I personally think that media bias is a very serious issue.
Even in today's world of social media and citizen journalism, most people still rely on major media providers to inform them of what is happening in the world and to hekp them to form an educated political opinion.
If the media organisations which people rely on to provide this service are biased in some form then people who think they are making an informed and educated political choice will actually be making an ill-educated choice which has been manipulated.
This is especially dangerous because most forms of bias in the media are not explicit, but are implicit within the stories chosen as worthy for publication and the facts which are included, and those which are not.
This means that it can be very hard to spot.
All of this is important even if individual news outlets each have their own bias, and if these biases all even out to form an unbiased view on average.
Still people would be making ill-advised political choices, but at least you would expect this to largely balance out to give a similar result at the polls.
But if there is a shared bias which runs across the whole of the news media, and perhaps even wider than that to the movies made in Hollywood, television entertainment and more, then I think this becomes a major threat to democracy.
And many people think that this is exactly what is happening.
Could they be right? In fact there is strong and growing evidence that there is a strong liberal bias to the media in western nations such as the United States of America.
We also have a pretty clear picture to show us why this is happening.
It is not, as you may have been told by news outlets with a conservative bias, because there is some kind of conspiracy to manipulate public opinion, perpetrated by the 'illumiati' or some other group intent on creating a 'new world order'.
The reason why so many studies are showing a liberal media bias is because political opinions are not purely based on intellectual analysis - they are actually much more influenced by our personality and our emotional preferences rather than by our intellect.
Unsurprisingly your choice of profession is also influenced by your personality.
So what we see is that people in professions such as: the army, the police force, finance and many others, show a strong tendency towards conservative political opinions.
On the other hand people who are attracted towards the creative industries show a strong tendency towards liberal politics.
'The media' is a creative industry, from journalism to making movies.
This means that most of the people who end up in the media have an emotional tendency to give preference to the liberal perspective - and that is exactly what they end up doing.