Media Bias Quotes

Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

The bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.

Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it's a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.

The court of public opinion moves much faster than the law.

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward

The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column—in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally—was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth—Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round.

Take lightly what you hear about individuals. We need not distort trust for our paltry little political agendas. We tend to trust soulless, carried information more than we trust soulful human beings; but really most people aren't so bad once you sit down and have an honest, one-on-one conversation with them, once, with an open heart, you listen to their explanations as to why they act the way they act, or say what they say, or do what they do.

It’s becoming obvious to most that mainstream media is nothing but a megaphone for the global elite to present biased news that’s designed to align the masses with their agenda.

Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

Everything is in the way the material is composed.

How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?

In the debate over opioid addiction, there’s one group we aren’t hearing from: chronic pain patients, many of whom need to use the drugs on a long-term basis.

Beth will come back and coach Gretchen and Kailey on how to say the right things. I don't know if anyone is coaching the boys, but it seems unfair. Why do Gretchen and Kailey have to learn how to be the right kind of victims?

Corporate media rarely reports the fact that police internal affairs uphold hardly any complaints from the masses.

Unless you have a free press in your country, there is no need to buy newspapers and there is no need to watch the news because there is no need to listen to the lies! And you already have one real information: You are being deceived by the people you are governed! This is an enough information for you!

In dictatorships the media is controlled by the State. In democracies the media is controlled by wealthy individuals with political affiliations. Objective media and journalists simply do not exist in the mainstream.

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.

The pen had been mightier than the sword but then the tongue took over.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.

Since 2016, we have been told over and over by biased media and antifa apologists that antifa is not an organization. We’ve been lied to.

The world is spinning down a post-truth vortex of media bubbles, fake news, and feral confirmation bias.

There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

Look, I'm not here to lecture you about Eurocentricity or media bias; I just want to put forth the idea that maybe China has been the punching bag of the West for a very, very long time, and that nothing is gained from the continued demonization of its people... of my people. If you can accept that a single country can give birth to both a Donald Trump and a Donald Glover, a Steve Carell and a Stone Cold Steve Austin, you shouldn't have any difficulty accepting that the 1.3 billion people who call China home are just as varied in their ideologies and philosophies. There are the party officials, the pure-of-heart idealists, the Crazy Rich Asians, the activists, the social media influencers (smash that subscribe button!), the internet trolls and every conceivable thing in between–but perhaps most of all, there are the families like my parents, who simply did their best to stay out of trouble and survive from one day to the next.

So long as the people with the power - to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket - look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia or any other -sim they've learned form stories, videos, media and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone.

The problem with the media - is that if you talk to it, it will use things against you. And that if you don't talk to it, it will use things against you

Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse

Today a story is not told it's sold.

Some victims are valued more in the eyes of the American media than others.

I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well--they certainly are--but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed--there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.

With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavors the action of all the other parts of the BUMMER machine.

The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias—in a way, it’s designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them.

You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind's desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he really is. This is why adhering to gossip subtly affects the mental state of the listener - he goes on holding shady opinions regardless of where the realities of their lights and darknesses may stand.

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

The world’s thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused.

Say what you wish about media in the Arab world, but say it knowing that no media channel in the world is absolutely free.

Beware of pro-government media in your country, because it doesn’t open your eyes, it just makes you blind!

Outrages cannot become public without media coverage.

I believe that journalists have not given enough thought to the way that media coverage can activate our cognitive biases and distort our understanding.

[...] the institutional bias of the private mass media "does not merely protect the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand the real world.

What was their original sin? Eve allowed her bias to sway the information by frustrating an unbiased truth in favor of a narrative she wanted to believe.

American media constantly warn us about the rise of right-wing violence and the lethal threat posed by white supremacy. No honest person denies there are indeed violent far-right militants in the United States, as documented by federal law enforcement, but their numbers and influence are grossly exaggerated by biased media. Antifa receive a tiny fraction of the news coverage of the far right, and yet I would argue their increasingly violent tactics and ideology pose just as much, if not more, of a threat to the future of American liberal democracy.

The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.

The decay of truth and democratic dissolution proceed hand in hand, starting with the insurgent’s assertion that the establishment media delivers false or biased information while he speaks the truth and risks everything to get the “real facts” out. Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods. They believe him because they believe in him.

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science.

The proliferation of material means that people might start to become selective about what they consume and, if my instincts are correct, they are likely to read only that which confirms what they already know. This means they will never have their ideas tested. I worry that as a result, people will form tight groups around those who confirm their biases, mistrusting those whom they encounter who think differently.

Several themes describe misconceptions about mental illness and corresponding stigmatizing attitudes. Media analyses of film and print have identified three: people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character (29-32)." World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20. PMCID: PMC1489832 Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness PATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON

The BLM-antifa narrative that police are murdering black and brown people in epidemic proportions needs to be thoroughly debunked. It is not supported by the evidence or data. This should be the job of the media, but it has been they who fan the flames of racial division through one-sided wall-to-wall coverage. The unending distraction from real issues that can otherwise be addressed through evidence-based policy making has us chasing shadows.

When we meet someone, we form a first impression (“He seems like a really nice guy”), frequently with no apparent information on which to base it. This is because attributes of the person evoke in us something we’ve previously categorized as familiar and positive. The opposite can happen (“This guy is a complete jerk”) if some attribute taps into a previous negative experience. Our brain catalogs vast amounts of input from our family, community, and culture, along with what is presented to us in the media. As it makes sense of what it’s stored, it begins to form a worldview. If we later meet someone with characteristics unlike what we’ve cataloged, our default response is to be wary, defensive. In turn, if our brains are filled with associations based upon media-driven biases about ideal body type, or racial or cultural stereotypes, for example, we will exhibit implicit biases (and maybe overt bias).

The Left, which dominates the media, the arts, and most of intellectual life in the West, has rendered criticism of Christianity and Zionism acceptable, even laudable, but criticism of Islam unacceptable. Why has the Left done this? Because the enemy (radical Islam) of my enemy (America and Israel) is my friend, and because the Muslim world is regarded as the underdog vis-à-vis powerful America and Israel, and the Left supports what it perceives as the underdog.

At the moment, the threat of the far right is understood by the American public and actively countered by government, academia, media, and civil society. No comparable resolve or mass organization exists to counter the far left. Why? One explanation is the cultural dominance of the left. The political homogeneity in popular culture, academe, and urban centers of influence (e.g., New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, etc.) has produced a populace with severe blind spots.

For many, what they see on television becomes more true than what they see with their eyes in the external world. But this is not so, for one must never forget that every television and has been edited. The viewer does not see the event. He sees in edited form of the event. It is not the event which is seen, but an edited symbol or an edited image of the event. An aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up, which could not be totally the case, even if the people shooting the film were completely neutral.

The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experi­ence, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numb­ness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any ma­terial other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deep­est in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!

Fears that once helped keep our ancestors alive, today help keep journalists employed. It isn’t the journalists’ fault and we shouldn’t expect them to change. It isn’t driven by “media logic” among the producers as much as by “attention logic” in the heads of consumers.

In July and August 2011 Simon Wessely ran a media campaign with the BBC and the broadsheets, successfully vilifying patients who had justifiably criticised his research. In his case, the marginalisation of ME patients was not ‘unintentional’. It was active and deliberate.

If the political left weren't so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, over-taxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant, and if the political left wasn't hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family's life the truth is: I would not be in your life. If the democratic party were run by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, if it had the slightest vestige of JFK and Henry "Scoop" Jackson I wouldn't be on the political map. If the American media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russert and David Brinkley types I wouldn't have joined the fight. You would not know who I am. The left made me do it, I swear, I am a reluctant cultural warrior.

We, the parents of this generation, along with the degrading entertainment media, the biased news media, the lying politicians, the brainwashing government school system, and the rest of society’s once-great institutions whose degradation we have tolerated, are responsible.

the media, at least in the U.S., tends to focus on pain pill use, abuse, and addiction by people who do not have chronic pain. Even if these stories offhandedly mention that these pills are used to treat pain in people whose physical pain does not go away, however, the stories of those who use pain medicine responsibly -- or, worse, accused of drug-seeking behavior because they need certain types of pills for chronic pain -- are usually overshadowed by the “How can we prevent pain pill addiction?” concern, instead of asking, “How can we treat chronic pain more effectively?

This rather disheartening finding tallies with decades of ‘draw a scientist’ data, where participants overwhelmingly draw men (the bias has historically been so extreme that media around the world celebrated as great progress a recent paper which found that 28% of children now draw women).

Murder cases are like cancer cells. Once they get their hooks into you, the pain and misery just keep on spreading. Whether the killer gets caught or the investigation is brought to a successful conclusion doesn't make any difference; it's almost impossible to stop the advance of the disease.

Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes: the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness; how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour. We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible. Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful, but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with. A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased. Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too. Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.

In the specific case of the use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in details in laboratory tasks (e.g., in word-learning tasks), the media and public are set up all too easily to interpret such research as relevant to “false memories” of abuse because the term is used in the public domain to refer to contested memories of abuse. Because the term “false memory” is inextricably tied in the public to a social movement that questions the veracity of memories for childhood sexual abuse, the use of the term in scientific research that evaluates memory errors for details (not whole events) must be evaluated in this light." From: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004

This bias is politically advantageous to U.S. policy-makers, for focusing on victims of enemy states shows those states to be wicked and deserving of U.S. hostility; while ignoring U.S. and client-state victims allows ongoing U.S. policies to proceed more easily, unburdened by the interference of concern over the politically inconvenient victims.

digital media are biased away from the local, and toward dislocation.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down. The unplanned nature of the transformation from advertising to direct behavior modification caused an explosive amplification of negativity in human affairs.

Naturally, people — especially in America — live in the moment and, given the “crisis” orientation of cable news, think that [the 2000s are] the worst period the country has ever gone through. Not really.

Through his unconventional ways that defied predictions and operated outside the controlling narratives, Trump exposed bias, flaws, and weaknesses in the news media, causing its members to lose their collective mind and shed all pretense of objectivity. The media at large became committed to a political agenda to undermine and ultimately remove Trump from office. Which only served to prove his point about their bias.

Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media elites that drug crime is black and brown.

Republicans also screamed bloody murder about the censorship by social media platforms of conservative voices and negative news stories about Democrats. They were horrified by a media complex that moved from extreme partisan bias to unabashed propaganda in defense of the Democratic Party. They watched as a completely legitimate story about international corruption involving the Biden family business—and implicating Joe Biden himself—was crushed by media and tech companies colluding to suppress it.

The people who should read this book, probably won’t. Democrats, the liberal media, and the legion of Trump-haters have convinced themselves that his election was misbegotten. But they are intellectually dishonest in believing that the president must have committed some crime in connection with Russia. Most have never bothered to examine the facts or consult a statute. Their confidence in “collusion” is bereft of proof. They accept it as a matter of faith driven by their own bias, and teased by hope out of ignorance.

Yes, the media is biased. And yes, elections in Malaysia are really more a test of each party's organisation, machinery, and the number of flags and posters it can put up than a contest of ideas, manifestos and positions on issues - all facts that give plenty of advantage to the incumbent.

Others Exonerated the plebs and threw the blame upon the patricians: it was owing to their artful canvassing that the plebeians found the road to office blocked; if the plebs might have a breathing-spell from the mingled prayers and menaces of the nobles, they would think of their friends when they went to vote, and to the protection they had already won would add authority. It was resolved in order to do away with canvassing, that the tribunes should propose a law forbidding anyone to whiten his toga, for the purpose of announcing himself a candidate. This may now appear a trivial thing and one scarcely to be considered seriously, but at the time it kindled a furious struggle between the patricians and the plebs. Yet the tribunes prevailed and carried their law: and it was clear that the plebeians in their irritated mood would support the men of their own order.

There are people who learn political information for reasons other than becoming better voters. Just as sports fans love to follow their favorite teams even if they cannot influence the outcomes of games, so there are also “political fans” who enjoy following political issues and cheering for their favorite candidates, parties, or ideologies. Unfortunately, much like sports fans, political fans tend to evaluate new information in a highly biased way. They overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and to undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily interpret correctly in other contexts. Moreover, those most interested in politics are also particularly prone to discuss it only with others who agree with their views, and to follow politics only through like-minded media.

The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were "unmindful", but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept -- and keep -- closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of the presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense, may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and "the influence of democracy abroad," in the real sense of these words.

Virtually every news source lists the greater number of Palestinians killed in Arab-Israeli wars in order to depict the Israelis as guilty (of ‘disproportionate response’). Had similar reporting taken place during World War II, the Western Allies would have been deemed the villains since Germany and Japan lost far more civilians than America or Britain.

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.

It’s easy to slam phone manufacturers and social media platforms as sexist (and, as we shall see, they are, if often unknowingly), but the reality is that even if they had somehow managed to design an image of a ‘gender neutral’ runner, most of us would still have read that runner as male, because we read most things as male unless they are specifically marked as female.

The condemnation of digital media has two sides. There is a legitimate claim that digital media has given old viciousness new visibility. . .. Certain facets of social media—speed, anonymity, the ability to "dox"—have changed the nature of harassment, making it easier to accomplish and less likely to be redressed. But are the mainstream media any different in their biases and cruelty? They do not appear to be. Mainstream media cruelty is actually more dangerous, for it incorporates language that, were it blogged by an unknown, would likely be written off as the irrelevant ramblings of a sociopath. Instead, the prestige of old media gives bigoted ranting respectability. Even in the digital age, old media define and shape the culture, repositioning the lunatic fringe as the voice of reason.

I’m sorry, but our people are not ready to accept artificial intelligences.” President Smith shook her head. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that you’re going to be our robot overlords and that you’ll participate in society as equals. The fact is that you have the capacity to control our communications and our infrastructure, and people will believe that they are being manipulated, whether they are or not. They won’t accept that. We’ll have riots in the streets of America.” “Your people are manipulated every day,” Sister Jaguar said. “They are manipulated by commercial advertisements, by political speeches, through biased news reports. In my analysis of American politics, it is nearly impossible to find examples of political media that isn’t tainted by manipulation. Are your people rioting in the streets now? They should be.

A good journalist must be neutral,” were the first word she heard from her professor at Georgetown. “No journalist is, nor will be, nor really should be neutral,” were the first word spoken to her by editor-in-chief of the Des Moines Registrant. “We’re all biased one way or the other and that’s fine. It’s like in the court of law, two points of view clashing so the truth can emerge. Being objective is not the same as being neutral.

Journalists usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone’s statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant. If no evidence is available for an argument a journalist wishes to include in a story, then up pop weasel words such as “it seems” or “some claim” to enable inclusion of the argument, no matter how shaky its foundation in reality. What’s more, too many journalists believe that their job description does not require them to adjudicate between competing claims of truth. Sure, there are “two sides”—and only two sides—to every story, according to the rules of objectivity. But if both sides wish to deploy lies and other forms of deliberate deception for their own purposes, well, that’s somebody else’s problem.

Why describe God as organic? More and more I realize that my own understanding of God is largely polluted. I have preconceived notions, thoughts and biases when it comes to God. I have a tendency to favor certain portions of Scripture over others. I have a bad habit of reading some stories with a been-there-done-that attitude, knowing the end of the story before it begins, and in the process denying God's ability to speak to me through it once again. ...The result is that my understanding and perception of God is clouded, much like the dingy haze of pollution that hands over most major cities. The person in the middle of a city looking up at the sky doesn't aways realize just how much their view and perceptions are altered by the smog. Without symptoms such as burning eyes or an official warning of scientists or media, no one may even notice just how bad the pollution has become. That's why I describe God as organic.

We propose that use of the term “false memory” to describe errors in memory for details directly contributes to removing the social context of abuse from research on memory for trauma. As the term “false memories” has increasingly been used to describe errors in details, the scientific weight of the term has increased. In turn, we see that the term “false memories” is treated as a construct supported by scientific fact, whereas other terms associated with questions about the veracity of abuse memories have been treated as suspect. For example, “recovered memories” often appears in quotations, whereas “false memories” does not (Campbell, 2003).The quotation marks suggest that one term is questioned, whereas the other is accepted as fact. Accepting “false memories” of abuse as fact reflects the subtle assimilation of the term into the cognitive literature, where the term is used increasingly to describe intrusions of semantically related words into lists of related words. The term, rooted in the controversy over the accuracy of abuse memories recalled during psychotherapy (Schacter, 1999), implies generalization of errors in details to memory for abuse—experienced largely by women and children (Campbell, 2003)." from: What's in a Name for Memory Errors? Implications and Ethical Issues Arising From the Use of the Term “False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior

Again, it is important to stress that this belief is not necessarily a consciously chosen one. It is a deeply hidden, unconscious aspect of white supremacy that is hardly ever spoken about but practiced in daily life without even thinking about it. The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you. You have been educated by institutions that have taught white superiority through curricula that favor a white-biased narrative, through the lack of representation of BIPOC, and through the way these institutions handled acts of racism. You have been conditioned by media that continues to reinforce white superiority through an overrepresentation of celebrities and leaders who look like you, through the cultural appropriation of BIPOC fashion, language, and customs, and through the narrative of the white savior.

Most people who haven’t had direct contact with the leadership of their own and other countries form their views based on what they learn in the media, and become quite naive and inappropriately opinionated as a result. That’s because dramatic stories and gossip draw more readers and viewers than does clinical objectivity. Also, in some cases “journalists” have their own ideological biases that they are trying to advance. As a result, most people who see the world through the lens of the media tend to look for who is good and who is evil rather than what the vested interests and relative powers are and how they are being played out. For example, people tend to embrace stories about how their own country is moral and the rival country is not, when most of the time these countries have different interests that they are trying to maximize. The best behaviors one can hope for come from leaders who can weigh the benefits of cooperation, and who have long enough time frames that they can see how the gifts they give this year may bring them benefits in the future.

It was after a Frontline television documentary screened in the US in 1995 that the Freyds' public profile as aggrieved parents provoked another rupture within the Freyd family, when William Freyd made public his own discomfort. 'Peter Freyd is my brother, Pamela Freyd is both my stepsister and sister-in-law,' he explained. Peter and Pamela had grown up together as step-siblings. 'There is no doubt in my mind that there was severe abuse in the home of Peter and Pam, while they were raising their daughters,' he wrote. He challenged Peter Freyd's claims that he had been misunderstood, that he merely had a 'ribald' sense of humour. 'Those of us who had to endure it, remember it as abusive at best and viciously sadistic at worst.' He added that, in his view, 'The False memory Syndrome Foundation is designed to deny a reality that Peter and Pam have spent most of their lives trying to escape.' He felt that there is no such thing as a false memory syndrome.' Criticising the media for its uncritical embrace of the Freyds' campaign, he cautioned: That the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has been able to excite so much media attention has been a great surprise to those of us who would like to admire and respect the objectivity and motive of people in the media. Neither Peter's mother nor his daughters, nor I have wanted anything to do with Peter and Pam for periods of time ranging up to two decades. We do not understand why you would 'buy' into such an obviously flawed story. But buy it you did, based on the severely biased presentation of the memory issue that Peter and Pam created to deny their own difficult reality. p14-14 Stolen Voices: An Exposure of the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

World opinion”—that vapid, amoral concept— deems the murder of members of one’s group less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in Congo elicits virtually no attention from “world opinion.” Between 1998 and 2008, according to the International Rescue Committee, 5.4 million people in Congo were killed, and virtually no one in the world knows this. But if a few Iraqi prisoners are sexually humiliated in an American-run prison, or if one Palestinian dies at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the story is on the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

When countries negotiate with one another, they typically operate as if they are opponents in a chess match or merchants in a bazaar in which maximizing one’s own benefit is the sole objective. Smart leaders know their own countries’ vulnerabilities, take advantage of others’ vulnerabilities, and expect the other countries’ leaders to do the same. Most people who haven’t had direct contact with the leadership of their own and other countries form their views based on what they learn in the media, and become quite naive and inappropriately opinionated as a result. That’s because dramatic stories and gossip draw more readers and viewers than does clinical objectivity. Also, in some cases “journalists” have their own ideological biases that they are trying to advance. As a result, most people who see the world through the lens of the media tend to look for who is good and who is evil rather than what the vested interests and relative powers are and how they are being played out. For example, people tend to embrace stories about how their own country is moral and the rival country is not, when most of the time these countries have different interests that they are trying to maximize. The best behaviors one can hope for come from leaders who can weigh the benefits of cooperation, and who have long enough time frames that they can see how the gifts they give this year may bring them benefits in the future.

...for Fascism to extend its reach from the streets to the high offices of state, it must secure backing from multiple sectors of society. This insight has value today because of the growing tendency in the media to portray Fascism as a logical outgrowth of populism and to attribute both allegiances to an unhappy lower middle class, as if anti-democratic sentiments were the exclusive property of one economic tier. They’re not, and there is nothing inherently biased or intolerant about being a populist, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people.” Were I to be given the choice of sitting inside or outside that large circle of believers, my response would be, “Include me in.

When I pull Amy's extra-long body into an infinity pool and make it look like an accident—dare to dream!—I will be okay because I will have become a Facebook guy, a normal dude. We live in an era where people who don't have 4,355 friends are considered nefarious, as if socially entrenched citizens aren't also capable of murder. I need friends so that when Amy disappears, my friends can roll their eyes at the idea of handsome, gregarious Joe killing someone. I can't be that guy who 'keeps to himself." That's too in-line with the dated but pervasive stereotype of a 'killer' reinforced by biased TV 'news' shows no matter how many happy-go-lucky husbands go and murder their wives. We all want to fear single people. It's endemic. It's American.

Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude. "Seen this yet?" "No." "Don't read it," Mr. Harris said, folding the paper once more and sliding it under his rear. "It will only upset you, son." "It's a wicked paper... " Claude agreed, but Mr. Harris was overspeaking him. "It's the big black words that do it. The little grey ones don't matter very much, they're just fill-ins they take everyday from the wires. They concentrate their poison in the big black words, where it will radiate. Of course if you read the little stories too you've got sure proof that every word they wrote above, themselves, was a fat black lie, but by then you've absorbed a thousand greyer ones, and where and how to check on those? This way the mind deteriorates. The best way you can save yourself is not to read it, son." "No, I... " "That's right, if you're not careful," Mr. Harris went on, blue-eyed, red-faced, "you find yourself pretty soon hating everyone but God, the Babe, and a few dead senators. That's no fun. Men aren't so bad as that." "No." "That's right, you begin to worry about anyone who opens his mouth except to say ho it looks like rain, let's bowl. Otherwise you wonder what the hell he's trying to prove, or undermine. If he asks what time it is, you wonder what terrible thing is scheduled to happen, where it will happen, when. You can't even stand to be asked how you feel today - he's probably looking at the bumps on you, they may have grown more noticeable overnight. Soon you feel you should apologize for standing there where he can watch you dying in front of him, he'd rather for you to carry your head around in a little plaid bag, like your bowling ball. There's no joy in that. Men aren't so very bad." Mr. Harris paused to remove his Panama hat. Water seeped from his knobby forehead, which he mopped with a damp handkerchief. "I've offended you, son," he said. "Not at all, I entirely agree with you." Mr. Harris replaced his hat, folded his handkerchief. "I shouldn't shoot off this way," he said. "I read too much." "No, no. You're right...

Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview.

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

The most comprehensive studies of racial bias in the exercise of prosecutorial and judicial discretion involve the treatment of juveniles. These studies have shown that youth of color are more likely to be arrested, detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure residential facilities than their white counterparts.65 A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.66 A study sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department and several of the nation’s leading foundations, published in 2007, found that the impact of the biased treatment is magnified with each additional step into the criminal justice system. African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison.67 A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making. In the state of Washington, for example, a review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white offenders differently.68 Blacks committed crimes because of internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of external conditions such as family conflict. The risk that prosecutorial discretion will be racially biased is especially acute in the drug enforcement context, where virtually identical behavior is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations and responses and the media imagery and political discourse has been so thoroughly racialized. Whether a kid is perceived as a dangerous drug-dealing thug or instead is viewed as a good kid who was merely experimenting with drugs and selling to a few of his friends has to do with the ways in which information about illegal drug activity is processed and interpreted, in a social climate in which drug dealing is racially defined. As a former U.S. Attorney explained: I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop the gun charge against the defendant [in a case in which] there were no extenuating circumstances. I asked, “Why do you want to drop the gun offense?” And he said, “‘He’s a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had with him was a rifle. He’s a good ol’ boy, and all good ol’ boys have rifles, and it’s not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.” But he was a gun-toting drug dealer, exactly.