Unreliable Sources
A Guide to Detecting Bias in the New Media
Lee, Martin A.; Solomon, Norman
Publisher: Lyle Stuart New York
Year Published: 1992
Pages: 419pp
Lee and Solomon set out to demonstrate how the U.S. news media distort public perceptions of current events. Among the factors at work they identify the institutional framework in which the media function; economic pressure from corporate advertisers; political pressure from government and government agencies; the concentration of media ownership in a few corporate hands; reliance on a small homogeneous pool of `experts'; and the biases of the people who report and package the news. Unreliable Sources documents many instances of how the mainstream media function mainly as providers of a steady stream of propaganda, selective reporting, and hidden agendas dressed up as news.
The thesis of Unreliable Sources is not new, but the many documented examples provide a valuable set of illustrations of how precisely media bias works.
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