rmed. The people tend to be in a passive and uninformed state, basing their decisions not on reality but on illusions as propagated by the media.
The news, notes Bennett, is a consumer good and is thus packaged and sold to the public like any other product. The news broadcast is shaped not by events as much as by rules of how to please the public. The late broadcast always ends with an upbeat feature story that reassures the viewer, for example (Bennett 5). The press has a gatekeeper function that is supposed to serve the public by alerting the people to problems. Just as the consumer is kept passive by the media, so is the media kept passive by economic realities and the tendency to protect the status quo so as not to change the prevailing power of the news to attract an audience (Bennett 17).
An argument that has been directed at the news media for some time is that it has an ideological bias. Most often this means that some conservative group sees a liberal bias in the news media, though liberal groups have purported to find a conservative bias as well. Bennett rightly finds that concerns about bias depend very heavily on the ideological biases of the observer, and he offers a different way of assessing news bias by looking for universal information problems that hinder the efforts of citizens of whatever ideological bent to take part in political life. Bennett finds first of all that the mass media always retreat from any opportunity to explain the power structures and political process behind issues on the public agenda. the media instead concentrate on the people engaged in political combat over issues. This is the information bias of personalization, encouraging people to take an egocentric rather than a socially concerned point of view.
Bennett says a second reporting tendency is to take those stories that are easily dramatized and capsulized. This is a particular problem with television news, where there a...