Thank you, YouTube! Take that, Dan Rather (wherever you are)! That's the sentiment of Karen Prior, who points out that the proliferation of media is a good thing for those seeking truth. There's simply too much information out there for any single medium to, by itself, shape our perceptions of the world. Yes, a particular medium or media outlet can lie; but the explosion of information sources (e.g.,YouTube) makes it difficult for any single medium to dominate our worldview. The death of lying? Maybe. Read on...

Media and cultural critic and NYU professor Todd Gitlin tells the parable of a customs officer who for years pulled over the same suspicious truck driver at his border stop. Convinced the driver was conveying some sort of contraband, the officer conducted detailed, exhaustive searches of the driver, his truck, and all its parts, and each time found nothing. Years later, as he was about to retire, the officer begged the driver to tell him what he had been smuggling across the border all these years. "Trucks," said the driver.

The point of the story is that concerns about the messages or effects of media often overlook the larger ways in which the mass media have altered our lives and our very way of thinking. In other words, what "the media have been smuggling," says Gitlin, is "the habit of living."

Media Trumps Mom

Just as in Gitlin's parable the truck doesn't carry the contraband but is the contraband, so in the famous words of media guru Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message." By message, McLuhan means not just the content conveyed, but the way a new technology changes the way we think about things and the way we relate to each other and the world. The content of the medium, on the other hand, actually "blinds us to the character of the medium" and thus to its "message."
The first televised presidential debate, held in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, is perhaps the most famous example of what McLuhan was talking about. While those who only listened to the debate on the radio declared Nixon the winner, television viewers thought Kennedy had won, a discrepancy analysts attribute to Nixon's considerably less photogenic appearance in comparison to Kennedy. Thus the "message" of the televised debate was not the content in the exchange between candidates, but rather the alteration of the public's view of the candidates based on how they presented themselves visually rather than on the substance of the debate.

Put simply, the form of the medium shapes the message. Or, as your mother used to tell you, it's not just what you say, but how you say it.

To understand the relationship between "medium" and "message" in this way, then, is to understand the redundancy of the phrase "media bias." Every medium is inherently biased because every medium inheres in its message. To understand the nature of the message, we must understand the nature of the medium.

The Medium Is The Message...Yada, Yada, Yada

No one explains this concept more clearly than the late, great media critic, Neil Postman. In his 1985 polemic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman laments the passing of the Age of Typography into the Age of Television and, with this passing, the diminishing ability for critical thinking that a literate culture fosters. Certain forms of media exclude certain forms of thought, Postman argues: you can't do philosophy with smoke signals and you can't communicate authentic religious experience through the boob tube. Furthermore, media do more than simply convey messages; certain media actually give rise to messages that wouldn't have existed without the medium to communicate them. For example, Postman points out, there wasn't any such thing as "news" until the technology existed that made it possible to communicate events quickly enough to constitute "news." In this way, media has the power to not merely shape reality, but indeed to create it.

But reality is not the same thing as truth.

According to Jacques Ellul, a sociologist and theologian who explores the implications of modern society's "dangerous addiction to images" in The Humiliation of the Word, "reality" refers to the state of objective, concrete, observable existence, while "truth" pertains to abstract notions of human meaning, relationship, and destiny. Ellul cautions that one of the greatest temptations of our modern, technological world is to mistake one for the other. Matters of truth are open to reflection, dialogue, and critical distance; reality, being based in facts, is not. You can't argue with a fact (nor with a visual image), but you can argue about the meaning of a fact (or an image). Reality concerns which candidate is ahead in the polls, the Federal Reserve's adjustment of the prime rate, and which designer's dress adorns an Oscar-nominated Hollywood ingénue. Truth, on the other hand, concerns a husband's guilt over a failing marriage, a young girl's dreams of becoming an Olympic athlete, and the belief that love is a higher law.

Thus to understand the true nature of media bias is to understand that bias involves much more than choosing to cover some stories rather than others, using this sound bite instead of that one, or selecting certain terminology to describe a group, movement, or event. Media bias stems from the very nature of the medium itself. Certain media are well-suited to conveying reality, the concrete facts of daily existence. But such do not constitute the whole truth of human existence. Visual media can really only convey messages about reality. Ideas about truth must be conveyed through language, through the word. Given the inherent limitations of every medium, media bias is, ultimately, inevitable. But it is not insurmountable.

Truth, Justice & The Internet Way?

Countering the inevitability of media bias requires a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the medium itself, what it must do and what it cannot do. Television and YouTube, for example, by their very natures, must present visual images; those visual images must be cut and edited, and decontextualized and are thus inherently distorted and incomplete. Furthermore, as Postman explains, a visual image "makes no arguable propositions"; it "offers no assertions to refute, so it is not refutable." Media such as newspapers and blogs, those that rely primarily on language rather than image, send very different "messages," in McLuhan's sense of the term. For language is propositional and refutable; unlike an image, words can be determined to be either true or false. Thus critical thinking is an inherent "message" in media that emphasize language over imagery.

Postman, who wrote in the Age of Television, well before the widespread availability and use of the Internet, feared that the masses would be overtaken by "the technologies that undo their capacities to think." But the Age of Television has been surpassed by the Age of the Internet. And the Internet brings us back, at least in part, to the Age of Typography. For the Internet - despite the visual nature of its layout, its use of slick graphics, and the ubiquity of its pop-ups - is a world of words, a world where the excesses and distortions of any one medium or message are countered by an endless barrage of bloggers, pundits, webzines, and commentators - and their armies of readers.

McLuhan defines a medium as any extension of ourselves, that is, of the human body: a hammer extends the hand; the wheel, the foot; and language, thought. The electronic media, then, are extensions of the extension - extending many, many thoughts to many, many people many, many times. With modern man so unalterably extended, there is not likely to be any shrinking back toward anything approaching his natural dimensions. But perhaps in striving toward a balance of extensions - resisting the overuse of any extension at the expense of another - modern man might correct the bias inherent in any one medium and achieve a more natural proportion of both himself and his thought.

To Know More...

Ellul, Jacques. The Humiliation of the Word. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985.

Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin,