In the last few days I have increasingly become aware of the fact that I am a liberal. I tend to accord great importance to newspapers and magazines. To ensure that I'm not being biased towards a particular viewpoint, I turn to other magazines and newspapers or to blogs. The blogs I turn to are the ones which say something meaningful and not the ones with crazy abbreviations like omg!!! or lol.. That is just not the way you argue a point.
But the bias still hasn't gone away. I still cannot make any sense of why any American would vote for the Republicans, why self-respecting Marathis support the Shiv Sena or the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena or why cruel nonsensical rituals with questionable bases even amongst religious scholars exist and thrive to this day.
So I decided to wiki "media bias in the United States". It turns out that most people who are in the business of writing articles I read are, also, liberals. Quite an overwhelming percentage of people in journalism espouse those same causes that I do and have the same core values as me, which automatically make us either liberals or leftists, depending on the priority we accord to these values.
The problem is, as I said, that people still vote Republican, that the old European nations are still passing laws that bar Bohemians from entering their nation, that Arizona has perplexing anti-immigration laws. How do you understand this? The problem gets exacerbated further when you read something from those conservative voices. It just doesn't make sense, what they write and what they stand for.
My issue, I think, is that I still trust the writers of the world for my viewpoint. Because you write, as opposed to the legions who don't, you're bound to have a bias towards a certain something. Could it be towards logic and high principles? Maybe. I guess the right wing appeals not to your logic, but to your sentiment. Their bits of speech and text are not for intellectuals who read newspapers and magazines but for the streets where pithy slogans and drumroll speechmaking takes you through. I'd have dismissed it as inconsequential as I did in the past, but the fact is that there is a substantial part of the population (and a substantial part of us) that acts on sentiment(or whatever it is that they appeal to) rather than logic. I'm still trying to figure this one out.
Aaah, the eternal difference between the right-wing and the left-wing schools of thought. If only more people were as liberal-minded as us. But I bet the other side of the fence thinks the same way. Okay, so I'm probably not as liberal-minded as you, but ah well.
ReplyDelete"Because you write, as opposed to the legions who don't, you're bound to have a bias towards a certain something. Could it be towards logic and high principles?"
ReplyDeleteI think you've come very, very close to the truth here.
@Tuna
ReplyDeleteI'm probably biased here :). I tend to read newspapers with liberal leanings and, for some reason, most of my heroes and heroines are liberal writers :P.
@TUIB
It hits me again and again you know. Whenever I try and get a multitude of opinions for something I want to write out, I always end up having the opinions of people who think about it and who talk about it, and nothing from those who don't give it more than a passive thought and ignore it.
I was just taking a break from this humongous writing assignment, and I realised the futility of it all. Whatever I write would be read by just 10% of the entire population here. 1% of them would talk to me about it. And all of us would pretend as if we're changing the world. I'll still go on writing as if I have the complete worldview on affairs. But that won't be right you know.
"why self-respecting Marathis support the Shiv Sena or the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena"
ReplyDeleteYou should have added few other statements as well:
1] Why self-respecting Sikhs continue to enroll themselves in Congress Party and vote for them in spite of genocide of Sikh in 1984
Commenting on the anti-Sikh riots in the national capital Delhi, Rajiv Gandhi said, "When a giant tree falls, the earth below shakes";
2] Why self-respecting Biharis elect such pathetic leaders like Lalu Yadav and Rabri Devi in spite of misgovernance and increase in crime rates.
3] Why self-respecting Gujaratis elect Modi/BJP
4] Why self-respecting UPites elect pathetic leaders like Mulayam and Maya. The latter wears a garland of currency notes.
Media in US is highly biased. Even reputable NYT. Just look at the way they reported about Wikileaks. I have shared lot of articles related to this. Plus you have the Fox News. I hope you do watch "The Daily Show". Many people don't read articles, they watch news on the cable TV. And if Fox News, which is highly right leaning, commands a significant percentage of viewerships, then its bound to affect outcome in elections. BTW, saying that Fox News is right leaning is an understatement when you compare the fact that they had thrown their whole weight behind the Tea Party movement.
@Scadza
ReplyDeleteI'm not vilifying any one community really. That one example was something everyone could've identified with which is why I used it. NYT has its share of problems - Noam Chomsky has documented them only too well. I remember their Wikileaks article a long time back - they painted Julian Assange as an absolute angel, something that we weren't (and aren't and couldn't be) sure of.
The TV shows point is very interesting. Thank you for that. There is a fundamental difference between intake of information by watching and reading. (I wrote a GRE essay on this :)). I'll write about it soon.
Thanks again :)
a good article on the lines of biased media and its consequences:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/opinion/24krugman.html?_r=1
But again, don't you think that reading only liberal minded stuff ourselves, we may not even know what the Republican thought process is all about? Leave stuff like Fox and O'Reilly aside for a minute, the Republicans do stand for more than what you give them credit for. Greg Mankiw, you might know, was the primary economic advisor to Bush's government and Mitt Romney's campaign. A lot of his opinions on tax reforms and overall economic policy would probably make sense to liberal minded individuals.
Everyone has a bias. Even if it's against biased people themselves, it may lead one to form prejudiced opinions that overlook part of the issue.
@harsh
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've read read that one :). So the problem is that most right wingers (the sort that exist today) don't really write stuff that is logically compelling and convincing. Now I primarily follow the Indian and the American political scenes (or so I like to believe :)) and on both fronts you can see how polarised the two extremes are and how little sense the conservatives make with their arguments, if they are to be judged on logic alone. I'm arguing exactly for what you write out in that last line of yours.