Dave, what is the job of the media?

It is to sell advertising time.

How do they do this?

They sensationalize news to the point you cannot turn away. This boosts their ratings and allows them to charge a premium for their advertising time.

If you want honesty in media coverage, look for media outlets that market themselves specificially for their accuracy (think McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc). This is not to say these sources are 'unbiased'. All three are certainly quite biased. But there's really two independent varaiables at play here... how editorially slanted is the outlet, and how accurate is their news.

Example: I seriously doubt that the Masskeega, Idaho (pop. 250) Ladies Sewing Guild's newsletter has a pro-Democrat or pro-Republican slant to it. But how accurate would you expect the coverage of the Niger famine to be?

Bias and accuracy are not the same thing at all.