By Mitch Holt, Copy Editor
As the Optimist staff strives for balance between opposing perspectives in each issue of the paper, an ever-increasing demand for objectivity within the American news media is surfacing, and they’re doing their job relatively well.
Americans need to know their views and be able to spot biases in the news media. This is an essential intuition which most people put to use whether they know it or not. America is a country of critics; it’s in our nature.
As some Americans have beef with the way the country “does democracy,” the news media seem to be making an effort to get it right.
Let me explain.
In a Washington Post article one of my distinguished professors recently threw my direction, the writer discusses an experiment in which 144 observers are shown six television news segments about a 20-year-old historical conflict in the Middle East.
In the segments, pro-Arab viewers picked out 42 comments that portrayed Israel positively and 26 comments that portrayed Israel negatively. Pro-Israeli viewers picked out 16 comments that portrayed Israel positively and 57 comments that portrayed Israel negatively.
These numbers reveal that Americans are watching the same news and drawing opposing biases from it. Granted this is just one experiment, I can attest to the accuracy of these results.
As the Arab and Israeli conflict coverage recently began hitting newspapers and primetime news again after several years of on-and-off coverage, I saw what I thought to be an extreme media bias towards Israel.
When picking a side in this conflict, I kept in the front of my mind the fruitful relationship between the U.S. and Israel. During more than 40 years of government construction, the Israeli’s have looked to our country for diplomatic support, financial and military help and mere inspiration. Despite cultural differences, one might think Israel is striving to become the U.S.
This in mind, I saw a one-sided, Israel-supporting American news media. .
It wouldn’t have mattered what the media said; my mind was made up about their biases.
Then I looked closer. I realized it’s a bit more two-sided than I thought.
On both broadcast and print news outlets, I saw the virtual civil war going on within the Lebanese borders-a militant Hezbollah attempting to replace the current government by financially overpowering it. All of this being done while shooting missiles into Israel and rapidly making enemies with Israel and the western world.
The portrayal of this side of the story jumped out at me just as I began having doubts about the news media’s objectivity.
Biases can be seen in both directions, but isn’t that democracy at work? It’s a good thing that the same news outlets are creating such a buzz in both directions.
But we need to look at the big picture. America is a melting pot of ideas, and we should be comforted that our news media are covering different perspectives, at least a good portion of the time.
Establish your opinions and stand by them. For when you maintain objectivity in observing the news, you might notice how well the media are doing, even if you don’t agree with their coverage 100 percent of the time.
