Perception Is Reality (and Vice Versa)

By Conrad Spencer

The myth of the liberal bias in mainstream media (that's "MSM", to those who rail against it) has always troubled me greatly. How, if the media is so liberally biased, does Dubya slide from 9/11 to Katrina with an ease that makes Slick Willy seem chafed by comparison?

The media is biased, but rather than a conservative or liberal political bias, the bias is to profitability. Slate's Jack Shafer highlights a new study by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago, that moves a step beyond that kernel of common sense to explore how the profit bias influences the reporting of the news.

Rather than walking the line between the conservative and the liberal, news organizations must present accurate coverage without upsetting audience expectations too much. That the news should be accurate seems simple enough, but what this study seems to indicate is that the perception of accuracy trumps the real thing. Up-end consumer's schema of the world and you're seen as unreliable. Get contradicted by a different news source and the same fate awaits.

As millions of dittoheads have known for years, it feels good to have your views endorsed and reinforced in print and over the airwaves. Add that maxim to the truth that violence, mayhem, and death are pretty cool to watch from the comfort of your sofa, and you have a recipe for profitable journalism.

For the Fourth Estate to really fulfill its role in our democracy, it should be shaking people loose from their preconceptions, not parroting them back. When the news seeks to bolster our perceptions of the world, and we in turn base our perceptions on what we see in the news, we can quickly find ourselves in a hall of mirrors in which our "reality" bears only the slightest resemblance to our neighbor's. Not only does this destroy "community" in any meaningful sense, it makes political discourse nearly impossible.