Nature of News
Newspapers and media outlets should be completely unbiased and, with maybe the exception of the editorial page, keep their noses out of politics. This is the general consensus of the public today. Print and broadcast media are constantly accused of having a liberal bias, or if you are a paper like the Greensburg Trib or an outlet like Fox News, it is a conservative bias that concerns people. And of course all major media sources are suspect because of their dependence on advertisers. Much of this is the subject of Helen MacGill Hughes' chapter "From Politics to Human Interest," from her 1940 book News and the Human Interest Story. Hughes discusses the evolution of newspapers from a vehicle of political parties to the big business enterprises they became 60 years ago, when the article was written. Before newspapers were funded by advertisements, political parties put out their own papers. This was not seen as a conflict of interest -- in fact Hughes notes that people did not trust papers that claimed to be unbiased. The political papers isolated the common man however, which allowed for the birth of news that wasn't all serious and political. These newspapers claimed no party affiliation and were funded almost exclusively by ads. So which is better for the public, an openly biased paper or a paper claiming to be as unbiased as possible? I don't know the answer, although I think the reader needs to be somewhat responsible for seeking news from established and reputable sources. The problem with our current system of big business media is that monopolies control too much of what the public sees.
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I remember reading extensively about liberal bias in the media in my Public Opinion and Propaganda class last fall.
From what I learned, it actually seemed like there was little such bias in print media, probably due to the fact that the "big business" you mention typically subscribes to the conservative ideology rather than the liberal.
The monopolization is indeed a problem to some degree, but is it really plausible that the conservative, big business leaders of the media at the top rung of the ladder can effectively bias the workings of journalists in the newsroom (people often considered to be much lower on the ladder)? The distance between the media leaders and the journalists is sometimes considered a negative, but it can also prove to be a positive, for it gives journalists the relative privacy they need to confidently write stories which are as fair and objective as possible.
That's a very good point, Alex. The commercial mainstream media are beholden to commercial interests, since the content is expensive to produce and deliver -- especially when TV audiences find computer-generated special effects are more "realistic" than the actual footage journalists shoot. Of course, part of the expense in mainstream media is fact-checking and libel-proofing, and we all know how important that is to the credibility of a journalist.