Media bias is the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of many events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a poll or a survey, is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals.
The 2008 United States presidential election was the 56th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 2008. The Democratic ticket of Barack Obama, the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, and Joe Biden, the senior U.S. Senator from Delaware, defeated the Republican ticket of John McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona, and Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska. Obama became the first African American ever to be elected to the presidency as well as being only the third sitting United States Senator elected president, joining Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy.
Agenda-setting describes the "ability to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda". Agenda-setting is the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media. The study of agenda-setting describes the way media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. Nations with more political power receive higher media exposure. The agenda-setting by media is driven by the media's bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc.
Journalistic ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and good practice applicable to journalists. This subset of media ethics is known as journalism's professional "code of ethics" and the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements by professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.
Media bias in the United States occurs because the US media systematically skews information, such as reporting news in a way that conflicts with standards of professional journalism or promoting a political agenda through entertainment media. There is liberal bias and conservative bias. Claims of outlets, writers, and stories exhibiting both have increased as the two-party system has become more polarized. There is also bias in reporting to favor the corporate owners, and mainstream bias, a tendency of the media to focus on certain "hot" stories and ignore news of more substance. A variety of watchdog groups attempt to combat bias by fact-checking biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias. Researchers in a variety of scholarly disciplines study media bias.
Pack journalism is the characterization of news reporting in which reporters from different news outlets collaborate to cover the same story, leaving news reporting homogeneous. This is the practice whereby reporters use the same sources of information for their stories. This not only refers to print sources but people who provide quotes and information for stories too. When reporters need to cover a specific person for a story, these individuals will often move from place to place, and crowd together in masses at the scenes of newsworthy locations just for comments and/or quotes from individuals involved. While this is considered proper reporting, when reporters from several news outlets take the same steps to cover the same story, it leaves news virtually unvaried.
Civic journalism is the idea of integrating journalism into the democratic process. The media not only informs the public, but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public debate. The civic journalism movement is an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants.
Fox News is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by News Corp, with Rupert Murdoch as its chairman. During its time on the air, it has been the subject of many controversies, allegations and firings.
Mass media are the means through which information is transmitted to a large audience. This includes newspapers, television, radio, and more recently the Internet. Organizations that provide news through mass media in the United States are collectively known as the news media in the United States.
Rasmussen Reports is an American polling company founded in 2003. The company engages in political commentary and the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information. Rasmussen Reports conducts nightly tracking, at national and state levels, of elections, politics, current events, consumer confidence, business topics, and the United States president's job approval ratings.
Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.
The Bradley effect is a theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some white voters who intend to vote for the white candidate would nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.
Horse race journalism is political journalism of elections that resembles coverage of horse races because of the focus on polling data, public perception instead of candidate policy, and almost exclusive reporting on candidate differences rather than similarities. "For journalists, the horse-race metaphor provides a framework for analysis. A horse is judged not by its own absolute speed or skill, but rather by its comparison to the speed of other horses, and especially by its wins and losses."
Political journalism is a broad branch of journalism that includes coverage of all aspects of politics and political science, although the term usually refers specifically to coverage of civil governments and political power.
The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers is a non-fiction book written by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, published in 1986. It details a social scientific study of the ideological commitments of elite journalists in the United States, and the consequences of those commitments on both the reporting itself and on its reception by the public. The book states that because of the political opinions of journalists, the elite media has a liberal media bias.
Racial biases are a form of implicit bias, which refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect an individual's understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass unfavorable assessments, are often activated involuntarily and without the awareness or intentional control of the individual. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Police officers come from all walks of life and they too have implicit bias, regardless of their ethnicity. Racial bias in criminal news reporting in the United States is a manifestation of this bias.
Political bias is a bias or perceived bias involving the slanting and altering of information to make a political position or political candidates seem more attractive. With a distinct association to media bias, it commonly refers to how a reporter, news organization, or TV show covers political candidates and policy issues.
The media coverage of Bernie Sanders, a US Senator from Vermont, became a subject of discussion during his unsuccessful 2016 and 2020 presidential runs. His campaigns, some independent observers, and some media sources have said that the mainstream media in the United States is biased against Bernie Sanders. Others say that coverage is unbiased or biased in his favor. The allegations of bias primarily concern the coverage of his presidential campaigns.
Media coverage of the 2016 presidential election was a source of controversy during and after the 2016 election, with various candidates, campaigns and supporters alleging bias against candidates and causes.
