Trust in Mass Media

Concepts of Perceived Bias in the News

There is specific language that we use to describe the news media about what “good” news looks like. Objectivity, balance, neutrality, plurality, and bias are among the concepts used to evaluate news media programming. These concepts guide public discussion. The public’s insistent demand for objectivity in the news and a naive faith in its possibility keep bringing debates about the media back to an insistence on unbiased coverage. Objectivity refers to a normative ideal that journalism can reach the truth and an instructional framework, which has attempted to differentiate news from advertising, facts from opinion. Objectivity provides a way to measure how far news media stray from fairness and balance toward bias and partisanship.  In pursuit of the truth, objectivity can be said to encourage a worthy goal to the extent that journalists seek to be fair, thorough, use verifiable facts, and step back from their own personal and organizational interests. Neutrality is closely connected with the spirit of objectivity, in the sense of non-alignment.  The journalist does not have a stake in one interest or another, but is able to stand apart and act on behalf of the public interest. Neutrality is increasingly irrelevant in the genres beyond hard news. Pluralism has been evaluated with respect to diversity in media outlets, in media professionals, and in the content itself. Pluralism developed in conjunction with the idea of objectivity and reflects the concept in which society is best served by having power distributed among many competing interests. New media, to the extent they allow greater access to citizens and other groups, may understand the ideal of pluralism better. The underpinnings of objectivity suggest that truth can be approached if enough care is exercised to gather the relevant facts. The notion of balance, however, suggests that the truth may be found by comparing two competing truth claims, which may arise from completely different perspectives, the truth statistically lying somewhere in between. Balance is easier to achieve on the surface by putting two voices against each other. Balance often refers to the more narrow representation of viewpoints within the programming. The goal corresponds to how print journalism often seeks to balance viewpoints within specific stories.  As one of the more common derogatory charges, bias suggests that there is an agreed standard against which a message can be evaluated, or “balanced” around. Bias implies an unstated unambiguous standard of “truth.” This allows critics to identify their own standard relative to their particular interests and gauge media accordingly.  Although there are differences between the concepts they all share a concern for understanding the news media’s performance. They all suggest a search for fairness, that social groups and leaders should have a voice, that positions receive a bearing, and that this chance not be corrupted by inappropriate pressure, suppression, or conflicts of interest. 

Audiences Level of Trust in the Media

Americans’ news environments are changing rapidly with the diffusion of digital media, the most notable trend being the explosion of social media such as Facebook and  Twitter as news platforms. Social media offer opportunities for news organizations to reach more people than ever before, especially for young people.  The new environment where social media function as news platforms provides an interesting context to examine. In particular, today’s social media users experience news as not just mass communication but “masspersonal” communication through which they can build interpersonal relationships with news sources. Both journalism and computer-mediated communication literature are lacking in the masspersonal approach. Most studies heavily rely on theories of mass communication while failing to consider relevant interpersonal communication theories. Social media has given rise to heated discussions over how journalists should use the media, resulting from the clash of social media norms and the traditional journalism norms. As social media users, journalists are subject to the influence of social media norms such as personality disclosure and interaction. Journalists often give feedback to audiences’ comments in public; individual journalists’ social media profiles tend to be more interactive and personal than the profiles of newspaper organizations. These findings indicate that journalists’ social media uses do not differ greatly from those of other users in offering personal thoughts an opinions and inviting more engagement with audiences. 

Aside from social media, both it has been found that both experimental and survey studies have found a common explanation for citizens’ perceptions of media bias. The  “hostile media phenomenon” maintains that citizens often view the news as being biased against their views, irrespective of the actual content of the news. Even when the news is balanced and objective, issue partisans are expected to view the news media as being hostile to, or biased against, their side of the issue.

There is little to suggest that over the past few decades news reporting has become more favorable to one party.  There has been bias found in reporting, however they don’t agree that one side is consistently favored over the other. It is possible that media bias occurs because with the information sharing and social media, the general public has become exposed to an overabundance of conflicting messages about bias on a daily basis. These messages, if unchecked, can trigger a widespread false impression of a high degree of bias within the media. Another reason why media bias may be found comes from the theory that individuals who are actively involved within the political spectrum, partisans, perceive the news media’s reporting as inflammatory if the given news outlet’s coverage directly conflicts with the viewers ideological viewpoint.