Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director says this about the motivations of journalists,
I’ve found that most of them are not ideologically driven. Do I think that a lot of them don’t agree with the president? No doubt about it. But impact, above all else, is what matters. All they’re worried about is, can I have the front-page byline? Can I lead the evening newscast? And unfortunately, that requires them to not do in-depth studies about President Bush’s health care plan or No Child Left Behind. It’s who’s up, who’s down: Cheney hates Condi, Condi hates Cheney.
Whenever people complain about the left wing bias or the right wing bias of the media, I note that people respond to incentives. If the media is biased it is because that bias is popular. People want to consume that biased content. If people generally wanted totally unbiased media, that’s what they would get. It is difficult to complain about this because it is hard to see how it could be different.
I should also note that different media institutions have different biases. The media is not monolithic.
Via Matt Yglesias
Good Morning, Economics 
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December 8, 2007 at 3:27 pm
John
I think the media is fairly monolithic in the sense you’re talking about. It has a certain audience, and it panders to it.
I find the biggest difference comes internationally. The perspectives of papers varies tremendously across countries.
Also I’m pretty sure that ‘unbiased’ is pretty much a non-existent concept; all reporting will be reporting from a certain perspective. There are certain perspectives everyone agrees on; for example most people are biased towards facts and away from total lies. But ‘factual’ is not the same as ‘unbiased’. What facts one reports and how one reports them is basically what bias consists in in Western media, as your very post demonstrates. It’s impossible to have no bias, however, because bias basically means ‘perspective,’ and reporting without perspective would basically imply reporting using only tautologies.
What one really wants is media that has one’s same perspective, and so the media will always report in alignment with the perspectives of its audience to the best of its abilities. When you say ‘people want to consume biased content’, what you actually mean is ‘people have a different perspective than me’.
December 9, 2007 at 1:58 pm
jsalvati
I think most of our disagreement comes from using slightly different word definitions.
I think that the US media is fairly monolithic if you consider it in a worldwide context. Compared to media in other countries, US media probably has a fairly cohesive bias. If you consider the media in the context of US society, the media probably has a wide range of different biases (liberal, conservative, Christian, secular, etc.). In this context, the media is not monolithic.
My best definition for what I mean by unbiased is ‘the perspective that would result if people were already much better informed.’ Perhaps this unsatisfying, but I think you will agree that it is not meaningless.
Edit: Actually, a better way of saying this is that if people weren’t interested in having their ideas confirmed or about being riled up about the sorts of things they already care about then news would be different. This difference is the difference between biased and “unbiased” news. A lot of news is framed to give the biggest emotional benefits to the consumers as opposed to conveying the most relevant information. Scandals sell better then partial scandals.
When I said that people want to consume biased contented, I mean what you said first, that “What one really wants is media that has one’s same perspective.” and that “the media will always report in alignment with the perspectives of its audience to the best of its abilities.”
December 13, 2007 at 8:47 pm
cdfox
I like John’s idea that bias is inevitable. What would a media catering to an unbiased, purely truth-seeking audience report? If it reports only facts, surely it cannot report them all. So it reports the most important ones, and it isn’t clear which facts a truth-seeking audience would consider most important. That would be a normative decision. It seems that what people really mean when they deride media bias is that the facts and interpretations reported perhpas align with viewer’s political inclinations but not with their more fundamental interests. Someone supports the president and so would not like to hear critical coverage of him, but wouldn’t that person care even more about knowing whether the president is worthy of support in the first place (by the criteria of this person’s values)? Or in another context, we say a researcher is a victim of her bias because she has merely sought to confirm her prior beliefs, even while, we assume, she is more interested in the truth than in fuzzy feelings from having her existing perspective reaffirmed.
Of course, there is our favorite way of explaining this (from Bryan Caplan’s book), that voters are not very interested in knowing whether they should support a particular candidate because they have little effect on who gets elected. They devote less mind share to areas of their lives where their decisions have no effect. Thus, the pain of having your political inclinations challenged is far more motivating that the pleasure of feeling confident that your inclinations truly line up with your values and interests. And media then just follows the demand.