A History of Media Bias

It's common today for the stinging terms "fake news," "media bias," and "partisan journalism" to be applied to the mainstream American media. Politicians complain about it even though many, if not most, citizens are drawn to the news sources that appear to espouse their own ideals. Yet the public seems to assume that the press in general should be objective. People long for the "old days" of press objectivity--which has never really existed here.

Colonial America

If periodicals of the late 1600s appeared inoffensive, it was because the publishers were also government printers and postmasters who had a vested interest in protecting their patrician patrons. Newspapers of the early 18th century tried to maintain this status quo by eschewing local events and politics in favor of reprinting material from London periodicals.

But in 1721 James Franklin started the first controversial colonial paper, inspiring public debate and challenge to authority. Fourteen years later, a printer was cleared of a seditious libel charge when his lawyer argued that his criticisms of the power-abusing royal governor were true. Thus, a courageous, truth-telling press was recognized as a cornerstone of liberty, though freedom of the press was actually considered a separate matter from bias.

Publishers like Benjamin Franklin moved newspapers toward more partisanship in the 1760s, and the colonies were glutted with partisan papers and pamphlets by the time of the Revolution. The press became a weapon of resistance to the distant British overlords, and patriots worried about media bias only if it was imposed by the king.

Early U.S.

The first amendment to the Constitution officially made a free press one of our dearest liberties, and the new government even supported it through subsidies. But people in power often resented what was printed, and this led to President John Adams' 1798 Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, or malicious” writings about the government. The law backfired, however, when it turned incarcerated writers into free-speech martyrs, and Thomas Jefferson repealed it soon after becoming president.

Not all bias was political. While President Lincoln ordered many border-states papers closed during the Civil War because of their supposed bias in favor of the Confederacy, his critic James Gordon Bennett kept in mind that newspapers were businesses whose primary concern was selling papers. This attitude had helped Bennett build his New York Herald into the world's biggest newspaper through the use of sensationalism and colorful embellishing of the facts.

Thus a typical American newspaper offered “news without truth or reliability,” according to a British observer in 1871. Indeed, later publishing titan Joseph Pulitzer and his archrival, William Randolph Hearst, filled their papers with lies and omissions. But the US became a nation of mass-readership newspapers by the end of the century, and few dwelled on the idea that media should be unbiased.

Then, papers like the New York Times started trying to “give the news...impartially,” and the concept of unbiased reporting was recognized as an integral part of journalistic ethics.

20th century

Anti-semitic American politicians blamed the bias against Nazi Germany during World War II on a supposedly Jewish-controlled international press, and the truth about the deadly radiation released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was forbidden to be reported.

In the mid-20th century, editorial pages of some papers still took their cues directly from political party leaders. It was economics, not ethics, which eventually drove the news industry toward objectivity: it became more neutral to attract readers and advertisers, be they Democrats, Republicans, natives, immigrants, poor people, or the wealthy. Thus many papers neglected to cover racial issues, particularly in the South. Yet the ideal of impartiality was so widely accepted that news was always assumed to be unbiased and accurate.

Then came the Civil Rights Movement and the conflict with North Vietnam. Conservative politicians and news sources claimed communist and anti-American bias by papers supporting liberal social reform and opposing war. At the same time, some news professionals started seeing objectivity as an outdated ideal that muted journalists and reinforced the status quo.

It may have been when TV news anchor Walter Cronkite came out against the Vietnam War that the mainstream media started developing cracks. In the early 70s, the stuffy Washington Post's groundbreaking investigative reporting on the Watergate cover-up set a precedent for outright newsmaking by the press.

However, those were minor changes next to the impact of cable TV and, later, the Internet. In my next post, I'll explain how these platforms affected partisanship in the media and what might be done to offset it.

References Citizentruth.org: Unpacking and Understanding Media Bias, by Nola Hynes; May 17 and June 9, 2018. WashingtonPost.com: Media bias is nothing new, by Amanda Bennett; Dec 22, 2015.

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