I’ve long-held that the only bias in commercial news media is toward money. Money comes from viewers, listeners, readers… brainwashed entertainment consumers. As Stephenson says, you can sell two things: Products and Entertainment. It’s pretty obvious which things are products, and everything else is entertainment.

This includes all TV news and newspapers. The media conglomerates are not interested in any sort of theoretical duty to the public, and all of them, with the obvious exception of Murdoch’s holdings, don’t have any biased agenda. All they want to do is make money, and they primarily do that by selling fear, but there are plenty of other methods.

The most amusing example to me right now of the total lack of bias, as well as a total lack of honesty is in the electoral projections of commercial media. In short, all the electoral projection sites that aren’t run by the media conglomerates are predicting Obama, while all the big media sites are calling it a much tighter race. Why? A tight race means more viewers.

The next example of a total lack of liberal bias is the fact that they still aren’t giving McCain any flack over his poor military record. They’re quick to talk about crazy preachers, because those are exciting video clips. They’re not so interested in talking about the fact that McCain graduated at the bottom of his class, was a very bad pilot, and didn’t take his job seriously. On the other hand, Rolling Stone has a done great job pointing out that if you’re going to run for president on your military record that maybe you should have a good one.

It’s the sort of thing that will sell for Rolling Stone, but won’t keep folks watching TV. Liberal bias my ass–if there were actually some liberal bias don’t you think they’d be all over this?