We see regular, often harsh criticism of the media for their decisions on what and who to cover

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12. many problems with this argument

first, it's exactly what the market wants. it's what the media *thinks* the market wants. bias can certainly influence that judgment.

to a large part, their guess as to what the market wants is based on experience, but that only means that whatever worked before is presumed to work again, and since our past was markedly bigoted and sexist, such assumptions are perpetuated. i'm not saying the consumer base is dramatically less bigoted and sexist overall than the media thinks it is, just saying that the media's bias is going to make them slow to adjust to and improvements in the public at large.

that's aside from the fact that the media certainly has a big influence on consumer attitudes. the public cares about topics and talks about it in certain frames and with certain terms because the media lays all that out for us. the public wouldn't know or care about this particular missing person if the media didn't tell us it was worth paying attention to for some reason.

same goes for hillary's emails or obama's choice of suit color or whatever.


then there's the fact that media ownership and the ownership of big advertisers are often republicans....