Broadcast vs. Print Press and Media Bias?
Some of the most prominent news forms in the UK are newspapers, TV and radio broadcasts, and more recently social media and online journalism.There are some differences between the more traditional forms of UK news and journalism, in particular newspaper and broadcast TV news. Broadcast journalists often create new bulletins throughout the day wanting to give the most updated information, this means they have little time to work on stories, whereas those writing for newspapers have more time to dig deeper into news or niche stories allowing print news to be more detailed.
Another huge factor in a papers’ ideology and political bias is the person or company they are owned by, through their reporting the editorial team and owners can push out their own opinions to influence readers. The political stance of papers, particularly nationals, is often more promoted, sometimes more obviously than others.
During the UK 2015 General Election, The Sun and The Times, both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorop backed the Conservative Party to win. View the list of UK endorsements in 2015 here.
Newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch have frequently been accused of political manipulation to ensure his political allies won elections, perhaps most notably with the arguably surprising Conservative win in 1992. The Sun, one of the NewsCorp papers, headline on election day read; “If Kinnock [Neil Kinnock, who was running for the labour party] wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” The headline that more famously followed was “It was the Sun Wot Won it”, with the paper even boasting that their coverage and evident bias and reporting had made a difference to the results.
The Guardian, owned by Scott Trust Limited and known to back Labour, reported last year that the national press was heavily skewed in favour of the UK leaving the European Union. The statistics from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said 45% of 928 referendum articles it studied were in favour of leaving, while 27% backed the remain case. This clear difference shows that media bias does exist.
I think media bias can have the potential to be very dangerous. Using the EU referendum as an example, the papers were for pro-leave, the people voted leave, and now it may have some detrimental effects on people and the nation (there is my personal bias coming through).
Any form of journalism can impact voters’ thoughts and opinions that media outlets present to them as key issues. Consumers look to the media as an information source, for example if they are reading about the benefits of the leave campaign — that may be all the information they have access to, causing them to agree with that papers ideologies.
In contrast to newspapers, the BBC is the UK’s largest public service broadcaster funded primarily through the yearly TV licence that UK home-owners pay for. The reason the BBC is independently funded and does not advertise is to help maintain its impartiality and to report on all things equally. Its guidelines state ‘impartiality’ as the first standard it is expected to uphold;
There is a BBC trust that ensures the impartiality of the BBC. It is essential to its independence that the BBC retains the public’s trust as an impartial purveyor of news and programming. A Royal Charter and Agreement, which guarantees the independence of the BBC, and outlines the expectations of the trust of the Executive board and Trust, requires the BBC to remain impartial and to treat controversial subjects with due impartiality.
Having an independent news source, whether print or broadcast, is something that I believe to be important to society. However, I think that it is hard for any outlet to remain truly impartial; the BBC is expected to give a balanced view on both sides of any argument. However, hypothetically speaking, if 90% of all economists said Brexit would have a negative impact the BBC would still show an interview with one for and one against economists, which is not representative to the real world.
Can the BBC or any news source ever be truly unbiased?
Journalists and editors of any publication, particularly one that is supposed to remain neutral, are in a tough position of not allowing their own ideas to filter through via their word choice and framing. Word choice has a great power and can say a lot on a topic or person.
Just as the above tweet shows, Donald Trump has been a huge persona in the media throughout the past year. He has claimed himself on more than one occasion that the media is rigged and not reporting in his favour with very few US newspapers publicly endorsing the candidate that went on to be President Elect of the USA.
In November 2016 I was part of the Bournemouth University USA Votes Team. In the lead up to the US Election and throughout the night live as the results came in, we covered the event in real time. I was part of the Foreign Desk team. I spent part of my night on the online team writing stories as the first states announced who their electoral votes were in favour of, and the second part of my night was in the TV room, where I sat refreshing the leading news sites’ twitter accounts on tweet deck waiting to see which way the ‘swing states’ voted.
As a group we were aware of our bias and personal interest being anti-Trump so we had to combat this by finding pro-Trump supporters to speak to and enlisting writers to write more neutral pieces on the candidates.
