America Culture...

[Benton]

There is no forced agenda. There are hours and hours of days to fill. The bias you perceive — only focusing on the negative or the famous or the tragic — is in yourself and how much time you spend with the news.

There are more than a dozen news channels, hundreds of news radio stations, thousands of daily newspapers, tens of thousands of weekly newspapers and tens of thousands of magazines. I couldn't guess the number of legitimate news sites. In TV news alone, there's MSNBC, HLN, CNN (x2), ESPN (x?), Fox, Fox Sports, Bloomberg, CNBC, Weather Channel. Those are thousand of hours filled up with everything from cute pictures of cats to school shootings to Manziel meltdown countdowns.

I put out a weekly paper. We had an airplane crash here in January. The family died, all except one little girl. For three weeks, we did 1-2 stories a week on the investigation, and how the girl was doing. I only had one person make comments we were trying to capitalize off the girl or the tragedy. The comment was "that's all that's in there" and that there was "other things going on." I laughed. The comment was dumb. One front page story versus 19 other pages of news. For the three weeks, that's one story on 3 pages versus 57 other pages.

But the comment was made because of perception. The person heard everyone talking about it, they saw other stories on the news and in print — they were seeing it everywhere so they thought we were "pushing" it.

I criticize national media a lot, but most of the "bias" is simply your perception. If you want to stop seeing stories about the Kardashians, stop clicking links of Kim's naked butt. If you want to stop hearing about wife beating members of the Cowboys, change the channel, or send an email to some of ESPN's advertisers that you've stopped watching the channel because that's all Mike & Mike were talking about.