As a casual observer of news and media, I’ve always sensed a difference in how the purported left and right media outlets cover news stories. Not the politics in the news….that bias is apparent, but the actual approach to covering news stories. I can summarize my observations into three differences. First, the left leaning news is very much the connoisseur of news, cherishing nuance. It is almost as if the left cherishes the complexity of humans and situations and decisions. There are shades of gray. There are mitigating circumstances to crime that deserve credence. There are alternative views in the world to America’s that deserve credence. And, a person’s plight may depend a variety of circumstances, many beyond a person’s control…in which case remedies need to come from the outside.
The right leaning news sees the world in stark dichotomous tones of good and bad. It is deterministic in that most human conditions are largely caused and can be controlled by the person and their freedom of choice, not the myriad of circumstances. Leaders are good or bad; socialism is always bad as free markets are always good. Second, the left leaning news is interpretive — looking at reasons from the inside-out. So, if a foreign leader takes an abrasive action, the left will try to interpret the action from the rationality of the leader. The right will not interpret, but focus on attribution of the action to an irrational actor. The actor is bad because the actions are not consistent with American espoused values…of democracy and freedom. Thirdly, the left leaning news tends to zero in on the human condition in any news story. It is empathy with the individual that makes the story newsworthy. The right-leaning news tends to abstract to the formality of numbers and suggest that the suffering human does not deserve respite or cannot get it because of the cost-benefit equation.
These are not judgments, but simply my observations. Nuance, interpretation and the human condition are largely the lenses the left leaning news puts on facts. Dichotomy, attribution, and abstraction are the lenses used by right leaning media. At both extremes they can take on adverse undertones of big brother on the left and jingoism on the right. The problem is that regular people who just want the news, have to delayer it to decipher the truth or be part of the echo chamber if it reinforces their point of view. Neither of these options is desirable, particularly in today’s environment where the layering is becoming thicker on each side.
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