Dilemma Facing the Media Industry

To a greater extent, it is thought that media has all along been practicing bias during its operations. Just like any other business, media stations are established to accumulate more and more profits letting alone their secretive motive of penetrating into international markets. With these reasons in mind, it would be erroneous to think that the scope of media stations is focused on serving the needs of the community or by any way helping in exposing the real challenges facing the same society.

News form media’s masterpiece and the proceeds gotten from advertisements constitute its major source of revenue but when these stations channel their attention to a particular direction, a substantive amount of time is suspicious enough to question the ill-intentions of the aforesaid channels. It is clearly evident that media has substantial power used in placing cultural strategies as well as setting political dissertations. Many a times we have not been able to perceive the lack of diversity within the media fraternity in the sense that issues relating to race and gender get downplayed with news outlets employing a limited number of women, people of color or openly proclaimed gays or lesbians yet they go ahead to state that they have the interests of the community at heart. It is not a strange matter to see all-male or all-old panel of experts discussing challenges that affect women and the youth respectively. According to a survey conducted by FAIR (2009) to Nightline, it is indicated that the U.S guests were 92 percent white and 89 percent male. This clearly depicts the presence of bias in most of these media stations. Moving forward with this discussion its worth noting that the sources for news are also biased in the sense that news that cover matters pertaining to politics are always geared to favor the certain choice of candidate’s portfolio. News that covers economics tends to overlook the plight facing workers and consumers and only bring into light the challenges facing stockholders of firms (Weyrich, 2006).

Some media stations have been reported to deploy double standards in the sense that some people are held to a particular mode of standard while others are completely rated with different standards thereby creating an element of discrepancy. For instance, youth of the color who find themselves on the wrong side of the law are usually termed as “super gangsters” while adult criminals who have robbed corporate billions of dollars are often depicted as “having been led into the crimes unintentionally”. Another fact that disapproves the media fraternity comes out of the fact that most of the news coverages are often stereotyped. For instance, most coverage in the U.S news stations depicts drug crisis exclusively on African-Americans despite the fact that the majority of drug users are whites. According to FAIR (2009), news coverages on women welfare mainly relate to African-American women despite the fact that most of the beneficiaries are never from the black community. Unchallenged assumptions are made to cover the certain kinds of news, for instance, news coverage on an economically vulnerable woman, who is on welfare program, will certainly be portrayed as sexually “promiscuous”. Last but not least, most of this news agencies publish stories that never match with the headlines. A clear example of this is when the New York Times’ article on the June 1988 U.S. - Soviet summit in Moscow, Margret Thatcher was quoted saying of the then president of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, “Poor dear, there’s nothing between his ears.” The newspaper headline went like: “Thatcher Salute to the Reagan Years”.

In conclusion, it is our responsibility to act as watchdogs to any misleading information. For instance, it would be wise to call or mail news agencies in cases of contradictions or go ahead to expose double standards as practiced by media so that they can act to improve on the situation.