divided audience cannot know what has been omitted and what degree of ‘spin’ is being applied. Instead of interaction there is a deepening polarisation, as is the case with American TV News for example.[1]
An impartial overview might make a valuable contribution to public discussion; this is an argument in favour of having public-service broadcasting such as the BBC, whose charter requires political neutrality. The BBC is often criticised for bias,[2] but it provides a lot of impartial and educative material as, for example, in its coverage of the 2010 election where it made every party’s manifesto available and explained the impact of proposed changes to the voting system.[3]
There are, though, obvious dangers in having an officially-sanctioned source of news if it could be manipulated by a government and used for propaganda. In contrast, free media are a hallmark of political legitimacy.
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] The Social Science Quarterly, Volume 88, Number 3, September 2007 published an analysis by Jonathan S. Morris entitled Slanted Objectivity? Perceived Media Bias, Cable News Exposure, and Political Attitudes; its abstract was available in May 2014 at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2007.00479.x/abstract, concluding that:
“The television news audience is divided along political lines. This division could contribute toward further political polarization among the U.S. mass public as the content of television news coverage of politics becomes less and less homogenized.”
As another example, Ronald Dworkin referred to Fox News’s “shamelessly biased news and current affairs programs” in his book Is Democracy Possible Here? (p. 129).
[2] For example, a website devoted to collecting evidence of BBC bias was available in May 2014 at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tag/bbc-bias/.
[3] The BBC Election 2010 web pages were available in May 2014 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/default.stm.