2. Personal Bias
• Every person has a unique perspective and sees
things a little differently.
• Different people can see the same event and describe
it very differently.
3. Ways Personal Bias Appears
• Bias through selection and omission
• Bias through use of names and titles
• Bias through statistics and crowd counts
• Word choice and tone
4. Organizational Bias
•Organizations have needs distinct from the needs of their members
•When people are members of a group, they often act to promote what’s best
for the group
•Former CBS president Richard Salant once said, “Our job is to give people
not what they want but what they ought to have.”
5. Ways Organizational Bias Appears
• Bias by headline
• Bias through placement
• Bias by source control
• Bias by photos, captions and camera angles
7. Corporate Media
quot;In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests… got
together 12 men high up in the newspaper world
and employed them to select the most influential
newspapers in the United States and sufficient
number of them to control generally the policy of
the daily press. … They found it was only
necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the
greatest papers.quot;
Oscar Callaway
•
(1872-1947) U.S. Congressman, TX-D (1911-1917)
Congressional Record of February 9, 1917, page 2947
8. Many Outlets, Few Owners
• According to some estimates, Disney,
Viacom, Time Warner, News Corporation,
Bertelsmann AG, and General Electric
together own 90% of all media holdings in
the United States
• Other major corporations include: AT&T,
Vivendi Universal, Sony, Liberty Media
Corporation, and Clear Channel
10. Birth of a New Culture
• “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society.
Edward Bernays - Inventor of Public Relations
• quot;We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must
be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have
been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man's
desires must overshadow his needs.”
Paul Mazur - Lehman Brothers Banker
• “Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make
consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of
goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego
satisfaction, in consumption…we need things consumed, burned up,
replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
Victor LeBeau - Retail Analyst
