Dean Baker makes an important point on the ridiculously reductive "bias in the media" conversation. While scores of partisans and watchdogs pore over every anchor utterance watching for hints of partisanship, almost no attention is offered to the non-partisan biases that nevertheless heavily impact the political world. As Baker puts it:
How about comparing the number of articles that refer to the Social Security "crisis" or the need to fix Social Security, relative to the number of stories that refer to the need to fix the country's health care system? I don't know any economist who does not believe that the health care system poses a far more serious threat to the country's economy and the federal budget, yet the media give health care reform a small fraction of the attention they give the long-term shortfall projected for Social Security.
One could argue that politicians don't talk about health care reform, but this raises a cause and effect issue. Politicians do try to bring up health care reform (e.g. dozens of members of Congress have signed on to a bill that would establish a universal Medicare system), but they are generally ignored or ridiculed by the media. Since politicians don't like being ignored or ridiculed, they opt not to talk about the issues that the media doesn't want them to talk about, so they go back to the Social Security crisis. [...]
The biggest problem with bias in the media, at least in its coverage of economics, is the way in which it narrows the frame of debate, not its word choice, although I could come up with a few key phrases here also (e.g. "free trade").
I might quibble with the specific example Baker uses -- there's a fair amount of reporting on a health system in crisis, it's just not constructively framed -- but the cumulative effect of the media's slanted economic reporting is to push the actual center in American politics to the right, which limits the range of political debate and disadvantages Democrats in a more fundamental way than leaving the "ic" off of "Democrat."
Whether you think there's a political bias in American reporting, it's undoubtedly true that there's a management bias that advantages employers over unions. Whether you think the media accepts the reality of abortion, they obviously spend excess time on isolated cases of entitlement fraud, making Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security seems far more misused and inefficient than any actual expert believes they are. Whether you think Canada is a good health care system, the media's (inaccurate) attention to their wait times gives a very different picture of universal health care systems than would a focus on their total absence of uninsured and massive per capita savings. These are very real examples of bias, and rather than disadvantaging a particular party, they recenter the American consensus, usually to the right. It's a real problem.
