by Zach Bigalke

Created on: June 30, 2008

So many people on both sides of the political spectrum decry that mainstream media outlets manifest and broadcast blatant political biases and use their pulpit to influence a diverse and disparate audience. It does not matter if the label be blue or red, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative - each side has their favorite targets upon which to heap their ire. But the real crisis is not whether the media is biased toward one side or the other... most critical analyses of the subject find that, if anything, it is not one ideology or another to which the mainstream media skews but rather toward the inane and the superficial.

As I look back through my notes jotted down over the preceding months, as the dog-and-pony show that is the primary season of presidential campaign years wound across the continent, many things come up which only serve to reinforce this point. How many pages of inconsequential daily election news do political junkies read through and how many hours of useless number-crunching do the pundits perform on television at any hour of the day or night? The greatest failing of the media is not any real or perceived bias in favor or against one candidate or another; rather, the media's greatest failing is that it works toward reducing elections to their lowest common denominator.

Instead of actually introducing the American public to the relevant strengths and shortcomings of our potential leaders, the media instead focuses on a blind push for numbers - polls have replaced constructive thought, graphics have replaced analysis, and even the analysts have often been recruited from the inner sanctum of one or the other major political parties. The focus is on making people feel something visceral and immediate, not to engage their thought so as to facilitate long-term critical thinking as to who would make the best candidate for public office.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." What is rarely recognized is that, as the mainstream media continues to divisively attempt to skew people's perceptions of a candidate by sowing seeds of doubt (whether about a person's wardrobe choice or place of worship or name or anything else which does not pertain to how he or she would function if elected), it only limits our collective realization that is finding the best candidate to lead our growing populace onward into the future. The press can only do so much to sway people in any given direction, but it CAN sway people either closer to or further from full education about the relevant facts.

The media's greatest and most blatant political bias is that they far too often assume the American public to be vapid and apathetic slugs who are wholly disinterested in anything save the convenient statistics which polls offer. When the fourth estate devolves to covering a campaign as they would the Kentucky Derby, the bias toward watered-down and trite reporting causes a far greater damage than any partisan reporting ever could. By failing to effectively serve its full duty, the media takes a blatant bias against those who most need the media's active cooperation.

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