Timothy Taylor on Media Bias

He writes,

There’s lots of political bias in the media, mainly because media outlets are trying to attract customers with similar bias. But in the world of the Internet, at least, people of all beliefs do surf readily between news websites with different kind of bias. The growth of television to some extent displaced the role of newspapers and lowered the extent of voting. For the future, a central question is whether a population that gets its news from a mixture of websites and social media becomes better-informed or more willing to vote, or whether it becomes a population that instead becomes expert at selfiesm, cat videos, World of Goo, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, and the celebrity-du-jour.

I see no reason to fear the second outcome more than the first.

7 thoughts on “Timothy Taylor on Media Bias

  1. When I worked in an online news environment (I may still yet, we’ll see) my editor readily admitted to having a liberal bias. But our readers were conservative. The idea was to NOT give them what they want. She hoped to repel them and attract newer cooler readers. That never came to fruition and now the site has been all but abandoned.

    • I’m not sure if this is where you’re going, but I think that kind of proves Taylor’s point.

      • Oh yes I see, I misread him as saying giving readers what they want. In fact it’s “trying to attract customers with similar bias.” They’re willing to risk losing $ and alienating current readers in order to attract readers who agree with editorial. Astonishing. So much for greed and “the customer is always right.”

    • Perhaps! It’s not a test after all, it’s more like an auction on everything owned in the country.

  2. Does it have to be one or the other? I for one see no reason why someone couldn’t be both an avid TMZ and, say, Marginal Revolution reader. Rendering judgement on Kim Kardashian’s New hairdo only takes a second. There’s still plenty of time left in the day to read Tyler’s links to articles on European sovereign debt problems.

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