An Examination of Media Bias
- Jalon McGregor
- Mar 31, 2025
- 3 min read
It is very well known that there are certain biases present in nearly all, if not all, media sites. These biases can be as innocuous as replacing certain words with others that have different connotations, or they can be as obvious as just not reporting on a certain issue, or diminishing its importance. To examine the biases that occur on both ends of the political spectrum, I examined an article from Fox News and a column from CNN that both covered the same topic, the semi-recent Signal group chat leak. (Clarification: This article in no way means to reflect my own political views at all, it is an unbiased and neutral view of how both Democratic news sources and Republican news sources can have bias in their coverage of major political events.)
Firstly, let's cover CNN. The column conveys a very critical tone, stating that the leaked messages from the group chat contained sensitive military information and heavily criticizes the Trump administration both for allowing the messages to be leaked as well as downplaying the importance of the messages. Using phrases such as “While [the Trump Administration] denied there was a “war plan”, the text messages published Wednesday offer an extremely detailed description of the coming strike, including the airplanes and drones used.” This sentence directly criticized the Trump administration for what, in their eyes, was a misleading public statement made by the new government. The story goes on to state that this was a near-irredeemable offense by the government, going so far as to include a quote from a defense official that says, “It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court martialed for this,” the defense official added. “We don’t provide that level of information on unclassified systems, in order to protect the lives and safety of the servicemembers carrying out these strikes. If we did, it would be wholly irresponsible. My most junior analysts know not to do this.” Clearly, CNN paints the incident in a harsh light and includes many words and phrases with extremely negative connotations. Now, let’s go and see what Fox had to say about this incident.
The article that I am about to show you is a textbook example of how bias can affect the media. Both the CNN column and this story from Fox News, discuss the same topic, but the stark differences in framing had me double checking that this was the same Signal leak. The article opens with the title “Dems have long history of supporting encrypted Signal app ahead of Trump chat leak” and a sub heading of representative Jasmine Crockett endorsing the messaging app. The story goes on to say how Democrats have long supported using Signal, despite only citing one example from Mrs. Crockett, although they did cite that multiple times. Then, the article covers the Trump administration's public denial that the war plans were confidential. Despite this article being released after the actual text messages were shown, including the ones seemingly planning an attack on Houthi rebels. In addition, the article states that the protocol for using Signal as one of the governmental messaging apps was established “under the Biden administration”. In all, this article focuses a lot of attention and blame on Democrats setting the precedent to use Signal, and little to none on the fact that it wasn’t the apps fault that the National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added an outsider, Editor-In-Chief of the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldburg, to an official government group chat with allegedly confidential information.
When presented side-by-side, you can see the extremely stark differences between the articles published by the media with opposing political views. Now you may ask, why would people publish articles with such bias? The answer lies in the fact that it is human nature to want to be right. Humans want to feel correct and superior at all times, so why would you click on an article that said that your favorite political party messed up when you could click on one that says that your chosen politician is perfect and never makes mistakes? The media outlets know this and thus, they gear their articles to make you want to click. That is one of the major sources of the tense political division in this country, and it is something that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents should all be working to stop so we can make our own decisions and form our own opinions about events and facts free of media bias.