HUM 115 : Critical Thinking

Al Jazeera English is headquartered in Doha, Qatar, with broadcasts to more than 220 million households in more than 100 countries. The network can be viewed and searched through the internet via websites, online TV providers and mobile apps.

British public service broadcaster headquartered in London, BBC is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff. It has operated since 1932 under a Royal Charter to provide impartial public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. Within the United Kingdom its work is funded principally by an annual television license fee, charged to all British households, companies and organizations using any type of equipment to record and/or receive live television broadcasts. It also provides services by direct broadcasting, re-transmission by sound radio, television & online.

A print and online publication by a news organization owned by the First Church of Christ Scientist & based in Boston since 1908, It focuses on international and US news and features, The Monitor does not rely primarily on wire services, but has its own writers based in 11 countries, as well as throughout the US.

International news, politics, business, finance, science and technology published in print and online, with archives dating to 1997, plus a variety of web-only content, including blogs, debates, audio & video. Since 1928, half the shares have been owned by the Financial Times, a subsidiary of Pearson, the other half by a group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff. Offices in New York, London and San Francisco, and worldwide editorial staff.

Cable & satellite television news channel owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Created by Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who hired former NBC executive Roger Ailes as the founding CEO, the channel was launched on October 7, 1996. As of April 2009, the channel was available to 102 million households in the United States and to viewers internationally, broadcasting primarily from its New York studios.

As commercial radio listeners declined with the advent of TV, public radio & public TV developed on college and university campuses. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which Congress called upon to encourage "the growth and development of non-commercial radio." Today NPR includes digital media as well as radio. It produces news, talk, music & entertainment programs & distributes programs produced by local member stations.

A web-based and mobile publication with 6 million unique visitors per month who spend an average time of 10 minutes on the site. 78% of readers visit the site daily. Founded in 2000 by former options trader John McIntyre and former advertising agency account executive Tom Bevan, Forbes Media LLC bought a 51% equity interest in the site in 2007.

The Standard is the first free English daily newspaper in Hong Kong, with an audited circulation of 222,413 copies a day. Since becoming a free newspaper in September 2007, the paper has been distributed Monday through Friday throughout Hong Kong and maintains a web presence including archives.

The proliferation of opinion and overt partisanship in cable news raises questions about how audiences perceive this content. Of particular interest is whether audiences effectively perceive bias in opinionated news programs, and the extent to which there are partisan differences in these perceptions. Results from a series of three online experiments produce evidence for a relative hostile media phenomenon in the context of opinionated news. Although, overall, audiences perceive more story and host bias in opinionated news than in non-opinionated news, these perceptions-particularly perceptions of the host-vary as a function of partisan agreement with the news content. Specifically, issue partisans appear to have a 'bias against bias,' whereby they perceive less bias in opinionated news with which they are predisposed to agree than non-partisans and especially partisans on the other side of the issue.

This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries.