If people go to a media source with the assumption that they&#x27;re going to be receiving useful information about the world, then I&#x27;d consider it a self-evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them and give them information that isn&#x27;t representative of reality. To put it into machine learning terms, giving people a bunch of training data that is biased (i.e. isn&#x27;t sampled from the same distribution as reality) is going to train people&#x27;s judgment to be less in tune with reality.<p>I don&#x27;t think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.