S05E02 - Media Bias and Ryan's Desire to Be a Vulcan

We tackle an often discussed topic on the podcast head-on: media bias. Ryan gets Tom and Josh to agree that bias is not an either/or but a continuum, ranging from completely neutral factual information (0 on a 10-point scale) to pure propaganda and lies (10 on a 10-point scale). We start with that point of agreement. Then, everything goes haywire. We turn to an article from thehill.com about a recent Wall Street Journal poll that found Democrats have a very low approval rating to explore bias. Ryan doesn't see any bias in the article because it is factual, while Josh and Tom immediately rate the article somewhere between 3 and 5 in terms of how biased it is, assuming that it is a right-leaning article that is being critical of Democrats (independent evaluations of the website put it as center and neutral, with maybe a slight left-leaning bias). We compare that article to one from NPR and one from Newsmax as well. Regardless, we end up realizing that Ryan approaches mainstream media outlets from the perspective that they are not biased, while Tom and Josh insist that "everyone is selling something" and everything has a bias. We agree that all people have biases, but Ryan is convinced that you can report things in a factual, objective fashion, while Josh and Tom are very dubious of this claim. Ryan's approach is, in part, a result of his occupation - he's a college professor who tries to be objective in the classroom and his professional writing. Josh moonlights as a novelist and sees his goal as trying to get people to feel what he wants them to feel, leading him down a different path. Ryan wants to be as objective as possible in his approach to the world, leading to Josh and Tom calling him a wannabe Vulcan, which Ryan fully embraces.