Television bias comes from structural constraints, not practitioners’ politics or censorship

Evidence

But I do not believe that television’s built-in biases can be accounted for in terms of the overt political inclinations—to Left or Right—of its individual practitioners. Indeed, what is far more significant is the way quite different kinds and conditions of men are systematically constrained to handle the variety of news and accounts which they process daily within the framework of a limited set of interpretations. Nor do I believe that the broadcasters are systematically censored and pressured from extrinsic sources except in limited and largely exceptional cases. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 859

Categorization

• XREF: Rejects both the Right’s ‘trendy Left TV man’ thesis and the Left’s censorship thesis; parallels institutionalist explanations of media seen in Bourdieu and later field theory. — connects to: Sponsor-driven television suppressed any programming that contradicted upbeat commercial messages — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 497; The counterculture was co-opted when networks traded relevant programming for viewer attention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 584; The BBC’s political coverage encodes unspoken rules suppressing political seriousness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 738 (+2 more)