In many cases even the pretense of journalistic fairness has faded, so consciously committed to the politics of liberalism are today’s news organizations.
It is almost impossible these days to open a newspaper or watch any of the alphabet-media empires without hearing President Bush or his administration cast in negative terms.
On the cable outlets, the media castigation of Bush and the GOP only worsens, as the viewer gets to hear CNN and the like regurgitate the latest Bush “scandal” every 12.5 minutes or so.
Surely, the Bush administration has made some missteps these past few years, and deserves to have its head handed to it occasionally. Democrats and liberals, of course, might be expected to balk at almost anything Bush promotes and signs into law.
Ask nearly any Republican or conservative, and he or she is likely to tell you that there are many things that have set one’s teeth on edge regarding this administration.
So what is one to think about a mainstream media that hides behind a First Amendment right of a free press, yet acts like a bought-and-paid-for Political Action Committee (PAC) on behalf of the Democratic Party?
With little surprise from those of us who know how the “independent” press operates from day to day, everyone else got to see one of those “bought to you by your National Democratic Party” moments by the PAC media.
The recent CBS News poll that found President Bush’s approval rating at an all-time low of 34%, and Vice President Cheney’s at an even more anemic 18% is a case in point. This was not so much a poll inasmuch as it was broadcast as breaking news.
Indeed. That was the entire purpose of such a poll. One goes to the CBS website to find banners trumpeting the news: a picture of a sad and dejected Bush, looking for all the world like he is about to cry. There are no less than five news videos and a half a dozen related stories that essentially say “Everything bad because of Bush.”
But about that poll: By now, most people have heard that the sample was heavily weighted towards Democrats and Independents, but for the record:
– The sampling was of 1018 “adults.” Not “likely voters” or even “registered voters,” just adults, like my neighbor, the non-voting, non-registered recluse, who, when last asked what he wanted to see in a president, responded “a knife hilt.”
– The “unweighted” sample of Democrats was 409, to the Republican sample of 272. That’s a 40% to 27% ratio, with Independents rated at 33%. Once these samples were “weighted” — which means they were adjusted to reflect the country’s general make-up — the poll still reflected a bias towards Democrats by a margin of 37% to 28%, putting Independents at 35%.
– I noticed something that I cannot recall seeing in many other polls of this type, and that is the specific reference to “African Americans,” who these days usually vote monolithically Democrat. After sampling 207 blacks for the poll, CBS weighted it to 118, a more representative number in regard to population. Still, why are blacks over-represented here? Why not Latinos or Asians? Is it because blacks have consistently voted Democratic in the 90+ percent range when voting in the last two presidential elections? Were they singled out from the beginning to achieve a desired result?
No, that couldn’t be it. That would be — along with the overall sampling of “adults,” and the over-sampling of Democrats in general — grossly negligent. I mean, we’re talking CBS here, the network that brought you “Memogate,” the story of a major media anchor’s insistence that forged documents are okay, because even though the documents are “fake,” they are nevertheless “accurate.”
Thankfully, Dan Rather has left the building. But unfortunately, his legacy of bias lives on in Blackrock and CBS. Too bad that legacy of bias also pervades just about all of the mainstream media.
Readers of the mainstream media, though, must by now be aware of the culture of partisan corruption that the media displays on a daily basis. As one manufactured crises winds down — like Vice President Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting partner — another crisis of historic proportions pops up.
This week, Americans have a choice: You can opt for the UAE (United Arab Emirates) terminal deal, in which the media worriedly reports that a wartime president is seemingly selling the country’s ports to terrorists, or the Hurricane Katrina video, in which the media breathlessly reports that “Bush knew” that those levees would burst, and kill those black people by the score.
Both stories are being portrayed as a “smoking gun” indictment of the Bush administration. The UAE interest regarding the terminals surfaced last October 31, 2005, in the Wall Street Journal. The Hurricane Katrina video of August 28, 2005, has actually been in the possession of the AP for some time now, but was reported as having been “leaked” to them by someone in the administration. In fact, the national press had their own copies that day, since they were invited to that very news conference. There is no “there” there. Yet, the PAC media continues its culture of corruption when reporting upon the events of a Republican president.
The story here is not the liberalism that dominates newsrooms across America, but the media’s unflinching willingness to be guided by it. In most cases, even the pretense of journalistic fairness has faded, so consciously committed to the politics of liberalism are today’s news organizations.
A while back, I forwarded the notion that the mainstream media were engaging in a “soft coup d’etat” of the country’s political process, and I echo that here today. Instead of blood and bullets to enact a takeover, the media use headlines and editorials.
Often penning front page parables that more often reflect wishful thinking than fact, the mainstream media hope that you do not take notice of its own culture of corruption in regard to the news.
But if you did take notice, you would know that most of what you read and hear from today’s “guardians of society” is intellectually dishonest because it is politically motivated, and that is that. It is, without preamble, a media culture of corruption that plays itself out daily in our newsrooms and on television.
I couldn’t agree more. Are we to accept the democratic party and their mouthpiece liberal media? No. Never. Their complete falsehoods, lies and treasonous use of the first ammendment is more than appauling. When we look to the leaders of government, industry and media we want to see solutions to problems and how we can improve on the great way of life we have, not how horrible we are, that all the world’s ills are our fault and the it’s only going to get worse. If we elect democrats and allow the liberal media to continue unchecked that prophecy will be true.
well, considering the fact that most of the media is owned by heavy republican donors and until the truth of bush’s mendacity and incompetance finally became too much to gloss over, i find it telling that we hear anything bad at all about bush and handlers. perhaps the neocons have stepped on a few too many good old fashioned country clubber style conservatives like specter and mccain…like the owners of that chimeric, never seen but in fuzzy distorted pictures, beast, “the liberal media”.
ibbleblibble ,
You say “…considering the fact that most of the media is owned by heavy republican donors…”
You mean like Ted Turner and Pinch Salzburger?
It never ceases to amaze me how the left is completely unable to see bias anywhere except Fox News. How can this be?
ted turner? whatever his political bent (it has changed at least a couple of times over the years) he controls NOTHING…in recent interviews he has bemoaned this fact…
the entire fallacy of “liberal media” always cracks me up. if reality disagrees with one’s ideology, is reality then “liberal” or “conservative” or whatever you oppose? the entire phenomenon of verifiable events and situations relativity is ludicrous. the same hard core conservative ideologues who bemoan liberal moral relativism are the very highest pitched screechers when it comes to demanding a relativistic interpretation of events and phenomena, which unlike nebulous unprovable quasi-religious notions, are ACTUALLY REALLY VERIFIABLE.
if it is your opinion that the earth is flat, and my opinion that it is not – sorry, your an idiot and your opinion is based on ignorance and/or great stupidity. but according to the doctrine of “fair and balanced news” (not only limited to the obvious neocon/fundyvangelist pandering murdoch owned fox propaganda network, but more subtlely spread about across the broader, conglomerized mainstream media), any all interpretations of verifiable reality are so hopelessly mired in ideologically slanted perception as to make any and all crackpot intepretation equal in validity. what stupid, hypocritical, projecting, sophistic, silliness!
ibbleblibble,
You say “…sorry, your an idiot and your opinion is based on ignorance and/or great stupidity…”
Whoops, that’d be “you’re”, not “your” as in “You are” as in “Ibblebibble, you’re a complete tinfoil hat wearing dumb shit.”
By the way, Ted Turner still sets on the board of Time Warner. He is about to resign, but as for now, he is a board member of one of the biggest media conglomerates on the planet.
Rather than foaming at the mouth and shrieking imprecations, why don’t you tell us who the majority shareholders of ABC, CBS, NBC, the NYT, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and CNN are, their political affiliation, who they’ve donated to during political campaigns, obvious examples of conservative slants in reporting, you know…facts. These are all publicly traded companies and this is all public information. Otherwise STFU.
wow mike, talk about foaming at the mouth! dont bust a blood vessel there guy…
well, at least you made some attempt to refute my arguments/claim…good boy! in the time i tapped the little blabbulation in which you so skillfully found a grammatic error, i bet you had finished an entire paragraph…
regardless, i’ll start digging and perhaps get back to you. off the top of my head, well there’s canadian conrad black, sun myung moon (owner of upi, big republican contributer and self styled jesus) and general electric…wonder if nbc would ever dare do an investigative report on them or any of their subsidiaries…
again, nice use of highbrow vocabulary, and please don’t get your blood pressure all worked up…
That’s all you’ve got? Conrad Black, also known as Lord Black of Crossharbour (really) and Sun Myung Moon?
I figured you’d have at least dragged out Rupert Murdoch.
Conrad Black has divested himself of nearly all of his newspaper holdings and Moon is a nutjob.
How those two relatively obscure people stack up to a vast right wing conspiracy is beyond me.
I’ll even spot you a little here. How is it that the whackjob left in America believes that AM talk radio, Fox News, The Washington Times, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal equal an overwhelming conservative slant to the news when every other major newspaper in the United States including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times leans left, every broadcast news network including NBC, ABC, and CBS are left leaning, all of the cable news channels including CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC are leftist, even NPR slants to the left. All of our major Hollywood celebrities are leftists, many of our popular musicians are leftists if not outright socialist, our universities are dominated by absolute frothing liberals, and the list goes on.
Conservativism in America has been fighting a rear-guard action since the 1950′s, and we have just begun making headway.
You all almost won the whole thing back there in the 60′s and 70′s. Thank God for Ronnie “Raygun” huh? I know that it really knocked the wind out of your sails when the old Soviet Union collapsed, but never fear, old Fidel is still kicking, and hell, even if he dies and Cuba knocks off the whole “workers paradise” act, there’s still Venezuela. Hugo would love to have you, or there’s Bolivia, or maybe even Nicaragua. It looks like your old buddy from the Sandanista days may just get himself put back into power. So, anyway, never fear. Even though Liberalism is a dying ideology in the United States, it’ll probably still be around for a while, and if we fart around and get too much of that self-reliance, low taxes, personal responsibility, small government thingie going on, you can always bail out and head down south of the border. There are any number of tin-pot despots down there who share your beliefs and would love to have you.
Here is a link to a study done in 2004 by Tim Groseclose, Department of Political Science at UCLA and Jeff Milyo, Department of Economics at the University of Missouri:
http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.8.htm
Their conclusion? I’ll quote from the study. “Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Consistent with many conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received a score far left of center. Outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, NPR’s Morning Edition, NBC’s Nightly News and ABC’s World News Tonight were moderately left. The most centrist outlets (but still left-leaning) by our measure were the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Fox News’ Special Report, while right of center, was closer to the center than any of the three major networks’ evening news broadcasts. All of our findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.”
A particularly fascinating item in the study is figure 2. near the end of the article which shows the ADA scores of various media as compared to selected politicians. Note that every single media source, including such things as the Drudge Report have a higher ADA score than the average American voter between 1975 and 1999. That’s not Republican voters. That’s ALL voters. Huh, imagine that. I guess the media IS left leaning…
Open YOUR (not you’re) eyes, ibbleblibble. Your haughty indignant responses do you no good. You can tell me over and over again that there is no liberal bias, but your rediculous attempts at logic don’t fool me. Ann Coulter said awhile back that least liberals are trying to fake linear thinking. The stats regarding media bias are not in your favor. Common sense and basic logic aren’t either.
Let’s see, ibbs. I could do a research project to dis-prove your assertion. But I could also just go watch TV for awhile. Next time you might as well say the sky is brown. I’m fed up with the arrogant mindless b.s. of ;iberals who think they’re all intellectual. If intellectual means all emotion and no logic, then yes, I guess they are.
So I put a ; where an “l” belonged. Go on, mock me, ibblebibble.
To imbecile(sorry I mean ibbleblibble). I guess the only way a liberal can convince him/herself that they’re smart is by using big words. Any fool can use a thesaurus, but only a wise man can put the words togetherso that what he says will have substance. For all your big words, you still came across as an idiot.
oh – i’ve done this before, have some time later, will do the research on the research AGAIN, post some links, blah blah blah. for every study you can drudge up “proving” liberal bias, i can drudge something up “proving” conservative influence/bias. the first credited charges of “liberal bias” were brought by edith efron whose scientific methodology consisted of sitting in front of the tv during the 68 presidential election coverage, smoking cigs, checking a notebook table whenever on any story, rating them liberal, conservative or unbiased. (just like you, shane, though i dont know if you smoke). problem was, other than the distinctly unscientific nature of her research, she was a right wing amoral ayn rand economic nihilist, so anything “moderate” appeared to her “liberal”… an almost inescapable impediment to any such content analysis. her book, “the news twisters”, was purchased by the thousands by nixon’s creep (campaign to re elect the president) during the investigation into the nixon white house’s felony activities, propelling it to the top of the ny times best seller list – a tactic often used by monied right wingers to make their publications appear more widely read than they actually are, although these days the times uses an annotation that states the high sales are due to bulk purchases.
sue – sorry about the real big words. i will endeavor – oops, sorry – try to dumb down my voca…uh… words to american idol level just for you. or would george w. level be accdeptable…i mean o.k.?
oh – thanks mike – i just assumed everybody knew about murdoch.
i will do some quick surface skimming here, call in a book or two i have lent out and give some more specific examples. the ucla study is just one of many, and i admit i do not credit anything tat comes out of the ideological propaganda reinforcing factories such as the heritage foundation, AEI, cato institute, or any of the multitude (thats “whole bunch of”, sue) of other such institutes…
well, enyoying the discussion, but must go.
have a nice day
ibbleblibble,
I’ll be interested to see what you’ve got.
I’m not sure how the 1968 presidential race or purported manipulation of the NYT best-seller list fits into this, so I don’t quite follow your references there.
I cited the UCLA academic finding on the matter for the express purpose of heading off the “ideological propaganda reinforcing factories” argument. An argument that you made anyway.
On the other hand, what you’ve basically just stated is that you will ignore anything that comes from a source you disagree with, no matter how well-referenced.
Does that mean that you will hold to the same standard? If so here is a list of 678 leftist groups that you aren’t allowed to reference:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/summary.asp?object=Organization&category=
Oh, and here’s a list of 115 leftist funds and foundations:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/summary.asp?object=Funders&category=
Here’s 1065 lefty persons you can’t cite:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/summary.asp?object=Persons&category=
Here’s 234 +/- lefty media related groups and persons you should ignore:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewMedia.asp
Here’s 100 or so academic groups and universities that are off-limits:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/profile.asp
Oh, and here’s another 183 socialist academic types that are strict no-no’s:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/IndividualDesc.asp?type=aca
Oh and these political organizations:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/politics.asp
And these political persons:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/IndividualDesc.asp?type=gov
And anyone else who might possibly agree with any of your points.
No fair you say? But you’ve already said you automatically ignore information from any source you disagree with. I’m just evening the playing field, and giving specific examples. This will save us some time as I fully expect you to reply to any source we provide, unless it is Michael Moore or MoveOn or Kos, by stating that you don’t buy the information because you don’t like the source, which you may as well start with by ignoring Discover the networks.org and writing off David Horowitz as a right-wing hack.
You have to pull your head out of…the sand…in order to have a discussion.
I came to this Web site to check out Joe Duarte’s latest column (Go Joe!) and stumbled onto this interesting column. If you are in the forum Mr. Fiore, could you also offer a couple of examples of reporters who are getting it right? I’d like to follow their work as good examples for a young journalist such as myself. Also, I wonder if you think your critique applies to all journalists or if you could say they apply to opinion writers or political beat reporters only. Thanks for your time.
B,
You’ll have a hard time finding balanced reporting coming out of the AP or Reuters or any of the other press pools.
As far as the print media is concerned you are almost forced to go and sieve through the Op-Ed pages for someone like Ralph Peters:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/64677.htm
and
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/64752.htm
Note that Mr. Peters is actually in Baghdad and actually travelling around the city rather than taking his cues from the NYT editorial page.
So, do you have any recent (you know, within the last decade or so) research, babblebabblebabble? Research from 1968 doesn’t cut it because, guess what, it’s OLD. The research that Mike McGill links to was done recently. I could show you research that backs up the claim that the Earth is flat if I went back far enough.
Mike McGill asked you for specific evidence of a “right wing bias” and this is the best you could come up with? I probably should have expected as much. Facts never seem to get in the way of you Liberals when you have a tinfoil hat theory you’re trying to ride.
So let’s objectively look at the facts here (sorry, there’s going to be some of those inconvenient things. Bear with me). Every poll conducted within the last twenty years has shown that an overwhelming majority of journalists, editors, anchors, correspondents, etc consider themselves liberal Democrats, and far more consider themselves “moderates” or “middle of the road” than identify themselves as conservatives. With numbers like the UCLA survey presents (for every journalist who contributed to George W. Bush’s campaign, 93 contributed to Kerry’s), I think it’s safe to say that many of the “moderates” are actually liberals who either don’t want to admit it (either because they want to skew the results or want to appear “balanced”), or don’t realize how liberal they are.
Let’s look at another infamous culprit. Dan “fake but accurate” Rather. Had he not been so blinded by his hatred of conservatives in general and George W. Bush in particular, he would have done his homework on the source of the document story (who’s name, thankfully, escapes me at the moment. Unlike some, I don’t obsess about obscurity), seen that he had a personal agenda, and had even had contact with the Kerry campaign. He also would have seen that the documents were blatant forgeries, written on MS Word and printed with modern equipment, instead of trying to prove that it was typed on a contemporary typewriter that would’ve cost the Texas ANG tens of thousands of dollars. Had he bothered to be fair and balanced, he would have interviewed several of the staffers of the Texas ANG who had since reported that GW Bush actually volunteered for service in Viet Nam, but because he wasn’t qualified on the more modern fighters he couldn’t go.
Nope, no liberal bias here.
I don’t even have to get into the “let’s make some stuff up” NY Times, or the “can we make stuff up too, please NY Times” Boston Globe, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, or PBS (as an aside… why in God’s name is my tax money paying for the liberal propaganda being spewed out of NPR and PBS? Then again, since Air America is going to lose its NY affiliate, I suppose government funding really is the only way to keep Liberal talk afloat).
The “vast right-wing media conspiracy?” Fox, the Journal editorial page, and a very few newspapers does not a conspiracy make. And since Fox is cleaning the other networks’ collective clocks in the ratings, and Air America is sinking like the Titanic while hundreds of syndicated conservative talkers regularly bring in good-to-great ratings, shouldn’t the dinosaur media, for their own survival, be asking themselves why?
Michael Breen,
Very, very well said. Unfortunately Ibblebibble has already stated that any person, group, or organization to the right of Teddy Kennedy is guilty of…what was it? Oh yeah, “neocon/fundyvangelist pandering propaganda.”
I don’t think that we’ve much chance of getting through to him…
i promise to respond in a more detailed manner as soon as i get a little breathing room in my busy schedule. its been about a year or two since, piqued by the question, i did some research into the research on my own.
i have found study after study on this topic that would support charges of liberal bias, conservatie bias, and no bias…again, if you are to the left, is not the middle the right and the right the far right? if you are to the right, the opposite? before the repeal of federal laws that assured a dispersed ownership of the media in te late 80′s, early 90′s, the best study i saw, commisioned, i believe, ironically by a conservative group, carried out by academically honest sensible conservatives (a husband/wife team – apologies here, again, need to call in some material), found nothing more damning (much to the consternation of their sponsors) than that lower level reporters tended to be more “liberal” while editors/owners tended more “conservative”.
since the advent of “relativistic entertainment reality” news with the repeal of abovementioned legislation, however, it seems that the idea that there exists a reality independent of ideological bias (reality relativism) has infested once relatively scientific, if somewhat imperfect, attempts to report some kind of objective reality. thus my comments on the stupidity of someone whose “opinion” is that the world is flat…not all opinions are equal, just as not all intellects are equal….
ps…my apologies for any insults flung out there…if you will read carefully, my initial barbs were directed at mike’s ingenious editorial discovery of a misplaced apostrophe…we can take this high or low, or both, it dont make me no nevermind, i’m a big boy and assume you folks to be big boys and gurls yourselves. i say this not in an effort to curry favor, but to show that, yes, i am capable of civil discourse, just have had a hard time finding such with certain brands of conservatives for some time now…and quite frankly enjoy calling a spade a spade and wallowing in he mud of personal attacks, mental masturbatory sophistry, and obfuscating drivel from time to time…like my old man said, “show me a masochist and i’ll show you a happy man…”
correction, 2nd paragraph – “that there does NOT exist…”
ughhh – correction to correction – 3rd paragraph – loooong day
Well that’s a little bit better. Tell us what ya’ find. (Specifics please.)
I guess ibbleblibble’s responses weren’t really “haughty and indignant” like I said earlier. More like “haughty and sardonic.”
shane
u know, democracy does not work in every human endeavor. like religion…i have always avoided faiths, after being raised in one, whose congregations can too easily rid themselves of ministers who tell them unflatteringly insulting things about themselves…which are usually correct and despised precisely for this reason.
whether i am right or wrong, and ultimately, in the case of media bias, which i think nearly as unprovable as the existence or not of the almighty, from what i see here, you preachers to the choir need a little shake up…come get me…har har…
but ridicule my vocabulary and syntax all you want, it just proves my theory of the existance of a quasi-religion far more dangerous than the much maligned “secular humanism”, i refer to as the “cult of stupidity” or the “brotherhood of ignorance”. why get a freakin education if your only going to use it to comunicate in monosyllabic 6th grade level fashion? oh yeah – dont want to appear too smart….thats not cool, man….
sardonic as hell, brother…
To ibbleblibble: I’ve posted this on two websites just to make sure you get this!!!
Your speech doesn’t impress me, therefore, the logical conclusion must be that I don’t understand “big words.” That’s okay though, I don’t blame you for getting it wrong. “It’s Bush’s fault.”
Hey,let me know if you still need help with the interpretation.
ibbleblibble,
Big words do not equal big thoughts. The truth is simple; therefore, people like you NEED to use polysyllabic
vocabulary and convoluted sentences to obscure the facts. As the well-educated,
intelligent person that you claim to be; if your arguments were valid, you would take the time to put what you know into layman’s terms.
ibbleblibble ,
Let me recap your postion(s) for you:
Post #2: The media is controlled by rich Republicans and liberal media bias doesn’t exist.
Post #5: Ted Turner has no power and is at best a wobbly lib.
Post #6: The very idea of a liberal media is a fallacy. Liberals aren’t moral relativists but conservatives are. Conservative slants are “subtlely spread about across the broader, conglomerized mainstream media.”
At this point I called BS on your blabbering. You responded with “Yeah, but Lord Black of Crossharbour and the founder of the Moonies control the media!” You were then provided with a UCLA study that proves liberal bias in the media at which point you:
Post #15: (a) Claimed to have done this research before and vaguely promise to provide some documentation to support your arguments someday. (b) Moved the goalposts so that now your argument is that the media appears liberal to conservatives and vice versa, rather than sticking to your original argument that the media is “in fact” conservatively biased. (c) State that you will disregard any information provided to you from any source that could be described as conservative.
Post #21: State that there is no bias in the media whatsoever. It is all just a matter of world view and perception.
To summarize, you started off with with strong, declaratory, and inflammatory statements and represented them to be facts. When provided with an actual non-partisan study that contradicted your unfounded statements you changed your position to something much less firm, but still unfounded, and promised to provide some supporting information at some indeterminate time in the future.
You have wandered around the Intellectual Conservative site and posted inflammatory statements on several occassions at several posts. You have not yet provided any facts to support anything you claim as fact. I am happy to have a discussion with you on any subject, but if you want to be treated courteously you should consider toning down the “BushChimpHitlerHalliburton” rhetoric and at least try to provide something that could be considered as a reputable source to back up your arguments, and by that I don’t mean a link to the Sundance Film Festival Website as you did at another posting.
sue, mistress, address my arguments, then, not my diction.
mike, others – impressive array of supporting evidence and study. do another search, however, and post all the links to those studies tat disagree with these, and your opinions…i’ll do it eventually, once had all “my” links until i had to reformat my hard drive…
careful with ideologies, though – htey lower IQ by some 10 – 40 pionts. when one is in the position where one must pound square pegs of reality into round holes of ideology, well, think about it.
it has been my experience that from the time we are born til the time we lie abandoned by our scared of death by death spawn in warehouses for the still breathing deceased, we are constantly assulted by bullshit from selfish people trying to convince us of one thing or another, be it commercial, religious, or political, for their own gain – often to our detriment. which is more important, learning the truth or unlearning all the bullshit?
ibbleblibble,
You said “blah, blah, blah…we lie abandoned by our scared of death by death spawn in warehouses for the still breathing deceased…blah, blah, blah.”
Huh? Sounds like you need to reboot your brain. You didn’t make much sense before, but now you are completely incoherent.
i am reminded of lazy students who, when unable to understand a fairly complex concept, claim that the concept is stupid, implying, i suppose, that their inability (or unwillingness) to undestand such concept is a sign of great intelligence.
The only thing complex about your statement is what it lacks. It lacks a relationship to the subject matter, it lacks a point, and it lacks a semblance to rational thought.
Interesting discussion.
One thought – these “studies” are basically a joke for both sides because they involve people making subjective determinations as to whether a story is to the left or right. Not very scientific. So, is a story that is any way negative about Bush inherently “liberal” and the reverse? Also, these studies all analyze what IS in the newscasts. What about what IS NOT reported? For example, the Downing Street Memo got scant coverage in MSM. Wouldn’t that indicate a “conservative bias?”
good point, hman23….;)
I have never understood the manufactured liberal uproar over the Downing Street Memo outside of the context of it being another stick to beat on the President with.
Bush, Blair, and virtually the entire civilized world believed that Hussein had WMD’s and ties to terrorism. Hussein in fact DID have direct ties to terrorism including financial, training, and intelligence ties and he DID have WMD’s. He used them, more than once. I still believe he had WMD’s leading up to the war, and that they for the most part have been moved to Syria. There’s too much proof of their existance, both circumstantial and factual. Regardless, that’s beside the point. The DSM states that “[m]ilitary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
OK. Bush wanted military action against Hussein because Hussein had ties to terrorism and WMD’s. The US Government proceeded to build their case around those suppositions. Nowhere does it say that anyone made up anything, simply that a case was built based on the understanding of the facts at the time. Facts that were, by the way, accepted as facts by most of our Democrat Representatives and Senators during the Clinton administration.
Here’s a list of 22 quotes, with links, made by Democrats regarding Saddam Husseins WMD program and its dangers.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/mostert/040816
Mike – I did not post to argue the merits of the DSM – that is another discussion. Just making a point about what I see as a gap in the “studies” on the “liberal media.” Care to comment on that?
Also considering the statement that the Downing Street Memos were ignored. They were a non-issue almost from the outset and it was a fight the media knew they’d lose if they flogged it too much. Having said that, they’ve been ignored so much that if you Google “Downing Street Memo” at Google News you still get almost 100 hits from just the last couple of weeks worth of news articles, and you get 2.1 million if you run the same phrase through the Google Search Engine. You can hardly claim that the story was ignored.
Furthermore, the medias hysterical leaping from one manufactured scandal to the next creates a short shelf life for any story. As soon as one Bush Bashfest loses steam they ping-pong to another; Missing WMD’s to Abu Ghraib, to Guantanamo, to Cindy Sheehan, to New Orleans, to Jack Abramoff, to the NSA wiretaps… It’s always something and it never ends.
HMan23
You should read the UCLA study at my link in #10 above. It’s in no way subjective. It’s probably the best work done on the subject that I am aware of.
Sure, you might get a lot of hits, but to what sources? I thought we were talking about the bias of the MSM here.
But, I took you up on your suggestion. Here were some of the 100 hits: Progressive.org, Indian Country Today NY, Political Cortex NY, Mathaba.Net UK, BuzzFlash, PeaceJournalism.com, and The Oak Leaves Indiana. But, I did see one mention of it in a WSJ article discussing a politician in Michigan running for Congress.
HMan23,
You left out
1. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, DC (First hit)
2. U.S. Newswire (press release), DC (Third hit)
Good point. I missed those, thinking they were not the MSM I was thinking of. But, did you read the articles? Here are some excerpts:
1. “A furor erupted after an article in Britain’s Daily Mirror of Nov. 22 alleged that President George W. Bush planned to bomb the Arab TV station al-Jazeera but was talked out of the idea by Prime Minister Tony Blair. According to the newspaper, which quoted a “No. 10 memo,” Bush “made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere, [but] Blair replied that would cause a big problem.” Following publication of the story, the British government charged two men under the Official Secrets Act with leaking and receiving a document, and threatened to gag newspapers if they dared reveal the document’s contents. …”
2. “A coalition of over 100 organizations — headquartered at http://www.AfterDowningStreet.org — flooded the U.S. media with e-mails, phone calls, faxes and protests last June until a leaked British document known as the Downing Street Memo received coverage.
The same coalition has launched a campaign to demand coverage of a memo recording a meeting at the White House on Jan. 31, 2003. …”
Kind of makes my point, no?
OK. A better example is this. Go to the New York Times Website and search the term “Downing Street Memo” for the past year. You get 17 articles. There were 12 articles from June 5th to July 3rd. I’d say they covered it pretty completely until the story lost steam. I’d have to dig back, but I’d guess that somewhere around the 4th of July we got into Fallujah or Guantanamo or something that supplanted a story that had been beaten to death but had gone nowhere.
Here’s a link:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=downing+street+memo&srchst=nyt&d=&o=&v=&c=&sort=newest&n=10&dp=0&daterange=past365days&frow=0
Oh yeah, you had the elections in Iraq the first week of July and then you had Plame-Gate start up around July 14th. The media, like a two year old with a new toy dropped Downing Street and jumped on the much more exciting Valerie Plame story.
Seriously. How many non-scandal scandals have the left, including the media tried to lay at the feet of this administration?
It starts with George Bush stole the election and covers off everything from the forged TANG documents to Valerie Plame to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to…well, like I said. It never ends.
Regarding my #44, I should have been more clear. A purported link between Plame-Gate and Karl Rove surfaced in early July 2005.
I don’t see how quantifying the number of “scandals” makes your point – or that because we have seen one after the other MENTIONED or REPORTED ON, the media is somehow biased. A dog that farts, stinks, whether he lets go of one big bomb, or pops out a bunch of little ones throughout the day.
By your reasoning, any time the DSM is referenced by any source (even if it is a source characterizing it negatively), this is another notch in the liberal side of the count. So, just because the CONTENT of the story may reflect negatively on Bush, it is decidedly and inherently “liberal.” That doesn’t wash.
You subjectively believe that there is no merit to any of the “non-scandals,” so by your view, reporting them shows a liberal bias to the media. You mention that these “non-scandals” are dropped quickly. I can turn that around to my position – the fact that I subjectively find merit in these “scandals” makes me inclined to think the media should devote MORE thorough attention to them than they do (and not let the story drop). The fact that the MSM lets go after a week without any true follow-up shows a conservative bias. That’s the trouble with subjective views on the underlying merits and implications of what is reported and what is not.
thanks hman – i am busy and weary of “proving” the unprovable or “disproving” the undebunkable…
it always boils down to “according to this study…blah…blah…blah – here’s the url” and whatever you are trying to prove here, in terms of content analysis, u can…and provide the url/source…
i appeal to common sense here…if one has pre-existing beleifs and reality disagrees with them, is an accurate report of reality biased?
HMan23
I guess you decided to ignore my link at #10 above. Let me quote 4 studies, their findings, and how they arrived at them.
1. James Hamilton (2004) analyzed Pew Center surveys of media bias. The surveys show—unsurprisingly—that conservatives tend to believe that there is a liberal bias in the media, while liberals tend to believe there is a conservative bias. While many would simply conclude that this is only evidence that “bias is in the eyes of the beholder,” Hamilton makes the astute point that that individuals are more likely to perceive bias the further the slant of the news is from their own position. Since the same surveys also show that conservatives tend to see a bias more than liberals do, this is evidence that the news slants more to the left.
2. John Lott and Kevin Hassett (2004) recorded whether the headlines of various economic news stories are positive or negative. For instance, on the day that the Commerce Department reports that GDP grows by a large degree, a newspaper could instead report “GDP Growth Less than Expected.” Lott and Hasset control for the actual economic figures reported by the Commerce Department, and they include an independent variable that indicates the political party of the president. Of the ten major newspapers that they examine, they find that nine are more likely to report a negative headline if the president is Republican.
3. Daniel Sutter (2004) collected data on the geographic locations of readers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. He shows that as a region becomes more liberal (as indicated by its vote share for President Clinton), its consumption of the three major national news magazines increases.
4. Groseclose and Milyo (2004) (Link at #10 above) estimated ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores for major media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News’ Special Report, and all three network television news shows and compared them to the ADA scores of members of Congress. Of the twenty media outlets sampled, 18 fell to the left of the average American voter.
While Hamiltons findings could be considered subjective, that’s a much harder argument to make for Lott & Hassett and Sutter, and nearly imposible to make for Groseclose and Milyo.
ibbleblibble,
It’d help your case if you tried to actually prove something rather than just babbling inane nonsense. You haven’t provided a source or a link or a reference yet, other than your sooper-dooper link to Sundance on another thread.
mike – do you read any commentary/studies that disagree with your opinion?