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News, whether broadcast or print, is a business. Its customers are advertisers. Its product is audience.

It creates material that is designed to attract its product, audiences. What attracts audiences?

Actual events
Sensationalism
Change
Controversy
Conflict
Celebrity

The news media cannot control actual events. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wars, accidents, etc. happen in their own time. These occurrences are completely independent of what reporters or editors would desire. Sometimes they double or even triple up and at other times nothing is going on for extended periods in terms of events.

Unfortunately, the news media can either completely or, at least, partially control things, other than events, which attract audiences. By slanting, censoring, controlling or omitting context and otherwise manipulating coverage, news organizations can create sensationalism, advocate change, stir controversy, deepen conflict, and, to a degree, generate celebrity.

Think about it. Which of the following headlines is more likely to cause a reader to buy a newspaper or listen to a radio broadcast: City Council Determines Water Supply Treatment Plant Is Not Using Latest Technology OR Is Your Drinking Water Killing You?

Both articles can be about the same set of basic, underlying facts. However, one article can be constructed to artificially emphasize sensationalism, deepen controversy, advocate change, and emphasize conflict where none really existed in any great amount. Viola, the news media has attracted audience and sold it to their customers, the advertisers.

There is one other issue that drives news media: politics. Politics is, be definition, about the control of power. The old “saw” comes into play, here, “information is power.” Controlling information can partially, or completely, control “power,” especially in democracies and republics. Controlling mass information, with advent of the printing press, meant controlling the presses either, directly, in terms of output or, indirectly, in terms of input. Obviously, the term, “press” in this context also means broadcast media as well.

Control can be direct as it was during Joseph Goebbels’ tenure as Hitler’s propaganda minister. Alternately, such control can be indirect as in having selection of all of the news media producers and reporters restricted to a few sources with exactly the same training, graduation criteria and governing philosophy.

The counter to bias in the news media, whether from a desire to attract audience or exercise power, is not demanding noble, public interest and morality from reporters and editors. Such will happen only haphazardly. Rather, the cure for bias in news media is unfettered competition. Audiences will eventually, if not immediately, figure out which sources are biased and gravitate toward competitors that are less so. Advertisers will also figure out which news providers are attracting the largest audiences and capitalism will eventually balance the bias, either in terms of alternative sources that are biased in opposite directions or single sources that have minimum bias. Regardless, both the audiences and advertisers will benefit.