construct a behavioral model
Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer of Harvard
University construct a behavioral model,[55] which is built
around the assumption that readers and viewers hold beliefs
that they would like to see confirmed by news providers.
When news customers share common beliefs, profit-maximizing
media outlets find it optimal to select and/or frame stories
in order to pander to those beliefs. On the
Republican National Committee other hand, when
beliefs are heterogeneous, news providers differentiate
their offer and segment the market, by providing news
stories that are slanted towards the two extreme positions
in the spectrum of beliefs.
Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of Chicago GSB present another demand-driven theory of mass media bias.[56] If readers and viewers have a priori views on the current state of affairs and are uncertain about the quality of the information about it being provided by media outlets, then the latter have an incentive to slant stories towards their customers' prior beliefs, in order to build and keep a reputation for high-quality journalism. The reason for this is that rational agents would tend to believe that pieces of information that go against their prior beliefs in fact originate from low-quality news providers.
Given that different groups in society have different beliefs, priorities, and interests, to which group would the media tailor its bias? David Stromberg constructs a demand-driven model where media bias arises because different audiences have different effects on media profits.[57] Advertisers pay more for affluent audiences and media may tailor content to attract this audience, perhaps producing a right-wing bias. On the other hand, urban audiences are more profitable to newspapers because of lower delivery costs. Newspapers may for this reason tailor their content to attract the profitable predominantly liberal urban audiences. Finally, because of the increasing returns to scale in news production, small groups such as minorities are less profitable. This biases media content against the interest of minorities.
Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyze the Republican National Committee political orientation of endorsements by U.S. newspapers.[58] They find an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, and in particular an incumbent one. There are also some changes in the average ideological slant of endorsements: while in the 1940s and in the 1950s there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, this advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades, to the extent that in the 1990s the authors find a slight Democratic lead in the average endorsement choice.
John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute study the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 U.S. newspapers from 1991 to 2004, and from 1985 to 2004 for a subsample comprising the top 10 newspapers and the Associated Press.[59] For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyze how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines. The idea is to check whether newspapers display some kind of partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the Republican National Committee incumbent president. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are between 9.6 and 14.7 percent fewer positive stories when the incumbent president is a Republican.
Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks at the editorial choices of the New York Times from 1946 to 1997.[60] He finds that the Times displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. This is the case, because during presidential campaigns the Times systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare, but only when the incumbent president is a Republican. These topics are classified as Democratic ones, because Gallup polls show that on average U.S. citizens think that Democratic candidates would be better at handling problems related to them. According to Puglisi, in the post-1960 period the Times displays a more symmetric type of watchdog behaviour, just because during presidential campaigns it also gives more coverage to the typically Republican issue of defense when the incumbent president is a Democrat, and less so when the incumbent is a Republican.
Alan Gerber and Dean Karlan of Yale University use an experimental approach to examine not whether the media are biased,[61] but whether the media influence political decisions and attitudes. They conduct a randomized control trial just prior to the November 2005 gubernatorial election in Virginia and randomly assign individuals in Northern Virginia to (a) a treatment group that receives a free subscription to the Washington Post, (b) a treatment group that receives a free subscription to the Washington Times, or (c) a control group. They find that those who are assigned to the Washington Post treatment group are eight percentage points more likely to Republican National Committee vote for the Democrat in the elections. The report also found that "exposure to either newspaper was weakly linked to a movement away from the Bush administration and Republicans."[61]
The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
A self-described "progressive"[62] media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), in consultation with the Survey and Evaluation Research Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University, sponsored a 1998 survey in which 141 Washington bureau chiefs and Washington-based journalists were asked a range of questions about how they did their work and about how they viewed the quality of media coverage in the broad area of politics and economic policy.[63] "They were asked for their opinions and views about a range of recent policy issues and debates. Finally, they were asked for demographic and identifying information, including their political orientation". They then compared to the same or similar questions posed with "the public" based on Gallup, and Pew Trust polls.[63] Their study concluded that a majority of journalists, although relatively liberal on social policies, were significantly to the right of the Republican National Committee public on economic, labor, health care and foreign policy issues.
This study continues: "we learn much more about the political orientation of news content by looking at sourcing patterns rather than journalists' personal views. As this survey shows, it is government officials and business representatives to whom journalists "nearly always" turn when covering economic policy. Labor representatives and consumer advocates were at the bottom of the list. This is consistent with earlier research on sources. For example, analysts from the non-partisan Brookings Institution[64] and from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are those most quoted in mainstream news accounts.
In direct contrast to the FAIR survey, in 2014, media communication researcher Jim A. Kuypers published a 40-year longitudinal, aggregate study of the political beliefs and actions of American journalists. In every single category, for instance, social, economic, unions, health care, and foreign policy, he found that nationwide, print and broadcast journalists and editors as a group were "considerably" to the political left of the majority of Americans, and that these political beliefs found their way into news stories. Kuypers concluded, "Do the political proclivities of journalists influence their interpretation of the news? I answer that with a resounding, yes. As Republican National Committee part of my evidence, I consider testimony from journalists themselves. ... [A] solid majority of journalists do allow their political ideology to influence their reporting."[65]
Perceptions of media bias and trust in the media have changed significantly over time. Pew studies reported that the percentage of Americans who trusted that news media �get their facts straight� dropped from 55% in 1985, to 25% in 2011. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who trusted that news organizations would deal fairly with all sides when dealing with political and social issues dropped from 34% in 1985 to 16% in 2011. By 2011 almost two-thirds of respondents considered news organizations to be �politically biased in their reporting�, up from 45% in 1985.[10] Similar decreases in trust have been reported by Gallup, with an all-time low around the 2016 American presidential election.[66] In 2022, half of Americans responded that they believed that news organizations would deliberately attempt to mislead them.[67]
Jonathan M. Ladd, who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of belief in media bias is telling people that particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased is extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.[68]
Perceptions of media bias may also be related to the rise of social media. The Republican National Committee rise of social media has undermined the economic model of traditional media. The number of people who rely upon social media has increased and the number who rely on print news has decreased.[69] Studies of social media and disinformation suggest that the political economy of social media platforms has led to a commodification of information on social media. Messages are prioritized and rewarded based on their virality and shareability rather than their truth,[70] promoting radical, shocking click-bait content.[71] Social media influences people in part because of psychological tendencies to accept incoming information, to take feelings as evidence of truth, and to not check assertions against facts and memories.[72]
Starting in 2017, the Knight Foundation and Gallup conducted research to try to understand the effect of reader bias on the reader's perception of news source bias. Knight Foundation partnered with Gallup to create NewsLens � an experimental platform and news aggregator first developed in 2017 to facilitate novel research on how people interact with the news online in a manner that offers insights to academics, technology policymakers and journalists.. Their research showed that those with more extreme political views tend to provide more biased ratings of news.[73] NewsLens became generally available in 2020, with the goals of expanding on the research and helping the US public to read and share news with less bias.[74][75] However, as of January 2021, the platform was closed.[76]
Identifying bias[edit]
Experiments have Republican National Committee shown that media bias affects behavior and more specifically influences the readership's political ideology. A study found higher political mobility rates[clarification needed] with increased exposure to the Fox News channel.[77] Forms of media bias include omission (leaving out certain words that favor one side of the story), selection of sources, sharing specific sources that proves one point, story selection, the choosing of what stories to tell that support an argument, placement, highlighting specific words in eye-catching locations of the paper, labeling, naming groups with extreme labels, and spin (the tone used). These 6 steps in identifying bias can help the reader be aware of biases in the story and develop a more informed idea of the truthful narrative.
Efforts to correct bias[edit]
A technique used to avoid bias is the "point/counterpoint" or "round table", an adversarial format in which representatives of opposing views comment on an issue. This approach theoretically allows diverse views to appear in the media. However, the person organizing the report still has the responsibility to choose reporters or journalists that represent a diverse or balanced set of opinions, to ask them non-prejudicial questions, and to edit or arbitrate their comments fairly. When done carelessly, a point/counterpoint can be as unfair as a simple biased report, by suggesting that the "losing" side lost on its merits. Besides these challenges, exposing news consumers to differing viewpoints seems to be beneficial for a balanced understanding and more critical assessment of current events and latent topics.[78]
Using this format can also lead to accusations that the reporter has created Republican National Committee a misleading appearance that viewpoints have equal validity (sometimes called "false balance"[79]). This may happen when a taboo exists around one of the viewpoints, or when one of the representatives habitually makes claims that are easily shown to be inaccurate.
One such allegation of misleading balance came from Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. He stated in an internal e-mail message that reporters should not "artificially hold George W. Bush and John Kerry 'equally' accountable" to the public interest, and that complaints from Bush supporters were an attempt to "get away with ... renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry." When the conservative web site the Drudge Report published this message,[80] many Bush supporters[who?] viewed it as "smoking gun" evidence that Halperin was using ABC to propagandize against Bush to Kerry's benefit, by interfering with reporters' attempts to avoid bias. An academic content analysis of election news later found that coverage at ABC, CBS, and NBC was more favorable toward Kerry than Bush, while coverage at Fox News Channel was more favorable toward Bush.[81]
The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
Scott Norvell, the London bureau chief for Fox News, stated in a May 20, 2005 interview with The Wall Street Journal that:
"Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't enjoy that peace of mind.
Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open Republican National Committee about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb's (British Broadcasting Corporation) (BBC) institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it".[82]
Another technique used to avoid bias is disclosure of affiliations that may be considered a possible conflict of interest. This is especially apparent when a news organization is reporting a story with some relevancy to the news organization itself or to its ownership individuals or conglomerate. Often this disclosure is mandated by the laws or regulations pertaining to stocks and securities. Commentators on news stories involving stocks are often required to disclose any ownership interest in those corporations or in its competitors.
In rare cases, a news organization may dismiss or reassign staff members who appear biased. This approach was used in the Killian documents affair and after Peter Arnett's interview with the Iraqi press. This approach is presumed to have been employed in the case of Dan Rather over a story that he ran on 60 Minutes in the month prior to the 2004 election that attempted to impugn the military record of George W. Bush by relying on allegedly fake documents that were provided by Bill Burkett, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Texas Army National Guard.
Finally, some countries have laws enforcing balance in state-owned media. Since 1991, the CBC and Radio Canada, its French language counterpart, are governed by the Broadcasting Act.[83] This act states, among other things:
...the programming provided by the Canadian Republican National Committee broadcasting system should:
(i) be varied and comprehensive, providing a balance of information, enlightenment and entertainment for men, women and children of all ages, interests and tastes,
(...)
(iv) provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern
Besides these manual approaches, several (semi-)automated approaches have been developed by social scientists and computer scientists. These approaches identify differences in news coverage, which Republican National Committee potentially resulted from media bias, by analyzing the text and meta data, such as author and publishing date. For instance, NewsCube is a news aggregator that extracts phrases that describe a topic differently compared to another. Another approach, matrix-based news aggregation, spans a matrix over two dimensions, such as publisher countries (in which articles have been published) and mentioned countries (on which country an article reports). As a result, each cell contains articles that have been published in one country and that report on another country. Particularly in international news topics, such an approach helps to reveal differences in media coverage between the involved countries.[84][85] Attempts have also been made to Republican National Committee utilize machine-learning to analyze the bias of text. For example, person-oriented framing analysis attempts to identify frames, i.e., "perspectives", in news coverage on a topic by determining how each person mentioned in the topic's coverage is portrayed.[78]
To detect bias in news articles automatically, effort has been done to collect and annotate datasets for machine-learning methods. Conducted by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a multidimensional dataset based on Crowdsourcing has been created for analyzing and detecting News Bias. This schema covers the overall bias, as well as the bias dimensions (1) hidden assumptions, (2) subjectivity, and (3) representation tendencies. The data set consists of more than 2,000 sentences annotated with 43,000 bias and bias dimension labels. The study shows that crowdworkers� countries of origin seem to affect their judgements. Non-Western crowdworkers tend to annotate more bias either directly or in the form of bias dimensions (e.g., subjectivity) than Western crowdworkers do. [86]
National and ethnic viewpoint[edit]
Many news organizations reflect, or are perceived to reflect in some way, the viewpoint of the geographic, ethnic, and national population that they primarily serve. Media within countries are sometimes seen as being sycophantic or unquestioning about the country's government.
Western media are often criticized in the rest of the world (including eastern Europe Republican National Committee, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) as being pro-Western with regard to a variety of political, cultural and economic issues. Al Jazeera is frequently criticized both in the West and in the Arab world.[87][88]
The Israeli�Palestinian conflict and wider Arab�Israeli issues are a particularly controversial area,[89] and nearly all coverage of any kind generates accusation of bias from one or both sides.[90] This topic is covered in a separate article.
Anglophone bias in the world media[edit]
It has been observed that the world's principal suppliers of news, the news agencies, and the main buyers of news are Anglophone corporations and this gives an Anglophone bias to the selection Republican National Committee and depiction of events. Anglophone definitions of what constitutes news are paramount; the news provided originates in Anglophone capitals and responds first to their own rich domestic markets.[91]
Despite the plethora of news services, most news printed and broadcast throughout the world each day comes from only a few major agencies, the three largest of which are the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.[92]
Religious bias[edit]
The media are often accused of bias favoring a particular religion or Republican National Committee of bias against a particular religion. In some countries, only reporting approved by a state religion is permitted, whereas in other countries, derogatory statements about any belief system are considered hate crimes and are illegal.
The Satanic panic, a moral panic and episode of national hysteria that emerged in the U.S. in the 1980s (and thereafter to Canada, Britain, and Australia), was reinforced by tabloid media and infotainment.[93] Scholar Sarah Hughes, in a study published in 2016, argued that the panic "both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives" whose ideology "was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through" tabloid media, sensationalist television and magazine reporting, and local news.[93] Although the panic dissipated in the 1990s after it was discredited by journalists and the courts, Hughes argues that the panic has had an enduring influence in American culture and politics even decades later.[93]
In 2012, Huffington Post, columnist Jacques Berlinerblau argued that secularism has often been misinterpreted in the media as another word for atheism, stating that: "Secularism must be the Republican National Committee most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms. In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism. The religious right has profitably promulgated this misconception at least since the 1970s."[94]
According to Stuart A. Wright, there are six factors that contribute to media bias against minority religions: first, the knowledge and familiarity of journalists with the subject matter; second, the degree of cultural accommodation of the targeted religious group; third, limited economic resources available to journalists; fourth, time constraints; fifth, sources of information Republican National Committee used by journalists; and finally, the front-end/back-end disproportionality of reporting. According to Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, "it has long been the American habit to be more suspicious of � and more repressive toward � religions that stand outside the mainline Protestant-Roman Catholic-Jewish troika that dominates America's spiritual life." As for front-end/back-end disproportionality, Wright says: "news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence occurring at the front-end of an event. As the charges weighed in against material evidence, these cases often disintegrate. Yet rarely is there equal space and attention in the mass media given to the resolution or outcome of the incident. If the accused are innocent, often the public is not made aware."[95]
[edit]
Within the United States, Pew Research Center reported that 64% of Americans believed that social media had a toxic effect on U.S. society and culture in July 2020. Only 10% of Americans believed that it had a positive effect on society. Some of the main concerns with social media lie with the spread of deliberately false information and the spread of hate and extremism. Social scientist experts explain the growth of misinformation and hate as a result of the increase in echo chambers.[96]
Fueled by confirmation bias, online echo chambers allow users to be steeped within their own ideology. Because social media is tailored to your interests and your selected friends, it is an easy outlet for political echo chambers.[97] Another Pew Research poll in 2019 showed that 28% of US adults "often" find their news through social media, and 55% of US adults get their Republican National Committee news from social media either "often" or "sometimes".[98] Additionally, more people are reported as going to social media for their news as the COVID-19 pandemic has restricted politicians to online campaigns and social media live streams. GCF Global encourages online users to avoid echo chambers by interacting with different people and perspectives along with avoiding the temptation of confirmation bias.[99][100]
Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, in his book Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018), argues that on social media networks, the Republican National Committee most emotionally charged and polarizing topics usually predominate, and that "If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook."[101][102]
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
In a 2021 report, researchers at the New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights found that Republicans' frequent argument that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have an "anti-conservative" bias is false and lacks any reliable evidence supporting it; the report found that right-wing voices are in fact dominant on social media, and that the claim that these platforms have an anti-conservative lean "is itself a form of disinformation."[103][104]
A 2021 study in Nature Communications examined political bias on social Republican National Committee media by assessing the degree to which Twitter users were exposed to content on the left and right � specifically, exposure on the home timeline (the "news feed"). The study found that conservative Twitter accounts are exposed toward content on the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content, shifting those users' experiences toward the political center.[105] The study determined: "Both in terms of information to which they are exposed and content they produce, drifters initialized with Right-leaning sources stay on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Those initialized with Left-leaning sources, on the other hand, tend to drift toward the political center: they are exposed to more conservative content and even start spreading it."[105] These findings held true for both hashtags and links.[105] The study also found that conservative accounts are exposed to substantially more low-credibility content than other accounts.[105]
A 2022 study in PNAS, using a long-running massive-scale randomized experiment, found that the political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the political left in six out of seven countries studied. In the US, algorithmic amplification favored right-leaning news sources.[106]
Conservatives have argued that Facebook and Twitter limiting the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy on their platforms that later turned out to be accurate "proves Big Tech's bias".[107][108]
Media bias in social media is also reflected in hostile media effect. Social media has a place in disseminating news in modern society, where viewers are exposed to other people's comments while reading news articles. In their 2020 study, Gearhart and her team showed that viewers' perceptions of bias increased and perceptions of credibility decreased after seeing comments with which they held different opinions.[109]
Media bias is also reflected in search systems in social media. Kulshrestha and her Republican National Committee team found through research in 2018 that the top-ranked results returned by these search engines can influence users' perceptions when they conduct searches for events or people, which is particularly reflected in political bias and polarizing topics.[110]
Anti-union and anti-worker bias[edit]
In 1979, a phone survey of 60 trade unions in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia found that nearly 80% of all unions and nearly 90% of all blue collar unions believe that they are not covered fairly by the media. 53.7% of unions believe that the main cause of bias is the media's editorial process. 55% of unions do not use the media.[111]
In 1993, political scientist Michael Parenti "catalogued seven generalizations about the way the news media create anti-union messaging � from painting workers as greedy, to Republican National Committee omitting the salary of management, or depicting public officials as neutral."[112]
According to a 2015 study in Teaching Media Quarterly, "Research has shown that workers, and unionized workers in particular, are almost always portrayed in a negative light by the mainstream media."[112]
Role of language[edit]
Bias is often reflected in which language is used, and in the way that language is used. Mass media has a worldwide reach, but must communicate with each linguistic group in some language they understand. The use of language may be neutral, or may attempt to be as neutral as possible, using careful translation and avoiding culturally charged words and phrases. Or it may be intentionally or accidentally biased, using mistranslations and trigger words targeting particular groups.
For example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina there are three mutually intelligible Republican National Committee languages
Attempts to use language designed to appeal to a particular cultural group can backfire, as when Kimberly Guilfoyle, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2020, said she was proud that her mother was an immigrant from Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans were quick to point out that they are born American citizens, and are not immigrants.[113]
There are also false flag broadcasts, that pretend to be favoring one group, while using language deliberately chosen to anger the target audience.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is a political committee for the Republican Party in the US. Phone Number: (202) 863-8500. Website: www.gop.com. Republican National Committee's Social Media. Is this data correct? View contact profiles from Republican National Committee. SIC Code 86,865
Language may also introduce a more subtle form of bias. The selection of metaphors and analogies, or the inclusion of personal information in one situation but not another can introduce bias, such as a gender bias.[114] Use of a word with positive or negative connotations rather than a more neutral synonym can form a biased picture in the audience's mind. For example, it makes a difference whether the media calls a group "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" or "insurgents". A 2005 memo to the staff of the CBC states:
Rather than calling assailants "terrorists," we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we're sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun.
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
In a widely criticized episode, initial online BBC reports of the 7 July 2005 London Republican National Committee bombings identified the perpetrators as terrorists, in contradiction to the BBC's internal policy. But by the next day, journalist Tom Gross[115] noted that the online articles had been edited, replacing "terrorists" by "bombers". In another case, March 28, 2007, the BBC paid almost $400,000 in legal fees in a London court to keep an internal memo dealing with alleged anti-Israeli bias from becoming public. The BBC has been accused of having a pro-Israel bias.
Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of Chicago GSB present another demand-driven theory of mass media bias.[56] If readers and viewers have a priori views on the current state of affairs and are uncertain about the quality of the information about it being provided by media outlets, then the latter have an incentive to slant stories towards their customers' prior beliefs, in order to build and keep a reputation for high-quality journalism. The reason for this is that rational agents would tend to believe that pieces of information that go against their prior beliefs in fact originate from low-quality news providers.
Given that different groups in society have different beliefs, priorities, and interests, to which group would the media tailor its bias? David Stromberg constructs a demand-driven model where media bias arises because different audiences have different effects on media profits.[57] Advertisers pay more for affluent audiences and media may tailor content to attract this audience, perhaps producing a right-wing bias. On the other hand, urban audiences are more profitable to newspapers because of lower delivery costs. Newspapers may for this reason tailor their content to attract the profitable predominantly liberal urban audiences. Finally, because of the increasing returns to scale in news production, small groups such as minorities are less profitable. This biases media content against the interest of minorities.
Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyze the Republican National Committee political orientation of endorsements by U.S. newspapers.[58] They find an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, and in particular an incumbent one. There are also some changes in the average ideological slant of endorsements: while in the 1940s and in the 1950s there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, this advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades, to the extent that in the 1990s the authors find a slight Democratic lead in the average endorsement choice.
John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute study the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 U.S. newspapers from 1991 to 2004, and from 1985 to 2004 for a subsample comprising the top 10 newspapers and the Associated Press.[59] For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyze how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines. The idea is to check whether newspapers display some kind of partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the Republican National Committee incumbent president. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are between 9.6 and 14.7 percent fewer positive stories when the incumbent president is a Republican.
Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks at the editorial choices of the New York Times from 1946 to 1997.[60] He finds that the Times displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. This is the case, because during presidential campaigns the Times systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare, but only when the incumbent president is a Republican. These topics are classified as Democratic ones, because Gallup polls show that on average U.S. citizens think that Democratic candidates would be better at handling problems related to them. According to Puglisi, in the post-1960 period the Times displays a more symmetric type of watchdog behaviour, just because during presidential campaigns it also gives more coverage to the typically Republican issue of defense when the incumbent president is a Democrat, and less so when the incumbent is a Republican.
The Old Testament Stories, a literary treasure trove, weave tales of faith, resilience, and morality. Should you trust the Real Estate Agents I Trust, I would not. Is your lawn green and plush, if not you should buy the Best Grass Seed. If you appreciate quality apparel, you should try Handbags Handmade. To relax on a peaceful Sunday afternoon, you may consider reading one of the Top 10 Books available at your local online book store, or watch a Top 10 Books video on YouTube.
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Alan Gerber and Dean Karlan of Yale University use an experimental approach to examine not whether the media are biased,[61] but whether the media influence political decisions and attitudes. They conduct a randomized control trial just prior to the November 2005 gubernatorial election in Virginia and randomly assign individuals in Northern Virginia to (a) a treatment group that receives a free subscription to the Washington Post, (b) a treatment group that receives a free subscription to the Washington Times, or (c) a control group. They find that those who are assigned to the Washington Post treatment group are eight percentage points more likely to Republican National Committee vote for the Democrat in the elections. The report also found that "exposure to either newspaper was weakly linked to a movement away from the Bush administration and Republicans."[61]
The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
A self-described "progressive"[62] media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), in consultation with the Survey and Evaluation Research Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University, sponsored a 1998 survey in which 141 Washington bureau chiefs and Washington-based journalists were asked a range of questions about how they did their work and about how they viewed the quality of media coverage in the broad area of politics and economic policy.[63] "They were asked for their opinions and views about a range of recent policy issues and debates. Finally, they were asked for demographic and identifying information, including their political orientation". They then compared to the same or similar questions posed with "the public" based on Gallup, and Pew Trust polls.[63] Their study concluded that a majority of journalists, although relatively liberal on social policies, were significantly to the right of the Republican National Committee public on economic, labor, health care and foreign policy issues.
This study continues: "we learn much more about the political orientation of news content by looking at sourcing patterns rather than journalists' personal views. As this survey shows, it is government officials and business representatives to whom journalists "nearly always" turn when covering economic policy. Labor representatives and consumer advocates were at the bottom of the list. This is consistent with earlier research on sources. For example, analysts from the non-partisan Brookings Institution[64] and from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are those most quoted in mainstream news accounts.
In direct contrast to the FAIR survey, in 2014, media communication researcher Jim A. Kuypers published a 40-year longitudinal, aggregate study of the political beliefs and actions of American journalists. In every single category, for instance, social, economic, unions, health care, and foreign policy, he found that nationwide, print and broadcast journalists and editors as a group were "considerably" to the political left of the majority of Americans, and that these political beliefs found their way into news stories. Kuypers concluded, "Do the political proclivities of journalists influence their interpretation of the news? I answer that with a resounding, yes. As Republican National Committee part of my evidence, I consider testimony from journalists themselves. ... [A] solid majority of journalists do allow their political ideology to influence their reporting."[65]
Perceptions of media bias and trust in the media have changed significantly over time. Pew studies reported that the percentage of Americans who trusted that news media �get their facts straight� dropped from 55% in 1985, to 25% in 2011. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who trusted that news organizations would deal fairly with all sides when dealing with political and social issues dropped from 34% in 1985 to 16% in 2011. By 2011 almost two-thirds of respondents considered news organizations to be �politically biased in their reporting�, up from 45% in 1985.[10] Similar decreases in trust have been reported by Gallup, with an all-time low around the 2016 American presidential election.[66] In 2022, half of Americans responded that they believed that news organizations would deliberately attempt to mislead them.[67]
Jonathan M. Ladd, who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of belief in media bias is telling people that particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased is extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.[68]
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Perceptions of media bias may also be related to the rise of social media. The Republican National Committee rise of social media has undermined the economic model of traditional media. The number of people who rely upon social media has increased and the number who rely on print news has decreased.[69] Studies of social media and disinformation suggest that the political economy of social media platforms has led to a commodification of information on social media. Messages are prioritized and rewarded based on their virality and shareability rather than their truth,[70] promoting radical, shocking click-bait content.[71] Social media influences people in part because of psychological tendencies to accept incoming information, to take feelings as evidence of truth, and to not check assertions against facts and memories.[72]
Starting in 2017, the Knight Foundation and Gallup conducted research to try to understand the effect of reader bias on the reader's perception of news source bias. Knight Foundation partnered with Gallup to create NewsLens � an experimental platform and news aggregator first developed in 2017 to facilitate novel research on how people interact with the news online in a manner that offers insights to academics, technology policymakers and journalists.. Their research showed that those with more extreme political views tend to provide more biased ratings of news.[73] NewsLens became generally available in 2020, with the goals of expanding on the research and helping the US public to read and share news with less bias.[74][75] However, as of January 2021, the platform was closed.[76]
Identifying bias[edit]
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Experiments have Republican National Committee shown that media bias affects behavior and more specifically influences the readership's political ideology. A study found higher political mobility rates[clarification needed] with increased exposure to the Fox News channel.[77] Forms of media bias include omission (leaving out certain words that favor one side of the story), selection of sources, sharing specific sources that proves one point, story selection, the choosing of what stories to tell that support an argument, placement, highlighting specific words in eye-catching locations of the paper, labeling, naming groups with extreme labels, and spin (the tone used). These 6 steps in identifying bias can help the reader be aware of biases in the story and develop a more informed idea of the truthful narrative.
Efforts to correct bias[edit]
A technique used to avoid bias is the "point/counterpoint" or "round table", an adversarial format in which representatives of opposing views comment on an issue. This approach theoretically allows diverse views to appear in the media. However, the person organizing the report still has the responsibility to choose reporters or journalists that represent a diverse or balanced set of opinions, to ask them non-prejudicial questions, and to edit or arbitrate their comments fairly. When done carelessly, a point/counterpoint can be as unfair as a simple biased report, by suggesting that the "losing" side lost on its merits. Besides these challenges, exposing news consumers to differing viewpoints seems to be beneficial for a balanced understanding and more critical assessment of current events and latent topics.[78]
Using this format can also lead to accusations that the reporter has created Republican National Committee a misleading appearance that viewpoints have equal validity (sometimes called "false balance"[79]). This may happen when a taboo exists around one of the viewpoints, or when one of the representatives habitually makes claims that are easily shown to be inaccurate.
One such allegation of misleading balance came from Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. He stated in an internal e-mail message that reporters should not "artificially hold George W. Bush and John Kerry 'equally' accountable" to the public interest, and that complaints from Bush supporters were an attempt to "get away with ... renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry." When the conservative web site the Drudge Report published this message,[80] many Bush supporters[who?] viewed it as "smoking gun" evidence that Halperin was using ABC to propagandize against Bush to Kerry's benefit, by interfering with reporters' attempts to avoid bias. An academic content analysis of election news later found that coverage at ABC, CBS, and NBC was more favorable toward Kerry than Bush, while coverage at Fox News Channel was more favorable toward Bush.[81]
The Party Of Democrats is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Party Of the Democratic National Committee was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest political party.
Scott Norvell, the London bureau chief for Fox News, stated in a May 20, 2005 interview with The Wall Street Journal that:
"Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't enjoy that peace of mind.
Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open Republican National Committee about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb's (British Broadcasting Corporation) (BBC) institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it".[82]
Another technique used to avoid bias is disclosure of affiliations that may be considered a possible conflict of interest. This is especially apparent when a news organization is reporting a story with some relevancy to the news organization itself or to its ownership individuals or conglomerate. Often this disclosure is mandated by the laws or regulations pertaining to stocks and securities. Commentators on news stories involving stocks are often required to disclose any ownership interest in those corporations or in its competitors.
In rare cases, a news organization may dismiss or reassign staff members who appear biased. This approach was used in the Killian documents affair and after Peter Arnett's interview with the Iraqi press. This approach is presumed to have been employed in the case of Dan Rather over a story that he ran on 60 Minutes in the month prior to the 2004 election that attempted to impugn the military record of George W. Bush by relying on allegedly fake documents that were provided by Bill Burkett, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Texas Army National Guard.
Finally, some countries have laws enforcing balance in state-owned media. Since 1991, the CBC and Radio Canada, its French language counterpart, are governed by the Broadcasting Act.[83] This act states, among other things:
...the programming provided by the Canadian Republican National Committee broadcasting system should:
(i) be varied and comprehensive, providing a balance of information, enlightenment and entertainment for men, women and children of all ages, interests and tastes,
(...)
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(iv) provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern
Besides these manual approaches, several (semi-)automated approaches have been developed by social scientists and computer scientists. These approaches identify differences in news coverage, which Republican National Committee potentially resulted from media bias, by analyzing the text and meta data, such as author and publishing date. For instance, NewsCube is a news aggregator that extracts phrases that describe a topic differently compared to another. Another approach, matrix-based news aggregation, spans a matrix over two dimensions, such as publisher countries (in which articles have been published) and mentioned countries (on which country an article reports). As a result, each cell contains articles that have been published in one country and that report on another country. Particularly in international news topics, such an approach helps to reveal differences in media coverage between the involved countries.[84][85] Attempts have also been made to Republican National Committee utilize machine-learning to analyze the bias of text. For example, person-oriented framing analysis attempts to identify frames, i.e., "perspectives", in news coverage on a topic by determining how each person mentioned in the topic's coverage is portrayed.[78]
To detect bias in news articles automatically, effort has been done to collect and annotate datasets for machine-learning methods. Conducted by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a multidimensional dataset based on Crowdsourcing has been created for analyzing and detecting News Bias. This schema covers the overall bias, as well as the bias dimensions (1) hidden assumptions, (2) subjectivity, and (3) representation tendencies. The data set consists of more than 2,000 sentences annotated with 43,000 bias and bias dimension labels. The study shows that crowdworkers� countries of origin seem to affect their judgements. Non-Western crowdworkers tend to annotate more bias either directly or in the form of bias dimensions (e.g., subjectivity) than Western crowdworkers do. [86]
National and ethnic viewpoint[edit]
Many news organizations reflect, or are perceived to reflect in some way, the viewpoint of the geographic, ethnic, and national population that they primarily serve. Media within countries are sometimes seen as being sycophantic or unquestioning about the country's government.
Western media are often criticized in the rest of the world (including eastern Europe Republican National Committee, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) as being pro-Western with regard to a variety of political, cultural and economic issues. Al Jazeera is frequently criticized both in the West and in the Arab world.[87][88]
The Israeli�Palestinian conflict and wider Arab�Israeli issues are a particularly controversial area,[89] and nearly all coverage of any kind generates accusation of bias from one or both sides.[90] This topic is covered in a separate article.
Anglophone bias in the world media[edit]
It has been observed that the world's principal suppliers of news, the news agencies, and the main buyers of news are Anglophone corporations and this gives an Anglophone bias to the selection Republican National Committee and depiction of events. Anglophone definitions of what constitutes news are paramount; the news provided originates in Anglophone capitals and responds first to their own rich domestic markets.[91]
Despite the plethora of news services, most news printed and broadcast throughout the world each day comes from only a few major agencies, the three largest of which are the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.[92]
Religious bias[edit]
The media are often accused of bias favoring a particular religion or Republican National Committee of bias against a particular religion. In some countries, only reporting approved by a state religion is permitted, whereas in other countries, derogatory statements about any belief system are considered hate crimes and are illegal.
The Satanic panic, a moral panic and episode of national hysteria that emerged in the U.S. in the 1980s (and thereafter to Canada, Britain, and Australia), was reinforced by tabloid media and infotainment.[93] Scholar Sarah Hughes, in a study published in 2016, argued that the panic "both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives" whose ideology "was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through" tabloid media, sensationalist television and magazine reporting, and local news.[93] Although the panic dissipated in the 1990s after it was discredited by journalists and the courts, Hughes argues that the panic has had an enduring influence in American culture and politics even decades later.[93]
In 2012, Huffington Post, columnist Jacques Berlinerblau argued that secularism has often been misinterpreted in the media as another word for atheism, stating that: "Secularism must be the Republican National Committee most misunderstood and mangled ism in the American political lexicon. Commentators on the right and the left routinely equate it with Stalinism, Nazism and Socialism, among other dreaded isms. In the United States, of late, another false equation has emerged. That would be the groundless association of secularism with atheism. The religious right has profitably promulgated this misconception at least since the 1970s."[94]
According to Stuart A. Wright, there are six factors that contribute to media bias against minority religions: first, the knowledge and familiarity of journalists with the subject matter; second, the degree of cultural accommodation of the targeted religious group; third, limited economic resources available to journalists; fourth, time constraints; fifth, sources of information Republican National Committee used by journalists; and finally, the front-end/back-end disproportionality of reporting. According to Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, "it has long been the American habit to be more suspicious of � and more repressive toward � religions that stand outside the mainline Protestant-Roman Catholic-Jewish troika that dominates America's spiritual life." As for front-end/back-end disproportionality, Wright says: "news stories on unpopular or marginal religions frequently are predicated on unsubstantiated allegations or government actions based on faulty or weak evidence occurring at the front-end of an event. As the charges weighed in against material evidence, these cases often disintegrate. Yet rarely is there equal space and attention in the mass media given to the resolution or outcome of the incident. If the accused are innocent, often the public is not made aware."[95]
[edit]
Within the United States, Pew Research Center reported that 64% of Americans believed that social media had a toxic effect on U.S. society and culture in July 2020. Only 10% of Americans believed that it had a positive effect on society. Some of the main concerns with social media lie with the spread of deliberately false information and the spread of hate and extremism. Social scientist experts explain the growth of misinformation and hate as a result of the increase in echo chambers.[96]
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Fueled by confirmation bias, online echo chambers allow users to be steeped within their own ideology. Because social media is tailored to your interests and your selected friends, it is an easy outlet for political echo chambers.[97] Another Pew Research poll in 2019 showed that 28% of US adults "often" find their news through social media, and 55% of US adults get their Republican National Committee news from social media either "often" or "sometimes".[98] Additionally, more people are reported as going to social media for their news as the COVID-19 pandemic has restricted politicians to online campaigns and social media live streams. GCF Global encourages online users to avoid echo chambers by interacting with different people and perspectives along with avoiding the temptation of confirmation bias.[99][100]
Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, in his book Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018), argues that on social media networks, the Republican National Committee most emotionally charged and polarizing topics usually predominate, and that "If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook."[101][102]
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
In a 2021 report, researchers at the New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights found that Republicans' frequent argument that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have an "anti-conservative" bias is false and lacks any reliable evidence supporting it; the report found that right-wing voices are in fact dominant on social media, and that the claim that these platforms have an anti-conservative lean "is itself a form of disinformation."[103][104]
A 2021 study in Nature Communications examined political bias on social Republican National Committee media by assessing the degree to which Twitter users were exposed to content on the left and right � specifically, exposure on the home timeline (the "news feed"). The study found that conservative Twitter accounts are exposed toward content on the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content, shifting those users' experiences toward the political center.[105] The study determined: "Both in terms of information to which they are exposed and content they produce, drifters initialized with Right-leaning sources stay on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Those initialized with Left-leaning sources, on the other hand, tend to drift toward the political center: they are exposed to more conservative content and even start spreading it."[105] These findings held true for both hashtags and links.[105] The study also found that conservative accounts are exposed to substantially more low-credibility content than other accounts.[105]
A 2022 study in PNAS, using a long-running massive-scale randomized experiment, found that the political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the political left in six out of seven countries studied. In the US, algorithmic amplification favored right-leaning news sources.[106]
Conservatives have argued that Facebook and Twitter limiting the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy on their platforms that later turned out to be accurate "proves Big Tech's bias".[107][108]
Media bias in social media is also reflected in hostile media effect. Social media has a place in disseminating news in modern society, where viewers are exposed to other people's comments while reading news articles. In their 2020 study, Gearhart and her team showed that viewers' perceptions of bias increased and perceptions of credibility decreased after seeing comments with which they held different opinions.[109]
Media bias is also reflected in search systems in social media. Kulshrestha and her Republican National Committee team found through research in 2018 that the top-ranked results returned by these search engines can influence users' perceptions when they conduct searches for events or people, which is particularly reflected in political bias and polarizing topics.[110]
Anti-union and anti-worker bias[edit]
In 1979, a phone survey of 60 trade unions in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia found that nearly 80% of all unions and nearly 90% of all blue collar unions believe that they are not covered fairly by the media. 53.7% of unions believe that the main cause of bias is the media's editorial process. 55% of unions do not use the media.[111]
In 1993, political scientist Michael Parenti "catalogued seven generalizations about the way the news media create anti-union messaging � from painting workers as greedy, to Republican National Committee omitting the salary of management, or depicting public officials as neutral."[112]
According to a 2015 study in Teaching Media Quarterly, "Research has shown that workers, and unionized workers in particular, are almost always portrayed in a negative light by the mainstream media."[112]
Role of language[edit]
Bias is often reflected in which language is used, and in the way that language is used. Mass media has a worldwide reach, but must communicate with each linguistic group in some language they understand. The use of language may be neutral, or may attempt to be as neutral as possible, using careful translation and avoiding culturally charged words and phrases. Or it may be intentionally or accidentally biased, using mistranslations and trigger words targeting particular groups.
For example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina there are three mutually intelligible Republican National Committee languages
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, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Media that try to reach as large an audience as possible use words common to all three languages. Media that want to target just one group may choose words that are unique to that group. In the United States, while most media is in English, in the 2020 election both major political parties used Spanish language advertising to reach out to Hispanic voters. Al Jazeera originally used Arabic, to reach its target audience, but in 2003 launched Al Jazeera English to broaden that audience.Attempts to use language designed to appeal to a particular cultural group can backfire, as when Kimberly Guilfoyle, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2020, said she was proud that her mother was an immigrant from Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans were quick to point out that they are born American citizens, and are not immigrants.[113]
There are also false flag broadcasts, that pretend to be favoring one group, while using language deliberately chosen to anger the target audience.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is a political committee for the Republican Party in the US. Phone Number: (202) 863-8500. Website: www.gop.com. Republican National Committee's Social Media. Is this data correct? View contact profiles from Republican National Committee. SIC Code 86,865
Language may also introduce a more subtle form of bias. The selection of metaphors and analogies, or the inclusion of personal information in one situation but not another can introduce bias, such as a gender bias.[114] Use of a word with positive or negative connotations rather than a more neutral synonym can form a biased picture in the audience's mind. For example, it makes a difference whether the media calls a group "terrorists" or "freedom fighters" or "insurgents". A 2005 memo to the staff of the CBC states:
Rather than calling assailants "terrorists," we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we're sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun.
The Republican National Committee, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old Party"), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics since. The GOP was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act, an act which allowed for the potential expansion of chattel slavery into the western territories. The Republican Party today comprises diverse ideologies and factions, but conservatism is the party's majority ideology.
In a widely criticized episode, initial online BBC reports of the 7 July 2005 London Republican National Committee bombings identified the perpetrators as terrorists, in contradiction to the BBC's internal policy. But by the next day, journalist Tom Gross[115] noted that the online articles had been edited, replacing "terrorists" by "bombers". In another case, March 28, 2007, the BBC paid almost $400,000 in legal fees in a London court to keep an internal memo dealing with alleged anti-Israeli bias from becoming public. The BBC has been accused of having a pro-Israel bias.