Study: News media bias can net mistakes at the ballot box
A recently released news article from the UIUC shows that our news media bias does have an impact at the ballot box. Some interesting quotes are below.
"...even though voters typically take the spin into account rather than following blindly and that the media only slant news rather than falsifying it, selective reporting can still factor into mistakes at the polls...
"One of the authors is quoted as saying "Biased media suppresses information that is unfavorable to ‘their’ candidate, and even smart voters cannot completely recover the truth from their reports"
"Media bias could play an even bigger role in this year’s presidential race because Obama is still a relative unknown whose positions and past will be selectively reported as they surface during the campaign"
"The problem is to avoid making mistakes you’re asking voters to work harder, and it’s not necessarily in their self-interest to do that,” Bernhardt said. “So there’s this paradox. Becoming better informed could potentially help everybody else because we would vote better and wouldn’t make mistakes. But people don’t internalize the consequences for everybody else, they only internalize their own. So they under invest in information. Most do.”
This article must be based on the "average" person. I would say that the people who contribute to sites like this and others are able to see through the bias and make an informed decision.