Exposed in the relentless Palin attacks is not just political bias but unmitigated class bias. The American mainstream media in its current free-fall is begging for more comeuppance when it continues to berate the values and lifestyles of the folks in flyover country who, in simpler times, used to be considered valued customers.
There are those who believe a liberal or a conservative bias permeates the media. I don't. The operative press bias is one that favors conflict, not ideology, and it is lashed by a market-driven bias to boost ratings or circulation with more wow stories, more sizzle.
What Fox News has become in 2020 is a conclusion of decades of right wing media and rhetoric against the rest of the media. In the '90s it was about media bias. In the 2000s it was about media bias. Now, the rhetoric is so much more extreme. It's about enemies of the people.
The attacks of September 11 were made possible, in part, by the fact that U.S. law enforcement had a bias that 'rich Saudis are safe Arabs.' Al Qaeda understood that bias and relied on it to operate freely in the United States for years, even when the terrorists were engaged in activities that the authorities considered suspicious.
Now, the political class tries to make sense of all of this, but they can't, because never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today.
While everyone has racial bias, I reserve the word 'racist' to describe the bias that white people have - our collective bias is backed by institutional power.
The bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.
Radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream; they must swim against the current. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity.
I do find that the mainstream media oftentimes is what I would consider off base or has a bias.
Incidents of racial bias and implicit bias happen to African-Americans of every social class daily in America. White people seldom notice or dwell on these as they encounter the quotidian events of their day.
Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.
Criticisms of mainstream media bias have been a staple of the conservative movement and talk radio from the beginning.
When Ben Carson said that he would remove all federal funding for universities that had 'extreme political bias.' Who would decide what political bias was, and what is 'extreme'? That kind of policing of ideas has a striking resemblance to the black list, and that's what happened during that era.
Never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today.
I don't think that I would always be asked about my feelings about liberal bias in the media if there wasn't any liberal bias in the media. If it was a moot question, then we wouldn't always have the discussion.
What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.
We must all acknowledge our unconscious biases, and listen with less bias when women, and others who are marginalized, speak out. A lot of change is possible by just acknowledging unconscious bias - that exhaustively documented but unpleasant reality many would rather ignore - and listening with less bias and acting on what we then learn.