For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has embraced a neat trick: by claiming that literally anything in factual opposition to their beliefs is “biased” and therefore must be discarded as unreliable, they’ve bullied U.S. media into becoming a feckless mess terrified of accusations of “liberal bias.”
Of course, if you ask the actual media academics who study U.S. media bias, they’ll quickly tell you that the U.S. media generally veers toward center-right corporatism because we’ve let it consolidate at the hands of center-right billionaires. The obvious result is a hot feckless mess that lacks the courage to speak truth to power, something that became obvious to even the most obtuse with the rise of U.S. authoritarianism.
Still, this idea that the U.S. media is “too woke” and “has a liberal bias” is central to the generational Republican mission of creating a press that only exists to make affluent Conservatives happy.
That’s what the right inevitably does.
They lie constantly. They invariably lie to others and in many cases (the ones who at least have some hint of principles and a conscience) they lie to themselves. They have to, because their ideology is really nothing more than hate and selfishness.
So of course they see bias everywhere. They’ve invested all this time and effort in their media bubbles having apologists convince them that they’re moral and upright and honorable, then as soon as they step out of their bubbles, they’re hit with the truth that they’re just selfish and hateful, and since that truth runs counter to their carefully cultivated delusions, they can only see it as “bias.”
And since their delusions are just that, the only way they can ensure that that’s what they see instead of the truth they don’t want to face is to introduce real bias.
And that’s exactly what they do, over and over and over again.