Denyse O’Leary’s presentation to Write! Canada conference:
People sometimes say that newspapers are in decline because they are biased, but – as I have pointed out before – they tended to become more biased when they were in decline. The more publicly vital a source of news is, the less it can be merely ideologically driven.
(Or, put another way, how many air traffic controllers are allowed to rant their political and moral opinions to pilots?)
Bias doesn’t matter any more because readers can just go elsewhere for news.
In fact, the new social media can be much more biased. Consumers organize their own media world and systematically shut out what they don’t want to hear. (Of course, people have always shut out what they didn’t want to hear but it never used to be as easy to organize a whole world around it.)
