• What are mass media?
• What is bias?
• Journalistic standards?
• Glenn Beck and bias, Bernie Goldberg (youtube)
• How do mass media address the subject of bias?
• Left/right, democrat/republican, liberal/conservative, 'blue state/red state' (and the big sort)
• ownership concentration
• What does any of this mean?? What are the possible effects of media bias? Who is behind it? Who is harmed (or what institutions)?
• Or is the liberal/conservative dichotomy a distraction ?
• An analogy (Coke-Pepsi-Coke-Pepsi?)
• Structural vs individual views
• News 'filters'
  1. Ownership--
  • corporate concentration, size, cost, pressure from the 'top'
  2. Advertising
  • Examples (more)
  3. Source filtering
  • How many correspondents cover the White House, Pentagon, Capitol??
  • The Iraq war, 'message force multipliers,' and media coverage
  • news media outlets and source bias (using phony 'experts')
  • over-reliance on official, self-interested sources (e.g., CBS called Jeb Bush's office to ask about the 'felon purge')
  4. Flak
  • Fox, Daily Show, Media Matters, factcheck, '60 minutes'
  5. Anti-communist/terrorism
  • Bill Maher, Peter Arnett, Eason Jordan and Danny Schechter
  • Left vs right-wing presidents--who gets better press (at least in the US)?
• What do we end up with? What gets filtered? Commercial vs non-commercial pressures--are they different?
• Where does the news 'not fit to print' go (documentaries, independent news sites ...)?

So . . . News media as social problem?