[Torus34]

The red/blue divide in the US these days presents as rotten-egging and dead-catting of one or another part of 'The Media'. To one side the old-line TV networks [NBS, CBS, etc.,] are a cabal working against patriotic and freedom-loving Americans. To the other side certain media outlets [FOX News, etc.,] are an anathema to middle and lower-class Americans. Brickbats fly willy-nilly and nothing at all is accomplished except for a strengthening of the divisive wall twixt 'red' and 'blue'. At issue is, of course, who and what to believe. I note this divide only as contrast to another way to section this particular apple.

First, let's note that media favored by both sides presents many easily acceptable facts. Both give time signals, weather reports, stock market averages and breaking news of fires, plane crashes and school shootings, to mention a few 'hard' news items. Even the errors which inevitably occur in reporting a quickly-breaking story seem well-distributed between them. With rare exceptions, we can exclude such reportage from a discussion of bias.

Last, there's the out-and-out proclamations of nonsense. 'The Republicans want war!' 'The liberals are destroying the country!' We can exclude these alarums from serious consideration along with other ridiculous assertions such as statements about the motives of individuals behind their actions. [I'm willing to drop the last part of that sentence as soon as some 'pundit' demonstrates to a panel of recognized scientists his or her ability to read minds.]

That leaves, I believe, two categories of possible bias. The first is the selection of what stories to cover. The second is the 'reportage' of a story in a slanted manner.

Each is amenable to a statistical analysis based upon openly-stated assumptions. It is possible to not only determine if a bias exists but also get some sort of a hand-hold on the magnitude.

[Varax]

All media has its inherent biases, as do all people. Not even so much in what they say, but also in what they don't say - either because they are completely blind to it or willfully ignore certain information as not being pertinent to their worldview. The news stations you listed have their clear biases - for instance MSNBC has a clear bias towards the Democrats and FOX towards the Republicans...CNN is somewhere in the center. But it goes far beyond that. They are all privately owned by American companies - they all have a clear bias towards America since that is where they are based, and towards liberal capitalism since they all for-profit, owned by major corporations and are colored by their own self interests along with the economic system they are born out of.

Now let's go global - BBC is publicly owned which has some advantages, but it is owned and centered around the UK so it is representative of British political views and attitudes - namely modern British liberalism. RT being based out of Russia of course has a pro-Russian bias. This is where the biases really start to become outwardly noticeable even to a casual observer especially when Western and Russian interests clash you see very different coverage. In the Ukraine crisis then we see RT for instance heavily being criticized by western outlets as being "a mouthpiece for Putin", but to many Russians Western outlets seem similarly biased towards the West's point of view. Now can also extend this to new outlets in other countries like China as well - a certain bias in what stories they present and they don't present along with how they present it.

If we want to go out even further we could say that all our media has a "human bias" in that it's made by people and an "Earth bias" in that it mostly just covers our planet but apart from animal liberationists and aliens there isn't any reasonable objection to that form of bias so I'll stop there because that is approaching the point of absurdity.

So what is one to do then? Well first of all as you rightly noted a lot of what is reported it still hard facts that can be corroborated by any decent news source. So that's a good start. For how to survive everything else well the internet for one thing is very useful for this because it makes it very easy to aggregate news from a variety of different sources and when one does that the biases become more apparent and we can in some way "split the difference" - realizing different points of view and come to some conclusions based on the information present. Also while I mentioned that American media tends to have liberal bias for instance, well that may be true for mainstream outlets but there are plenty of small outlets as well with different points of view. Many third parties for instance have their own newspapers/news feeds that often run counter to the "official" story mainstream outlets carry. Of course, some of these sources can be suspect as well but it's useful to have an alternative perspective. I often like to read from Socialist newspapers for instance because it is relevant to my interests, runs counter to the views of establishment media and covers stories related to the trials of poor and working class people that "mainstream" outlets might ignore.

Of course looking at it this way is often more work than the casual observer is willing to do, but it's becoming easier to access information from multiple sources including those from foreign or less mainstream sources. It then requires one's own thought and judgement to synthesize the information and bring it in to line with their own priorities to make such information actionable. In doing so we almost inevitably color the information with our own biases (I don't mean that as a negative either - it just is).

[Torus34]

@ Varex:

You saved the best for last, you sly devil! I refer to the bias we ourselves bring to the news/commentary of the day.

In the sciences it's not unusual to run into factors which affect the information we're gathering about a specific object of study. A lot of good work has gone down the drain because the existence of such factors wasn't even suspected. Once aware of their existence, the clever scientist will seek ways to nullify their effect. The trick is to suspect they're there in the first place.

The same is true of our personal biases. And it's a darned difficult job to:

1) Admit to ourselves that they exist, and

2) Find a way to nullify their effect when trying to make a judgment or come to a conclusion.

I've been at it for years. I've finally come to the point where I know that mine are essentially those of a secular humanist. I've gotten past the first step. But given that I've at least got a slight hold on that most greased of pigs -- my own quite human ability to lie to myself -- compensating for me is another story entirely.

There are times when I almost envy those who are so certain 'bout everything.

But only almost.