YouTube Biased? Or are Some Missing the Boat?

Conservatives are launching their own YouTube, via ABC News. Umm, why?

YouTube may well have some sort of liberal media bias. Maybe it’s a legitimate complaint, or maybe it’s a conspiracy theory. I haven’t studied the issue, so I’ll back off on that point.

Yet YouTube’s accessible to anyone. If YouTube was around when President Clinton was in the White House, given all of Clinton’s publicized indiscretions, it would have seemed like Fox News Channel.

It’s one thing to have social networks and online communities to gather like-minded users. Yet YouTube is one of those sites that’s a blank slate where anyone can participate. It’s like saying Google or Yahoo has a political bias as a search engine. Theoretically, an algorithm could be adjusted so that such a bias existed, but really the bias is entirely with the users; the engines themselves remain agnostic. It’s up to participants to use the channels more effectively.

If there is some ‘macaca moment’ for one of the Democratic presidential candidates, and we’ll undoubtedly see quite a few, we’ll be watching it on YouTube, MySpace, or another top video site, not some gated community. If it stays in the gates, it’ll just be a handful of people talking to themselves. That’s fine of course, but it’s not what’ll make an impact.