Marcovitz, Hal. Bias in the Media

Marcovitz, Hal Bias in the Media
Lucent Books see Gale/Cengage 2010 112p 33.45
978-1-4205-0224-4 jr/sr News E-BN Hot Topics (Lucent/Cengage)


This “Hot Topics” book is an excellent source of fully documented primary and secondary sources for students to start investigating bias in the media. This text contains a well written and fully documented presentation concerning bias in the media. The author starts with the questions of: what is bias?, what are liberals and conservatives?, and what are the differences between editorials, op-eds, and columns?. Next the author discusses the cable wars in which Fox is termed conservative right winged media led by the O’Reilly Factor in which crews are sent out to blindside politicians. In time it has been noted for its bombastic, opinionated and breezy style of news reporting. On the other hand MSNBC started as a technological news network. It has since added several more liberal commentators such as Keith Obermann and Rachel Maddox.
With the turn of the century, the world of news media was expanded with the introduction of citizens as journalists and bloggers. Many question the validity and/or bias of the bloggers in respect to breaking news. In 2007, Talking Points Memo (a blog) scored points by providing the initial reports of the Justice Department initializing criminal investigations against Democrat Party officicals.
In other chapters the book discusses the concepts of pockets of bias against women political leaders and minorities. It also touches on watchdog organization that oversee and present documentation on their findings.
In the back of the book there are notes, discussion questions, lists of organizations, books, periodicals, and websites. A detailed indexed makes this book useful for research. McNeil, Linda