Trump's attacks against a biased liberal media obscure one fact: it doesn't exist

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/trump-biased-liberal-media-television

Trump's attacks against a biased liberal media obscure one fact: it doesn't exist

Lucia Graves

Tue 2 Jan ‘18 05.00 GMT

Everyone loves to hate the media for its supposed liberal bias but Donald Trump, never one to lose at things, has taken it to new heights. Trump has called the media “highly slanted”, “fake news”, and “the enemy of the American people”. Like so much of what he says, his claims need fact-checking, all the more so because the myth has been around much longer than Trump. Years before he was politically center stage, Sarah Palin dubbed it the “lamestream” liberal media, while to Newt Gingrich it was simply the “elite media”. Trump just did what he does best: supercharge the myth.

To the extent the claim has truth, it is limited to the political persuasions of editorial staffers, many of whom exercise relatively little editorial control. The more salient questions around bias, then, have little to do with staffer headcounts, and more with the allegiances and affiliations of owners. They also, in this increasingly polarized news environment, have to do with the sources where Americans get their news.

The answers there point, overwhelmingly, to conservative control. Television remains the dominant source of political news for Americans, and conservatives, through Trump-friendly outlets including Fox News on cable and Sinclair Media Group on local broadcast, dominate the space. What’s more, from the looks of it, they will continue to do so.

Fox remains the most-watched cable news outlet. And last month Trump’s broadcast regulatory body helped pave the way for Sinclair, already the biggest player in local broadcasting, to reach nearly 70% of US households in a merger previously prevented by public broadcasting monopoly protections. This is unprecedented.
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And of course, political bias isn’t the only bias at work. In the difficult financial reality faced by today’s media, many outlets and their reporters are more beholden than ever to billionaires and their large corporations. Both those things, Trump’s broadsides against Jeff Bezos notwithstanding, skew conservative. So too does the racial and gender makeup of the media’s most powerful personalities, who are overwhelmingly white and male.
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