The history of media bias in the United States has evolved from overtly partisan newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries to professional journalism with ethical standards in the 20th century and into the 21st century, where the Internet enabled anyone to become a journalist and the public stopped paying for their news, leaving socially responsible journalism difficult to sustain and the floodgates open to people who lack education or training in journalism to publish news stories with little effort or knowledge. Early newspapers often reflected the views of their publishers, with competing papers presenting differing opinions. Government interventions, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and press suppression during the Civil War, demonstrated tensions between political authorities and the media.
Throughout the 20th century, media ownership consolidated, and journalistic standards were established. Public trust in news was relatively high during the mid-century, though divisions remained. The civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and Watergate scandal highlighted media influence and accusations of bias. The introduction of cable news and later social media in the 21st century intensified concerns about polarization, misinformation, and media trust. Issues of bias extend to coverage of race, gender, and international conflicts. Studies indicate disparities in reporting on different racial groups and gender representation in the media. U.S. coverage of foreign affairs, particularly in regions like the Middle East and China, has also been scrutinized for favoring specific perspectives.
Political bias in journalism has been debated extensively, with accusations directed at both liberal and conservative media. Studies suggest audiences seek news aligning with their views, and media organizations may cater to these preferences. Corporate ownership, advertising revenue, and government influence have also been cited as factors shaping media narratives. The rise of digital and social media has further altered news consumption, enabling widespread information sharing but also contributing to misinformation and echo chambers. Trust in mainstream media has declined, with increasing skepticism about its objectivity. Media watchdogs, fact-checking organizations, and efforts to assess bias continue to play a role in addressing concerns about the accuracy and fairness of news reporting.
History Before the rise of professional journalism in the early 20th century and the conception of media ethics, newspapers reflected the opinions of the publisher. Frequently, an area would be served by competing newspapers taking differing and often radical views by modern standards. In colonial Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was an early and forceful advocate for presenting all sides of an issue, writing, for instance, in his "An Apology For Printers" that "when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, (2004) p 66 From around 1790 to the late 1800s, most American newspapers were partisan.
In 1798, the Federalist Party in control of Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts designed to weaken the opposition press. It prohibited the publication of "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government and made it a crime to voice any public opposition to any law or presidential act. This part of the act was in effect until 1801.Walter Berns, "Freedom of the Press and the Alien and Sedition Laws: A Reappraisal." The Supreme Court Review 1970 (1970): 109–159. Thomas Jefferson, president from 1801 to 1809, was frequently attacked in the press. He advised editors to divide their newspapers into four sections labeled "truth", "probabilities", "possibilities", and "lies", and observed that the first section would be the smallest and the last the largest. After retiring, he said that "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."Harvey G. Zeidenstein, "White House Perceptions of News Media Bias," Presidential Studies Quarterly 13#3 (1983), pp. 345–356; quotes at p 345. online
In 1861, Federal officials identified newspapers that supported the Confederate cause and ordered many of them closed.Jennifer Weber, "Lincoln's Critics: The Copperheads." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 32.1 (2011): 33–47. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Northern newspaper editors for publishing articles alleged to have been sympathetic to the Confederacy. In the 19th century, the accessibility of cheap newspapers allowed the market to expand exponentially. Cities typically had multiple competing newspapers supporting various political factions in each party. To some extent this was mitigated by a separation between news and editorial. News reporting was expected to be relatively neutral or at least factual, whereas editorial sections openly relayed the opinion of the publisher. Editorials often were accompanied by editorial cartoons, which lampooned the publisher's opponents.W. David Sloan (Editor), Lisa Mullikin Parcell (Editor), American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices (2002),
Small ethnic newspapers serviced people of various ethnicities, such as Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, Poles, and Italians. Large cities had numerous foreign-language newspapers, magazines and publishers. They typically were boosters who supported their group's positions on public issues. They disappeared as their readership increasingly became assimilated. In the 1960s and 70s, an effort began to collect these ethnic newspapers in order to preserve their history and increase their accessibility to the general public. In the 20th century, newspapers in various Asian languages, and also in Spanish and Arabic, appeared and are still published, read by newer immigrants.Hanno Hardt. "The Foreign‐Language Press in American Press History." Journal of communication 39.2 (1989): 114–131.
Starting in the 1890s, a few very high-profile metropolitan newspapers engaged in yellow journalism to increase sales. They emphasized sports, sex, scandal, and sensationalism. The leaders of this style of journalism in New York City were William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.W. Joseph Campbell, Yellow journalism: Puncturing the myths, defining the legacies (Greenwood, 2001). Hearst falsified or exaggerated sensational stories about atrocities in Cuba and the sinking of the USS Maine to boost circulation. Hearst falsely claimed that he had started the war, but in fact the nation's decision makers paid little attention to his demands—President McKinley, for example, did not read the yellow journals.
The Progressive Era, from the 1890s to the 1920s, was reform-oriented. From 1905 to 1915, the muckraker style exposed malefaction in city government and industry. Academic Richard A. Hogarty, when discussing muckraker William E. Sackett's critical coverage of Lion Abbett, notes that while many of Sackett's criticisms were justified, he had a tendency "to exaggerate, misinterpret, and oversimplify events", which Hogarty found typical of muckraking journalists. The term was popularized by President Theodore Roosevelt, who said that "the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.""'Muckraker: 2 Meanings", The New York Times, April 10, 1985.
The Dearborn Independent, a weekly magazine owned by Henry Ford and distributed free through Ford dealerships, published conspiracy theories about international Jewry in the 1920s. A favorite trope of the anti-Semitism that raged in the 1930s was the allegation that Jews controlled Hollywood and the media. Charles Lindbergh in 1941 claimed American Jews, possessing outsized influence in Hollywood, the media, and the Roosevelt administration, were pushing the nation into war against its interests.Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II (2013) pp 375–92. Lindbergh received a storm of criticism; the Gallup poll reported that support for his foreign policy views fell to 15%. Hans Thomsen, the senior diplomat at the German Embassy in Washington, reported to Berlin that his efforts to place pro-isolationist articles in American newspapers had failed. "Influential journalists of high repute will not lend themselves, even for money, to publishing such material." Thomsen set up a publishing house to produce anti-British books, but almost all of them went unsold.Olson, Those Angry Days p 125. In the years leading up to World War II, the pro-Nazi German American Bund accused the media of being controlled by Jews. They claimed that reports of German mistreatment of Jews were biased and without foundation. They said that Hollywood was a hotbed of Jewish bias, and called for Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator to be banned as an insult to a respected leader.Louis Pizzitola, Hearst Over Hollywood, (quoting William Randolph Hearst) "Lindburg makes a still graver charge when he says that the 'greatest danger' to this country lies in the 'ownership' and 'influence' of the radio, motion pictures, and 'our government'." (Quoting Douglas Fairbanks) "He [Joe Kennedy] apparently threw the fear of god into many of our producers and executives by telling them that the Jews were on the spot, and that they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures...", Columbia University Press, 2002,
A 1956 American National Election Study found that 66% of Americans thought newspapers were fair, including 78% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats. A 1964 poll by the Roper Organization asked a similar question about network news, and 71% thought network news was fair. A 1972 poll found that 72% of Americans trusted CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite. According to Jonathan M. Ladd's Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters, "institutional journalists were [once] powerful guardians of the republic, maintaining high standards of political discourse."Jonathan M. Ladd, Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, Princeton University Press, 2011,
During the American civil rights movement, conservative newspapers strongly slanted their news about civil rights, blaming the unrest among Southern Blacks on communists.Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Best: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, Vintage, 2007, . In some cases, Southern television stations refused to air programs such as I Spy and Star Trek because of their racially mixed casts.Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, Berkley, 1995, Newspapers supporting civil rights, labor unions, and aspects of liberal social reform were often accused by conservative newspapers of communist bias. In November 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew made a landmark speech denouncing what he saw as media bias against the Vietnam War. He called those opposed to the war the "nattering nabobs of negativism"."
Starting in the 21st century, social media became a major source of bias, since anyone could post anything without regard to its accuracy. Social media has, on the one hand, allowed all views to be heard, but on the other hand has provided a platform for the most extreme bias. In 2010, President Barack Obama expressed his fear that Fox News's conservative-biased "'opinionated' reporting is 'ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of the United States. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that the audience of news was polarized along political alignments. In 2015, after the launch of Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, the media began to critique Trump's statements by using the term "fake news". In late 2015, Donald Trump began addressing his concern with the fairness of the media by co-opting the phrase, claiming that much of the information relayed in the media was "fake news".