After beginning to write for a published newspaper, I knew that the criticism would eventually come. Of all the various critiques I’ve received, my personal favorite has been that my opinion writing is just “liberal media bias.” To clarify, clearly marked commentary pieces have a predisposed bias, and that they are designed to further my liberal beliefs and ideals. While the writer for a particular piece might have predisposed political beliefs, the conspiracy that the media being dominated by the left-wing is grossly overblown.

Conservatives have been clinging onto the idea that any mainstream media has a liberal bias, with the exception of the Almighty Fox News. CNN is commonly referred to by right-wingers as the “Clinton News Network.” Many have even less trust of news outlets than they do of established government, which is astonishing since most modern GOP politicians sit on the fine line between conservatism and anarchy.

I understand where the distrust might come in. It’s easy for the media to report sensational pieces about conservative figureheads like Donald Trump, and most arguments claim that the democratic nominee doesn’t nearly receive the kind of cross-checking that her counterpart does. Hillary Clinton, unlike the GOP nominee, doesn’t spit out outrageously misleading statements on the weekly.

In a Technician column several weeks ago, the author claimed that the media purposefully tries to squash conservative voices and blow Trump’s statements out of proportion. This is far from the truth.

It’s important to note that Fox News is currently having its best network year since its inception 20 years ago, and it continues to be the highest-rated cable news broadcast. Of all the mainstream broadcast journalism outlets, the widely known conservative network was the most viewed.

The media has a job to be the watchdog of the election, and whenever Trump is called out and analyzed for a ludicrous statement, the media is simply doing their job. For a candidate that is loved so wildly for speaking his mind and not sugarcoating, the Trump campaign has had to clarify an abundance of statements in just the previous year.

After almost every controversial statement made, days later the Trump camp comes out to ensure that Trump didn’t in fact mean that he thinks Hillary should be shot, or that by imitating a disabled reporter, he wasn’t actually mocking him. Trump then proceeds to blame the media for his inflating his comments.

If anything, the media hasn’t done enough to fact check the Trump campaign, and hold them to a standard that every politician should be held to, even if he is an outsider.

Media has bias, but so does everything else. Human beings are subjective, and that even comes into play in a profession where objectivity is the main goal. Journalism is meant to state the facts of an event and inform an electorate. That occasionally comes across as favoring one side of the political spectrum. After a piece is written, it is extensively edited and verified to be factually accurate and objective, before it hits the press or goes online.

News is designed to state facts. Opinion is designed to expand on those facts with interpretation. News is objective and opinion is subjective. If a journalist simply states the facts of an event, then they are telling the story in an unbiased, unpartisan way, even if that content favors one side of the political spectrum. If that is the case, then maybe that side has point.

Social conservatives don’t have to be activists because they already have equality, and in their eyes, everyone already has equality and those that don’t should just work harder. Conservatives don’t fight for issues such as Black Lives Matter, racism or the wage gap, because many don’t believe that any of the aforementioned issues are even issues. People who are more socially liberal, myself included, see writing for an Opinion section as an opportunity to use my voice of privilege to create some sort of justice on this campus and outward.

If striving for justice on campus defines me as the liberal media, then I will gladly accept that title.