Principle Three: The media are driven by commercial interests. The vast majority of media outlets are commercial enterprises, driven by a bottom-line desire for profit. This has a great deal to do with how the news is presented, how the readers or audience are addressed, and how issues are framed. As Neil Postman and Steve Powers explained, much of what we see on television news is designed "to keep viewers watching so that they will be exposed to commercials." Thus, producers and news directors are driven to cover stories that offer visual interest, regardless of news value. As the old newsroom adage goes, "If it bleeds, it leads." Images often displace words, and a distorted picture of reality results. Furthermore, the commercial interest of broadcast news means that viewers must be held over a period of time by enticements. That is why news anchors advertise upcoming stories and, as C. John Sommerville of the University of Florida explains, "string us along." As Sommerville argues, "The techniques of stringing us along show that the news industry is not as interested in satisfying a hunger as in creating an addiction." The media have a commercial product to sell, and that product is television commercials.

Principle Four: The media elite is demographically and ideologically removed from the world inhabited by most Americans. As researchers S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter argued over two decades ago, the news business is now largely in the hands of a "media elite." As these researchers made clear, this media elite is comprised of persons from a very thin slice of the American population. They are highly educated, socially mobile, metropolitan in focus, and overwhelmingly liberal in terms of ideological bias. They have often attended America's most prestigious universities, they were often radicalized by the 1960s, Vietnam, and the Watergate experience, and they see the news media as an opportunity to revolutionize society. As Robert and Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman described the media elite, "In their attitudes toward sex and sex roles, members of the media elite are virtually unanimous in opposing both governmental and traditional constraints. A large majority opposes government regulation of sexual activities, upholds a pro-choice position on abortion, and rejects the notion that homosexuality is wrong. In fact, a slight majority would not characterize adultery as wrong." Does the coalescence of leading journalists into a media elite make a difference? Bernard Goldberg, a long-time veteran of CBS News, poses the questions this way: "Do we really think that if the media elites worked out of Nebraska instead of New York, and if they were overwhelmingly social conservatives instead of liberals, and if they overwhelmingly voted for Nixon and Reagan instead of McGovern and Mondale . . . do we really think that would make no difference? Does anyone really believe that the evening newscast would fundamentally be the same?" No sane person can believe this would make no difference, and in the case of media bias, naivete is deadly.