Media's Menus.

Media, it's our lifeline to the outside world, the world that never seems to stop whirling about. Day after day we check our smartphones, Internet sites and of course sit in front of our televisions to be fed the latest news that is floating around Washington and the world. Media is our main means of mass communication, but does it always give us the whole picture? Though you may not think about it while watching your daily dose of news, those stations you watch do have a slight bias, some more than others. Media tends to literally spoon feed us information that we want to confirm and support our own political views. Of course this takes a little searching on our part to find media stations, websites, and other sources that support our views. Yet once we have found these comfort zones, we only shy away when we need to confirm to ourselves that our politics is the superior view. Yet we can't give all the blame to the media we surround ourselves with, we carry our own bias as well. Media is basically an enabler for us to get more of our view confirming information faster and more often. Like the cartoon above suggest media does spoon feed us but note that "we" the character in the cartoon, prepare ourselves for this almost every day ritual. Media can be viewed as a restaurant that we come to everyday and eat the exact same meal. There may be those days when we try something new from another restaurant and just don't like the meal at all, so the next day we again go back to that restaurant where they know us by heart.

Out of all the media we use to compile information from, television can be the most controversial. We can watch the same story on three different stations, all the while those three different stations give three almost completely different takes on that story. This is because television is based mainly on visual aids and visual aids are extremely easy to manipulate. When your argument is almost based solely on visuals it's very easy to cut out specific aspects that you would not necessarily want the public to see on your station. Television stations can easily manipulate footage they have captured and they replay us only what supports that stations overall view. Although we as viewers would argue that our stations have no bias, they are there, whether we want to admit it or not. Television may not be our number way of viewing news anymore but we cannot exclude those same stations websites. Media may be moving past watching news on television but we still watch news on the web. If we get used to watching a specific television station, it is more than likely that we use that stations website and maybe even follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

Just because the media has started to fall away from the use of television does not mean that the web is free from this media bias. Television stations post videos of their shows and other videos of topics that they covering. These videos are just as likely to be skewed as television. Media in all its forms has complete control of what they chose to show, just as we have control as to what sources we chose to trust and watch. Media has been skewing our views for years. Will we ever ask ourselves what we are not getting from our trusted stations? Or we will continue to put on our bib and sit in front our trust media sources and be spoon-fed the information we seek.