the idea of unbiased news media is idiotic, everything about the phenomenon of presented news is a product of the defining ideology of the news service, arguments against this view are many and varied, but all outrageously stupid, so i’m not going to waste time dismissing them as hypotheticals.
what i want to go straight to talking about, the important thing, is how our news media should be biased, the ideology (interests) we can (or at least should) all agree on.
of course a democratic media must be educational — presenting all information and opinions, questioning everything, encouraging critical thought and individual decision making rather than trying to impose opinions on the audience — but simply by being democratic there is a base of ideology that will define the interests of the media: which issues are considered the most important, what the public interest actually is in the broadest sense.
the interests that a liberal democratic news media should be guided by are unarguably this: (incomplete list, humble opinion of course)
– real global democracy (equal distribution of political power worldwide)
– social justice (particularly economic justice within and between nations)
– human rights (pretty much the same thing as social justice really)
– environmental sustainability
– peace (a just peace of course)
– holding all positions of public power to account (including the public power entrusted to the news media)
– ending systemic/cultural discrimination against harmless and unimportant difference (eg. nationalist, racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, speciest, etc.(listed in no particular order, list far from complete, before you get your knickers in a twist))
– et bloody cetera with the broad and overlapping terms/concepts
these things listed cannot (generally) be successfully argued against directly because of their (very encouraging) intrinsic value/rightness for the majority, those who do argue against them usually conceal their true desires and clothe their arguments in a shoddily-constructed ‘morality’ of some description.
all of those interests i have listed above (as a partial definition of the ideology that should direct the operations of our news media) are without a doubt ‘left’, this is not a problem, it is not a failure of balance or the overwhelming of politcal/critical thought by some irrational, prejudicial political bias, it is just that all decent, just and logical aims (those liberal democratic ones) which we should have for our global media system happen to fall under the broad banner of ‘left’.
unfortunately for the conservatives of inequality, liberal democracy, global in scope, is a fundamentally left operation — ‘democracy’ has been held up by capitalist ‘elites’, under significant pressure, but also because they believed their ability to manipulate parliamentary democracy was significant enough to render people power useless, while still convincing the people themselves that they do have power, aiding a profitable social stability — but now democracy has been given across-the-board support, it can and should be actualised in a way that control the capitalist-economic ‘elites’ and start to realise the economic justice and mutual respect that democracy implies.
the terms left and right (while useful sometimes) are unspecific, clumsy, annoyingly simplistic and certainly overused (often serving as part of offhand insults that replace meaningful, issue-focussed political discussion).
unfortunately, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are likely to remain prominent in the underdeveloped public political conversation we have in the ‘developed’ world, i’m certainly not saying left is always right and right is always wrong, just that we don’t need to seek ‘balance’ between left and right, we only need to decide what is just, which is best done by focussing on the issues.
like many tools that the conservative/elitist/capitalist materialists use to bash global justice progressives over the head with, this tool of ‘balance’ may have been handed to the ‘right’ by the ‘left’ (i don’t do research, i just sit around typing things).
‘balance’ and ‘unbiased coverage’ were probably devised by media-lefties trying to figure out a way to partially challenge the right-wing domination of our corporate/capitalist mainstream media, now that ‘balance’ and ‘unbiased coverage’ have gripped the public consciousness they are perfectly prepared for use by the capitalist-conservatives (‘right’) in attempts to prevent the development of a global-justice-focussed, progressive media (a ‘left’, liberal democratic media).
we have to forget these long-standing media deities of ‘balance’ and ‘unbiased coverage’ and talk about how we should have our media directed ideologically, to which ends via which means — media is always ‘biased'(directed) by an ideological/ethical framework, so let’s draw it all out and decide what that should be.
how our media should be directed and the current directing ideology of our media is largely obscured and avoided by these ‘ideologically-neutral’ concepts of balance and unbias — i think the terms might actually result in the ideology of reserving judgement and the formation of strong guiding principles until sometime after death, which certainly helps to maintain a spectator mentality and, thereby, the status quo.
there is undoubtedly appropriate time for what is often called balance and unbiased coverage (presenting all relevant information and both sides of view on issues the are truly contentious amongst aware and compassionate parties), but these concepts shouldn’t serve to preserve the equal and uncritical representation of beliefs and attitudes that are fundamentally opposed to global justice/democracy, sustainability etc — the analysis has to come from somewhere, and this should be an egalitarian perspective.
there are beliefs and attitudes out there that are so idiotic and destructive that it should be the role of the global liberal media to focus on the evidence-based and logical demolition of such beliefs and attitudes, so long as they persist within the community (the logic will have to proceed from a basis of basic human compassion of course).
certainly all politicians and their policies should be subjected to the most challenging criticisms regardless of their place on the political spectrum, but a news media possessing a sound ideology would see those of the right/conservative/nationalist/rich-elitist persuasion face fundamental and sustained humiliation over their world view and their agenda, until the point that what is currently considered left will become the mainstream of the future (as has often been the way since revolutionary france coined the term).
that’s the hope anyway.
