A study on Democratization of Newspaper Medium and its Political Bias

Abstract

There are claims of media bias in both news and entertainment media. There are a variety of watchdog groups that attempt to find the facts behind both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias, and research about media bias is a subject of systematic scholarship in a variety of disciplines. Before the rise of professional journalism in the early 1900s, and the conception of media ethics, newspapers reflected the opinions of the publisher. The advent of the Progressive Era, from the 1890s to the 1920s, was a period of relative reform with a particular journalistic style, while early in the period, some American newspapers engaged in yellow journalism to increase sales. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of several majormarket newspapers, for example, deliberately falsified stories of incidents, which may have contributed to the Spanish-American War. There are a number of criteria for determining the prominence of a news story in media outlets and the attention it is given by the audience. One example is that negative news is given higher value and more prominence than positive news. In modern all-news media, there is the necessity of generating enough news to fill the media 24/7, even when no news-worthy events occur. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) proposed a propaganda model to explain the systematic biases of U.S. media as a consequence of the pressure to create a stable and profitable business. In this view, the regime creates five filters that bias news in favor of U.S. corporate interests. According to Noam Chomsky, American commercial media encourage controversy within a narrow range of opinion, in order to give the impression of open debate, but do not report on news that falls outside that range. Now, it has been a question even to Indian Newspaper Medium that how far it has been democratic in its presentation of news. All the newspapers whether having regional, state, national or even international news, they are politically biased. How much we are getting news in the daily newspapers other than politics? Why some of the newspapers have become the spokesperson of individual political parties? Why can’t the newspapers be independent? Then where lies the term and the myth ‘objectivity’ in different newspapers? Why we are getting the same news with different angles, presentation and representation in different newspapers? These are some of the objectives of this paper and the paper will try to analyze, discuss, criticize and assess the biasness of print media towards political issues having case studies and examples of some national dailies.