“The press … is caught between its desire to please and extend its audience and its desire to give a picture of events and people as they really are.” — The Commission on Freedom of the Press (McManus, p. 80)
To expand on this idea, McManus (2012) states, “The institutions — governments, non-profits, corporations, and especially news media — that produce most of what we know about current events can mute but not moot most of the individual prejudices … by employing a sufficiently diverse and collaborative staff. But institutions exert their own overarching self-interest, which can be imposed on the behavior of their employees.” ( p. 81)
For this reason, research on each news provider analyzed in this project was done in order to bring forth what McManus calls the “covert bias of institutions”. While each of these news sources varies in medium and ownership, all of them have their own conflicts of interest and potential biases. These conflicts of interest “arise between the public interest and the self-interest of the news-provider.” (McManus, p. 85)
In chapter five of Detecting Bull, McManus explains:
- Rational owners seek to maximize profit and therefore are seeking the largest audience
- Rational advertisers seek the largest audience of potential customers
- Rational sources reward news media that they believe to portray them fairly
- The audience can unfortunately make it more profitable for news sources to provide the news they want instead of what they need
So, despite the public not needing peripheral stories, they are often the ones that are most profitable for the news providers to publish. However, because of this, a lot of news sources tend to suffer on their score cards because of the lack of points provided by peripheral stories. So, despite the news sources doing what is most profitable, this isn’t necessarily what will best serve the public. In fact, the British journalist Nick Davies and author of Flat Earth News says, “It is these forces of commercialism which now provide the greatest obstacle of truth-telling journalism.”
(McManus, p. 85-87)
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Schooling the News 