CNN leans liberal. Fox News is conservative. Most people already have these generalizations in the back of their minds because they've learned to accept it. But when news stations are biased, it changes the way that news stories are presented to the world. During this election especially, news stations are being accused of leaning one way or the other when reporting on the candidates. Through bias, they're able to pick and choose which stories to report on, and how to report on them.

For example, there have been some videos going around where people made different kinds of videos at political rallies. One of the videos that was circulating was done by the Free Hugs Project where a man went out to both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders rallies to give free hugs and talk to supporters. During the first half of the video, he can be seen engaging with some violent Trump fans who want nothing to do with his free hugs, and who shout insults at him as he tries to talk to them. Then the second half of the video portrays the man giving out free hugs at a Bernie rally. In that part of the video, the music is upbeat and it only shows people welcoming the free hugs with smiles and laughs.

Then there are the videos that are created in a biased way as they portray supporters of certain candidates as stupider than other people. The Daily Show (an American news and satire program) made a video asking Trump supporters questions, and each person in the video was made to look unintelligent. While we can laugh along at these videos, and some try to use them to support their political views, we have to consider the fact that footage is edited and cut while making videos. Videos like this are made to try to prove a point one way or the other, and it's easy to edit footage to do that in today's day and age. We also have to consider that there will always be idiots in the world, and you can find them at any political rally that you go to. The Daily Show just happens to be satirical and that's exactly what they were trying to achieve in this video, but taken out of that context, people will believe it to be real news coverage.

So while these videos could be 100% truthful, we as viewers can't trust that possibility. We only saw a few minutes worth of a Trump rally and a few minutes worth of a Bernie rally, so there's no way for us to know about what went on behind the scenes and what footage was cut. Then in the second video, we only saw footage of a few of the people that were interviewed at a Trump rally. We cannot generalize and assume that these select people in each video represent the entire political following of each candidate.

And this article is not to prove a political point one way or the other. The way this all ties into journalism is the fact that people will take "news" like this and blame the media for making one candidate look worse than the other. The problem is that this is not real journalism. Any news network that doesn't report all sides of politics equally cannot claim to be reporters associated with journalism.

Journalists are supposed to be the watchdogs of society. In order to do that, journalists are supposed to investigate issues to provide facts for the people, and the people are supposed to interpret those facts however they please. Journalists shouldn't be attempting to influence people one way or the other with how they present news, instead they should be doing their best to keep people safe by keeping them informed.

So it saddens me to see news networks that lean left or right wing. When bias is input with news, there's no way that the journalist presenting the news is being 100 percent truthful. There's always news to cut or add when bias is present, and that's why we're taught as journalists that we need to present the facts as they are, and not how we interpret them for ourselves.

And we can argue that there aren't any news networks out there that don't lean one way or the other. Bias is a hard thing to get rid of because it's wired naturally into our human brains. But that doesn't mean that we should be okay with it. Citizens don't know who to trust anymore. If the watchdogs of society aren't giving all the facts, who will?

As a journalist, I hope that journalists everywhere can begin to realize that journalism isn't about personal opinion. Journalism is about reporting the cold hard facts to the public, and letting them create biases on their own. So next time you watch a talk show or political video on Facebook, just keep in mind that editing is easier than ever in today's society. Also keep in mind that not all journalists are bad people who want to influence the public's opinion to match their own. Some of us are still just trying to report news as it is.