You hear it a lot.  The liberal news media.  The news media won’t cover story X because it’s liberal.  The liberal news media doesn’t want you to know about Y.  It’s all a bunch of poppycock.  Stories X and Y aren’t covered because they’re either non-stories or they’re boring stories.

The news media is only liberal in the sense that society is liberal and the news media is a reflection of society.  The news media doesn’t cover conservative stories because conservative stories are boring.  “Things are exactly the same as they we’re yesterday!  News at 11!”

That isn’t to say that the news media doesn’t have an agenda.  They do.  That agenda is money.  That agenda is ratings.  If a news organization thinks a story can generate either of those two things, they will cover the story.  If not, they won’t.  End of story.

Really, “news” should be taken out of the name and they should just be called ” the media” because much of what they do cover is not news and what they do cover is so unbalanced it’s not even funny.  They take a story and offer “both sides” of the story even when there is quite obviously only one side.  “Is the sky blue?  Opinions differ.  Let’s hear both sides.”

Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to change the current state of things short of creating a state subsidized news system.  Of course, we already have that in NPR and PBS and they do a stellar job of reporting stories in as unbiased a way as possible.  “Unbiased”, by they way, does not mean reporting both sides.  It means reporting the truth.

NPR and PBS are horribly underfunded, unfortunately.  This is mostly due to the same people who scream “media bias” at every opportunity.  They really are the only two entities who do hard news anymore and that makes them dangerous to the corporate conglomerations that run, well, everything.  CNN, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, all spin their news to appease their corporate masters.    It is a sorry state of affairs.

For all its many, many flaws there is no liberal bias in the media.  Change is just much more interesting than nothing changing so it gets covered.  I will admit that reporting on things that have worked well for a long time would have social benefit but it’s very hard to sell as a news story.  These things won’t change so it’s up to us to seek out news.  This is a very tall order in the chaos that is our lives.  The result is a criminally uninformed society.