Political bias is evident in cross-cultural international news communication. News in Western media tends to associate developing countries with negative concepts such as chaos, war, backwardness, and tyranny. The subject matter of the report focuses on political and social issues. Territorial issues, human rights issues, democracy issues, religious freedom, and population issues are also the focus of their attention, so the report’s tone is more negative than positive.
For example, on September 30, 2005, Denmark’s largest circulation newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published a caricature entitled “Muhammad’s Face” with the editor’s note: “Some Muslims refuse to accept the non-religious modern society, and they insist on their religious special feelings and way of life. However, such insistence is incompatible with the spirit of democracy and the opposite of freedom of speech…” The meaning expressed by the cartoon seriously hurt the feelings of The Muslim people and aroused strong dissatisfaction in the Islamic world. Within two weeks, the incident erupted, causing protests and violence among Muslims all over the world. In this incident, the Western media attacked Muslims’ democratic and religious issues, linking the Muslim nation with terrorism and authoritarianism, which is a typical case of media prejudice and even discrimination.

As a media person, no matter the reporter or the editor or the producer, they should stick to the truth from facts, establish exact news values, report the truth of news facts, and do not exaggerate or distort news facts sensationalism and political bias. Those biased and untrue reports fundamentally violate the principles of objectivity and authenticity of news reports.

In the United States, mainstream information magazines related to political stand can be roughly divided into current political information, business, and culture. First of all, Time and Newsweek’s comprehensive news magazine is the most well-known magazine media. These magazines are characterized by large circulation and a wide audience. Because they are comprehensive magazines, many pages also involve sports, culture, entertainment, science, technology, etc. Moreover, the editorial policy tends to plan topics on the hottest topics in the world. It makes even less sense to trumpet your political leanings there, especially given the international readership and coverage (Time has multiple versions for different regions). As a result, these magazines rarely have a clear political bias.

The political bias in business magazines is also less obvious. But The political magazines represented by The New Republic and The Nation. Here the distinction is more prominent. The New Republic leans slightly towards liberalism on fiscal policy and social issues. Here can be understood as TNR democratic fans. After all, 04 and election 08, TNR publicly supports the democratic candidate, and defend include Medicare and set up the environmental protection agency (EPA, widely criticized based on the background of “big government” administrative agency’s bloated case), the federal policy. However, now the tendency has not so strong compared to the 1970 s.