Is the news biased?

Sourced from several sources including Wikipedia and the US State archives.

The amazing world of journalism is always targeted by governments to fulfill their goals - this can be really bad. If a country did this kind of practices, it should never be tolerated, but how will we prove this? And why don't we hear about this on the news?

Media bias is a huge factor when we take the modern news media. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed. Let's take a look at a media that may be biased or is a suspect of potential bias.

• Al Jazeera:
• This news platform has a deep history of broadcasting biases - starting from broadcasting Bin Ladan's defense speech during the 9/11 attacks. (See transcript evidence) This is the number one and still standing, is 24-hour English-language news channel operating under Al Jazeera Media Network, which is partially funded by the government of Qatar.  See a full list of Al Jazeera controversies and criticism, in Wikipedia.

How do we deal with this?

In 2011, NPR's ombudsman authored an article detailing the process of identifying the political leanings of think tanks and other groups, which may not be widely known to the average listener, prior to referencing a study or statistic from such organizations. (read)

Usage of Algorithms and Machine learning are also increasing in this field. For instance, person-oriented framing analysis is like an investigation, where the goal is to spot the "frames" or "perspectives" in news stories by figuring out the portrayal of each character mentioned in the gigantic list of the coverage.

Another approach includes making a matrix of news articles from different countries. Consequently, each cell comprises articles published in one country that report on another. This method is particularly useful in international news topics as it shows the variations in media coverage among the countries concerned.  (Learn more)

Conclusion

The risk of media bias still stands, unless an international entity with billions of shares and is not concentrated in some large entities comes forward and makes a news platform.

Even this article, written by people with varying opinions, may count as media bias. But with modern political situations, we can believe that this would not be a factor that leads to huge issues.

The methods we found for eradicating potential biases, is not perfect, as machine learning and artificial intelligence could get biased too.

The other approach - creating a matrix isn't the best, as the creators of the matrix viewer could create bias in its creation.

Learn more:

• "However, the media can be hampered to fulfill its role as a watchdog by obstacles such as restrictions on press freedom, market failures, lack of professional standards, weak civil social..." - Microsoft Word - 368.docx (u4.no)
• "If people think all journalists fight for democracy and stand up against the authorities, they need to think again. Journalism plays a much more complex role" - “Whenever you bribe a journalist, you provoke another” | NUPI