Is the US Media Really Factual & Unbiased?

          I found myself slightly lost when I sat down to write this blog, so I looked through my notes to find something I remembered to be interesting.  I ended up stopping on notes from chapter two.  I remembered that the Political Involvement spectrum that was up on the board actually made perfect sense to me.  It involved the three media models as stated by Hallin and Mancini: Liberal Model, Democratic Corporatist Model, and Polarized Pluralist Model.  The spectrum started with the Liberal Model as having the least amount of political involvement and spanned all the way to the Polarized Pluralist Model as having the most.  Curran makes sure to say, “Their [Hallin and Mancini] scholarly mission is to deteremine not whether a media system is good or bad, but to describe what it is and how it is” (Curran 28).  I chose the Liberal Model because that is the category that the US fell into, among three other countries.  There are a couple points that Hallin and Mancini stress.  They talk about the US, as well as Canada, Ireland, and Britain, as having “market-dominated, fact-centered journalism” and “professionally orientated journalists” (Curran 29).
            To start off, Curran, through Hallin and Mancini, makes one of his main points to say that the US media is journalism centered on facts.  That is what our media system is built upon but there are definitely times where that isn’t the case.  I wanted to find examples to disprove the all-powerful James Curran simply because I think it makes for a more compelling paper.  So, I found a video from CNN about the recent Navy Yard Shooting.  This video discusses how several news sources reported on the name of the suspect as Rollie Chance.  [Granted, this mistake was not purposely devised by any politician or political group, but it was still incorrect information that got put out there because the news media was in a hurry to be the first to name the killer.  The decision to release an unverified name is brought on by money because the first news station to get the name out there will have the most views and therefore make more money.  It is political in the sense that the station that breaks the most news first will be on top of all the other news stations.]  The real shooter was in fact discovered to be Aaron Alexis, but more importantly than that, it shows that there are certainly exceptions to Curran's classification of the Liberal Model and the United States’ inclusion in that model.
            The need for quick, breaking-news reporting in this scenario got me thinking what other things the media got wrong.  I found another news video, this one from Fox News, talking about the bias of left-wing liberals in the media.  He was saying that they used this very raw, very recent incident (as they seem to do with every mass shooting incident) to call for more gun control laws.  Bill O’Reilly also talks about how every media outlet was incorrectly reporting that Alexis had used an AR-15 assault rifle, which goes along with my previous point against Curran.  This other idea brought forward by O’Reilly also directly conflicts with Curran’s point about professional journalists.  Curran states that the US, being a part of the Liberal Model of media, has professional, un-biased journalists.  O’Reilly is directly refuting that statement.  He calls out left-wingers, saying they used the recent fatalities as proof that the gun laws need amended.  He’s saying that news stations used these left-winger’s statements even though they are extremely biased.
            I feel mistakes by the media make the citizens’ less informed in the immediate short term, but ultimately they become more careful about what to believe.  Thus, they look up information on their own to be more informed, so as to not be “duped” by the hastiness of the American media again.  This makes citizens more engaged with online and social media news sources.

            Basically, Curran’s points were valid, but I found two instances where his Liberal Model was not a catch-all for everything in the US media and that there is definitely some overlap into the other two categories.  First, CNN showed that the news stations don’t always report factual journalism.  There are instances where facts aren’t confirmed but are reported anyways.  Secondly, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News reported on the bias of left-wing news stations broadcasting footage of liberal politicians using this Navy Yard Shooting as proof that we need more gun control laws.  These both go against Hallin and Mancini’s points, presented by Curran, that the US media is centered on facts and reported by un-biased professionals.