Cable News, 24 hour news or political control?

Lately I've been finding that all the cable news networks seem to be espousing a semi-conservative attitude, a highly conservative attitude, or a mildly liberal attitude. Should news really be about politics? Should we allow the pundits to control our thoughts? Who are the worst culprits?

Please, discuss and deconstruct.

The media has always been guilty of deliberately biasing their material, nothing is produced without some editorially-driven political leaning (although obviously less so in certain cases it is still there). I guess the question is why, or to be accuratem who is responsible for this. Certainly in the case of the US I think the government has a lot of indirect power over what can be shown (going by anecdotes here from my American relations who noticed the differences in the way Iraq was reported here).

Ideally news would be reported completely objectively, but realistically that won't happen because
1)it is designed to get ratings (profit takes precedence) and pure facts are boring
and
2)it is frankly impossible for someone to be completely objective about something.

It is good that you bring this up though, I wonder how many people realise the motivations behind everything, and bias is not always immediately obvious. It's important that we form our own opinions from an assessment of as many sources as possible.

[edit on 3/6/2006 by Zoid]

Every station has its own agenda and a political opinion aswell.

Take the BBC, for example, its extremely biased on certain issues, regarding the Government, Iraq and everything to do with Israel. (Israeli bias should be taken lightly)

its strange to say this, but news nowadays has to be entertainment.

Originally posted by andy1033
its strange to say this, but news nowadays has to be entertainment.

of course. The news thinks we are some dimwits who are only interested in what goes on in the big brother house than the security and well-being of our own country