"The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover"

Al Franken highlights a broader critique of the media landscape that transcends traditional political alignments. Rather than viewing media bias simply within the context of left-versus-right ideologies, he points to structural and economic drivers that shape the nature of news coverage. Commercial media organizations, motivated by the imperative to attract large audiences, prioritize stories that promise high engagement, spark emotional reactions, or reinforce existing narratives that are easy for viewers to follow. The pursuit of ratings and profit creates a feedback loop, where news outlets gravitate toward sensationalism, repetition, and surface-level conflict, often at the expense of in-depth or nuanced reporting.

Such tendencies can manifest in the selection of topics that lend themselves to dramatic framing, or the overemphasis of stories that align with audience expectations rather than challenge or inform them. The drive for efficiency means that stories which are logistically simple to cover, such as press conferences, crime reports, or celebrity scandals, receive disproportionate attention, while complex, resource-intensive investigations or stories about marginalized communities are often sidelined.

Franken’s point suggests that audience metrics and business models exert as much, if not more, influence on media content than overt political agendas. While ideological slants undeniably exist within the media ecosystem, they are frequently shaped or amplified by the economic realities facing newsrooms: limited time, tight budgets, and fierce competition for viewers and advertisers. As a result, substantive public discourse can suffer, with important issues simplified or ignored, and the public left with a distorted sense of priorities or trends.

This structural critique encourages a deeper analysis of how information is produced and disseminated, urging media consumers to recognize that biases linked to profit motives and operational convenience may play a profound role in shaping the news agenda, often more so than any explicit allegiance to conservative or liberal viewpoints.