Media

The Ð''media' as a whole plays a major part in one's life. Media messages can be presented in many ways from reading newspapers to watching news on television from the comfort of your own home. However, the most important factors are how the news is retrieved and portrayed by an individual or a group of individuals as each individual has the right to accept what they believe not what they are manipulated to believe or to accept. There are various issues that can be looked at to conclude whether or not there is such thing as free, unbiased media, to define this topic it is too broad to study itself so it will be broken down and researched in small parts. Bias in different context will be analysed and shown how it is interpreted. Theorists will be researched such as: Rupert Murdoch and Noam Chomsky taking his views into consideration as well as elaborating on them. The approach taken to tackle this area of study will show clear evidence of where the information has been taken from as this will enable the reader to make their own judgment as to whether there is such thing as free, unbiased media.

Can it be argued that there is such thing as a free, unbiased media?

Bias is based around media organisations made up of journalists and news producers presenting particular stories and the selection of which stories to cover with an uneven viewpoint, these particular stories may refer to accusations of either censorship or propagandism. Individuals perceiving various media messages can receive these in different contexts such as socially, ethically, economically and politically.

There are different categories of bias that can be looked upon when presenting media messages to individuals such as: ethnic bias which includes nationalism and regionalism, corporate bias involving advertising and political campaigns, social bias that contains overall bias of reporting to favour the status class, political bias regarding the split in political slant and sensationalism about manufacturing or distort news as a purely commercial product. Temporal bias is known when media are biased toward the immediate, when media organisations decide to take up a story that is happening immediately. News has to be new and fresh, this news has to be ever changing even when there is a small amount of news to cover. There are other forms of bias such as status quo bias, narrative bias, fairness bias, expediency bias and glory bias. Bias can be covered within good and bad news categories, publishing good stories can be seen as dull and boring having some kind of conflict contained within particular stories makes it more exciting to read and more sellable making a larger profit since news media are money making businesses. Taking this into consideration the media industries must release products for their customers to buy in order for them to make a profit. This is known as commercial bias for the reason that the customers of the news media are advertisers. The meaning of Ð''good' to media sources is observed as the number of readers and viewers attention they can draw.

The sources of bias can be from editors, journalists, speakers and corporation groups. When journalists or any other news source decide to publish a particular story it needs to be taken into account whether or not they will benefit from the story or will it be a failure to them. A journalist will attempt to be neutral by taking two points into thought, the first being: fairness to those individuals involved within the news / story being released and the second is a professional process of collecting data / information that obtains fairness, completeness and accurateness.

When detecting bias in a press release or story a number of issues can be raised from the reader's point of view resulting in questions relating to the authors socio-political position and which group they belong to, does the speaker have something or another to gain personally for actually releasing the story or not. Such points as to who is paying for the message, where do these messages appear and what is the bias of the medium should be considered. One can ask simple questions on what sources have been used as well as what statistics have been used at all if any have been used.

Other factors can be raised regarding the speaker of the message released as well as the issues mentioned.

Many viewers and readers would argue that media messages should obtain more than one viewpoint as this would be unbiased, but on most occasions only one point of view is exposed that of the speaker in many cases.

Media industries possess a certain amount of power over what is being broadcasted through media messages. One argument in itself is that who owns the media? This is where a powerful man named Rupert Murdoch is introduced.

Rupert Murdoch was born on 11th March 1931 in Australia. He is an American media proprietor holding and managing director of News Corporation Ltd which is one the world's largest and most prominent media corporations. He is known to be one of the