Excerpt from: "The Daily News vs. The Real News
Two Distorted Views of Reality"

...The Real News (made up of striking journalists) also plays on sympathy to increase its legitimacy. For instance, Joel Burton, a 60 year old copy editor was striking with the rest of the union people. After going on strike, Joel's mother died. He felt she died worrying about his job. While posting up a notice on the bulletin board, suggesting Guild strikers send checks to Greyhound strikers in his mother's name (p.2. Mike McAlary), he "grabbed his chest and died!" This is an obvious play on the readers' compassion. A man and his mother died - not because of old age, or illness, but because of the Tribune Company and their efforts to bust the unions and fire hundreds of employees. Whether or not these people did die because of the strike is unimportant. They have become martyrs for the cause to some degree. This too can damage the credibility of the Daily News, but only if the public believes.

The Real News utilizes bias in two ways. It reverses the role of dominant organization bias towards non-dominant organizations. In other words, the Real News is biased against the Daily News. Therefore, any story about the Daily News will be depicted in a negative light. This is the exact same process the Daily News follows towards the strikers.

The second type of bias resembles the original dominant organization to non-dominant organization format. There are lower people on the "totem pole" below strikers. They are the people that replace the strikers at work - they are the scabs. The scabs are treated in the same way by the Real News as the strikers are treated by the Daily News. They are considered deviant from the unions because they are not part of them and they are not supporting their fellow journalists. But in essence, this only perpetuates what the strikers are fighting against in the first place. You could say that the Real News takes on the role of dominant organization towards the scabs.

Now that the avenues of self interest and bias have been explored, it is time to look at how this affects the way the public receives its information. Since both parties only tell the sides of the story that are in their own self interest, then other aspects of a story or situation will not be reported. The Daily News slants all of its strike related stories in favor of themselves. They do not admit to be at fault and they do not accept the fact that the unions may have just cause to be on strike. In the same respect, the Real News slants their stories in their own favor. Because of this, the public is missing alot of middle ground. The reader is being deprived of the facts that would make the story coherent and digestible.

The public should not have to make assumptions. The news is supposed to be informative and insightful! But in most cases the news is fragmented, personalized, normalized, or dramatized - so the public loses sight of the real issues and receives a packaged product that we are asked to ingest without question.