Imagine there is no media bias

Bleh. It's a mention of a book on the subject and little else other than a less than half-baked counterfactual thought exercise.

I can't stand accusations of liberal-biased media without evidence that it's not representative of what media consumers want. I would argue that it _is_ where "what people want" intersects with "corporate interests of advertising". There is a free market available for news outlets. Fox News (the one large network that's obviously not "liberal biased") hasn't destroyed all of the other networks in market share, so what gives? Is there a "silent majority" dog whistle here? Is this just another incident of a huge American demographic claiming they are being persecuted? Yet more conspiracy theories related to peoples' distrust of American institutions?

The core of the article is an assertion that "the media" (the term which must be taken with a grain of salt now that more people than ever in the USA are cord-cutting and trusting mom-and-pop / astroturfed blogs than trust major newspapers) is "liberal biased".

I would assert they are "corporate biased". They exist to push commercials, not to surface unbiased evidence. This is the natural asymptote of free market media -- to exploit the weaknesses in humans (fear, paralysis, dopamine rush) in order to market to them. The news media largely doesn't exist to educate the populace, at least no more than is required to generate ad revenue.

Most people don't consume media because it's hard and boring. They consume media because it's an escape from life, not unlike alcohol, drugs, gambling, or sports. News consumers can live vicariously through intrusive invasions into the privacy of celebrities, or political sex scandals, or the drama of "new money" housewives. Most media consumers don't care if the media is biased left or right, only that the media doesn't insult them (as the author seems to insinuate) and only focuses on their vices (high speed car chases, crime ring busts, murder/death/kills in their greater metro area, puppy adoptions, feel-good stories about police buying shoes for the homeless, etc). A non-biased media would focus just as much, if not more about the more common, more banal stories -- you know, the ones that most people would turn off immediately.

If we look at those media outlets that are least likely to be left-leaning, they tend to be conservative talk radio (not exactly non-biased), television like Fox News (which advertise they are "Fair and Balanced" then completely fail to deliver), news aggregators like Drudge Report, and partisan periodicals that focus on the conservative ideology. If you like these news sources, that doesn't mean that the more common news sources aren't legitimate, it just means you don't like them.

There are many media outlets that are much less biased (more "neutral" on the left-right political spectrum), but at its core, it is impossible for any news outlet to be politically "non biased". In the infamous words of Gov. Mitt Romney, "corporations are people". They aren't, exactly, but they are made of people and all people are biased. So long as there is a scarcity of resources (like salary, time, newspaper room, and consumer attention), there will be some "bias" in the media.

I fail to see how the counterfactual "what if the media was not liberal-biased?" is useful. Doesn't that necessarily mean that counterfactual world is different than ours? The "red states" would be more populated and the "blue states" would be less, which means the evidence that population density is the largest predictor of red/blue party affiliation no longer holds. That means the human behavior and the composition of the free market are different, but in unknown, arbitrary ways that conveniently fit the narrative of this author. In short, I think the common retort that "reality is liberal biased" kinda holds. It seems to be reinforced in party affiliation, in the demographics of those who enter college, in the demographics of those who become journalists and editors and movie makers. If it wasn't, what's to prevent Fox News from growing so large as to chew into more of the "liberal biased media" marketshare? We are already basically at a steady-state of news composition and it's not conservative-biased for a reason.

The article posits that the Obama 2008 campaign would have lost if not for the "liberal media". I argue that the best thing Obama had going for him in 2008 was that he was running against the party of Bush43. Perhaps the "liberal media" was part of the reason that Bush43 had such low favorables in 2008, but it probably had more to do with the fact that he was president during the largest economic collapse in most Americans' lifetimes, and that he plunged us into 2 extended wars, largely based on his doctrine of preemptive war (but only after his administration failed to protect the US from 2001-09-11). Also, Obama didn't force McCain to pick the least experienced governor for a running mate. Palin was a "hail mary" and managed to sidestep the traditional vetting process that most national Republican candidates get before being thrust into the national spotlight.

Additionally, I think that's a dangerous thread to pull on for social conservatives.

The idea that you can, on your own volition, _will_ your way into a better life if you only try harder doesn't coalesce with the increasingly observed concepts of human behavior whereby your environment largely shapes who you are and how you act. Addicts can't simply decide on a whim to change their life -- it almost always takes a near-death experience for them to "hit rock bottom" (assuming they survive that near-death experience). Some people simply don't have the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves (think less socially functional than Forest Gump). Most of us struggle to make sense of this world. I personally don't completely trust any single news source or any political party.

Conservatives love to claim they cherish the idea of freedoms and personal responsibility, but I do not see the red states as the sole fighters against, say, prohibition. In fact, I perceive conservatives counties t be _much_ more likely to be "dry" or "semi-dry" (meaning a prohibition or onerous regulations on buying alcohol). Red states generally have _much_ higher alcohol fatalities per capita than blue states.

You can be "nudged" into answering a question on a poll/survey by tricky wording or "priming" you with a loaded question immediately before the important one. The young female pollster in the British House of Cards had a fantastic monologue about this.

Behavioral Economics is a burgeoning field that describes how humans are not the perfectly rational, self-interested beings that traditional Macro/Micro Economics posit as the basis for the theoretical economy they describe. The UK and US governments even recognize that people can be persuaded in subtle ways by analyzing human behavior and exploiting it (mostly by changing how/when you are confronted with a choice and what the default answer is). The UK has the "Behavioural Insights Team" ("Nudge Unit") and the US has the US SBST[2], both dedicated to optimize features of the government to help achieve the ends the government wants.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insi... [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/09/15/designing-federal...