Conservative bias in the media?

In response to the accounts of liberal bias in the media, many argue that such bias can't exist – if anything, there's a conservative bias, because the media are all owned by big corporations.

Of course, this doesn't follow – Disney, for example, is not known for its conservative positions on much of anything. However, even if we stipulate that all big corporations are ipso facto conservative, we find that news divisions enjoy considerable independence (indeed, almost total immunity) from corporate control.

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When Fred Friendly and Ed Murrow created the modern broadcast news division at CBS in the 1940s and 1950s, they explicitly set it up as an independent division within CBS. Not only was CBS News managed an edited independently of CBS proper, it was explicitly offered as a public service. The general understanding within CBS was that the News Division wouldn't have to turn a profit—indeed, it was generally acknowledged that the provision of news by the network would be a net cost for the network. It existed in its own special bubble in CBS, with a clear separation of responsibility between network management and the editorial staff, who were solely responsible for the content the News Division would broadcast. Both Murrow and Friendly, and the executives and editors that followed them, felt this structure was vitally important to the credibility of the News Division, in terms of preventing it from becoming a corporate shill. In general, the other networks , ABC and NBC, followed this formula more or less to the letter. The reason that GE or Disney don't try to screw with news coverage is that they rightly fear the results of upsetting people who "buy ink by the barrel." The second that Viacom or GE tried to mandate news coverage, in any way shape or form, the News Division would erupt in complete anti-corporate hysteria. The corporate bosses would be subjected to endless news stories about how they were trying to muzzle the free press, destroy freedom of speech, and to turn the holy public service that is news coverage into an arm of corporate PR. No corporate executive with an ounce of sanity has any interest at all in provoking a nasty public fight over news coverage that is likely to accomplish nothing more than to make corporate management look like goose-stepping fascists. What possible outcome would be worth the trouble? So, corporate ownership in the cases cited is simply irrelevant. Editors and reporters control the viewpoints and biases that appear in their reportage, and corporate management keeps its mouth shut. In return, the management of the News Divisions have, since the 1980s, tried to ensure that the News Divisions are at least marginally profitable.