Liberal Media Bias

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Excellent example IS: All us redneck conservatives KNOW Elvis is not dead. Why would such a liberal rag, under the guise of reporting music news, spread such propagandish filth. He is STILL the king, he's just on an extended vacation. People still see him (the National Enquirer says so), and that's proof enough.

 

I do take the constitution seriously. I would love to see Hillary show me where in the constitution it says that everyone should have health care. You have to remember, I am a libertarian at heart. If I was in charge I would gut the government as I believe anything that isn't in the constitution the federal government shouldn't be involved in. That includes social security and all the other sacred cows of the federal government.

I am confused why you think I'm not taking the constitution seriously. I hope you don't think, my distaste for unacknowledged liberal bias somehow is a first amendment issue. The first amendment only prevents the government from prohibiting speech. Last I checked the media wasn't a part of the government.

 

And the FBI? And Nasa? the FDA? the FAA? And the CIA? the FCC? The Dept of Energy? The Atomic Energy Commission? The Dept of Education? Tell me when you would like me to stop....

Of course, you can always use the argument that Alexander Hamilton (author of the Federalist Papers and one of the driving forces behind the crafting of the Constitution), which he made to President Washington on the issue of the federal government assuming the debt of the states (Assumption) and the creation of a national bank: "Sir, tell me where the Constitution tells the federal government that it cannot perform these functions." Please note that I am parapharsing, as I am writing from memory.

My point is that the crafters of the Constitution had no intention of severely limiting the powers of the federal government. In fact, the reason for the Constitutional Convention in the first place was to increase the power of the federal government, despite rumors that you may hear to the contrary.

Sorry, TGS, I did not realize that you were just whining about the right of the free press to print what it wants. My bad.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you will never understand. Oh well.

 

Chandos, we're not whining about rights of any kind. Instead, we're discussing the common American perception that news networks are generally trustworthy and reliable and without bias (I have honestly heard this many times). In the US, the major news networks have for a long time been considered a 'watchdog' system, making sure the public knows what it needs to know about what's going on. This has been an absolute failure. As several have pointed out, they all have bias, and several have extreme bias on one end or the other.

The other thing I find interesting is how many people here disagree about the classification of the same news channels as either left-wing, right-wing, or centrist. Could it be that we are viewing bias from a perspective of our own bias?

No for already stated reasons, and yes, and they did.

No, because they would rather poke fun at him and get more attention themselves, and yes, and they did.

Yes, and they did.

Would a conservative or even fair, middle-ground media run story after story about the conservative President's low job approval rating (currently 33%) while ignoring the story of the Democratic Congress's even lower one (currently 20%)?

 

To me, most of the left wing material you see on TV is satirical. There are certainly left wing shows that take on politics, but it usually isn't in a completely serious light. People have already mentioned The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. We can add Saturday Night Live and Real Time with Bill Maher (although you need HBO for the latter) to the list. Going into other media, I agree in print media that Rolling Stone is left wing. Going to the web, you'd be looking back at another satirical source like The Onion or Salon.

The point being of all this, is that I think you have to make a concerted effort to find left wing sources. The most easily accessible, mainstream sources tend to be right wing, or at best, moderate. It's not like the combined viewership of all four of those shows I listed come anywhere close to the viewership of Fox News. I think a lot more people read The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker than read Rolling Stone. And how many people rely on Rush Limbaugh as their main source of news while riding in their cars?

There is a liberal media - if you make the effort. The easy way out though is the right wing, conservative media.

 

NOG, there were mountains of evidence before we invaded Iraq that Bush was lying about it. This was not covered by the "liberal" media until well after public opinion had turned. If liberal bias was slanting all of our news coverage, the media would have reported on this in an effort to make the democrats look good and the republicans look bad. Instead, what we got was a colossal Mea Culpa years after the fact. They didn't fail to report on this because of bias, though, unless you consider laziness a bias.

Let's take a look at the election of 2000. It is reasonable to assume that if liberal bias was slanting all of our news coverage, the media would have run more positive stories and less negative stories about Al Gore and more negative stories and less positive stories about GW Bush, right? That is what you would expect from a liberally biased media. Guess what? According to the Pew Charitable Trusts Project for Excellence in Journalism, Al Gore's coverage for the 2000 election was 13% positive, 31% neutral, and 56% negative. Bush's coverage, on the other hand was 24% positive, 27% neutral, and 49% percent negative. Hmm. It appears that the "liberal" media ran almost twice as many positive stories about the conservative and ran more negative stories about the liberal. Why would they do that? This isn't how liberal media bias is supposed to work, last I checked.

And, NOG, the "liberal" media most assuredly did not question the run up to the war in Iraq. They may be critical now, but where was the "liberal" media back when Bush was using de-bunked intel as "evidence" for his run-up to war? Vacation? Regardless of bias, one of the most important responsibilities of the media is to check to see if what our leaders are telling us is, you know, true. They didn't do that with the run up to Iraq.

 

Well, strictly speaking, no one said anything about before the war. I also can't think of any evidence there were even misleading statements made before the actual invasion. I can think of reports that were leaked after, I can think of people that came forward after, but none before. And guess what, the media was all over them when they did. I also remember plenty of criticism of the invasion befor the war, it just wasn't really supported by evidence. I remember people questioning the accuracy of the reports, I remember people questioning the wisdom of going in before the weapons inspectors had finished, I just don't remember any evidence for anything until some time after the war had started.

13% compared to 24% is not massive, especially when you consider FOX and its viewership. More telling is the 49% vs 56% negative stories. That's really insignificant, showing nothing more than an over-all, average, minor preference, certainly not a true bias.

 

You've completely missed my point. You act as if the media is either liberally biased or conservatively biased. I am not trying to prove that the media is biased to the right! I am trying to prove that the media isn't biased to the left. A liberally biased media would obviously have run more negative stories about Bush (who they would have wanted to lose) and more positive stories about Gore (who they would have wanted to win). They did neither, which indicates that, at least in covering the election of 2000, the media coverage was not affected by liberal bias.

 

Ok, this is off-topic but what planet are you living on? The rest of the freaking world were screaming at the top of their lungs that every reason for the war was bull, that every bit of proof that was put forward was flawed. Heck, you could have gone to this forum, everything that as you claim has been "revealed" after the war was pretty much discussed here before the war. No one outside of the US bought the stories of why you went to war, every piece of evidence was already thoroughly debunked well before the war. To back on topic, if the "liberal media" did not report that then exactly how liberal can they be?

 

Apparently not the same one as you. For example, how exactly had the claim that Saddam had WMDs been disproven? The piece-meal, frequently interrupted guided tour the UN weapon's inspectors had? Now mind you, the evidence for the war may not have been terribly strong, but consider:

1.) Saddam's suspicious actions agianst US weapons inspectors
2.) Saddam had had and used WMDs in the not-too-distant past
3.) Saddam was an evil, torturing madman
4.) The US had recently suffered the worst terrorist attack on its soil ever (ok, not too recent, but it was still fresh in our minds).

You can argue that our judgement was clouded, sure, and that you all had a better perspective, sure, but that the US media knowingly concealed the truth in an effort to bring about war? You'll have to cite me some sources. At the very least the UK, Australia, and Poland seemed to agree with us, as they helped in the initial invasion.

Anyway, the most conclusive arguement I heard before the war was that there wasn't any proof one way or the other (mainly due toto Saddam's own actions).

As for what was on this forum, I'm sorry to say I wasn't here then, and the archives don't seem to go back past 2004.

Again, on the topic of media bias, why would even a centrist, unbiased media not run with a story of democratic party officials in Florida commiting election fraud?

 

No, they were just afraid of being called unpatriotic traitors if they didnt chime in with the bloodthirst and warmongering. Not to mention that war is interesting and if there is anything all media outlets are interested in it is the bottom line.

Also, not even going to adress the Saddam Iraq thingies, they are so ridicoulous, it is off-topic and it is a horse that has been pounded to death so thoroughly that it is now making a living attaching macaronis to a piece of paper in a day center in Ohio.

 

NOG,

I remember very well, hearing Powell's talking points and getting ever more incredulous and angry by the minute because I knew that what he said was false, simply false. That was so because I had read the rebuttals of what he presented as fact in the previous months in mostly European newspapers. The news were there if you were interested in looking at them, with the sole problem that they came from presumably biased sources, like the Guardian, which is a reason to discount it as ... leftist smear? reiteration of Saddamite propaganda? vicious anti-Americanism?

A more productive approach would be to check who has been right in the end. But that can't even touch the true believer who explains the absence of WMD with them being cunningly hidden at the bottom of a lake in Iraq, somewhere in the desert or in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, whatever - everything but an admission of error. Fathom the power of faith.

And anyway, bias clearly has the effect that so-called 'facts' that are reported are in all likelihood not only wrong, but vicious disinformation. When the Guradian writes the world is a globe that implies considering their bias that it probably is more of a donut shape, because those sick leftist creeps can't write a line without compulsory lying or distorting

Snark aside, the problem with bias is that it isn't a problem. When people are only partisan enough, they only read what they want to read and discount the rest. Normal people successfully deal with bias in their everyday life (think of that usual salesman trying to tell you what you're desperately in need of) - big deal. But it's supposed to be a big problem in media? Certainly!

In reality bias in the media is all but a cheap way to score a political point and an added reason given to the true believers to discount what they don't like anyway. More important, the accusation casually hurled towards a media that thinks of itself as neutral has the effect of pushing it into the direction of the accuser in order to dispel his criticism. That's why you would see such preposterous displays like three R's and one D on a talk show discussing domestic politics, the R's merrily reiterating their talking points in canon. See we aren't biased, we're even giving the R's more air time than the D's! And we're biased? Nevermind, as that's not the point anyway, giving the R's more time in reaction won't change anything. The accusation is simply reiterated relentlessly, for good measure.

In my view the problem lies elsewhere, and not so much in the myth of media neutrality.

The bully pulpit is a very powerful platform, and one that Bush and his administration have utilised to the fullest. There has been a very skill- and successful domestic propaganda campaign in the US before the Iraq war, and it appears that journalists were simply saturated by the media blitz the administration unfolded. I also remember the prevalent sense of patriotism. Like the rest of the country journalists wanted to help after 9/11. Bias after 9/11? I rather had the impression US media were happily in lock step with the Whitehouse on the Iraq war. And I don't think that the journalists were either duplicitous or dupes. They and their newspapers imo told their audience what it and what they themselves wanted to hear. That's still dereliction of duty as far as the functions and privileges of the fifth estate are concerned. All in all, they have been remarkably gullible and incurious.

In my view the US does not even have a real major left newspaper at all - like Germany's TAZ or the British Guardian. It always puzzles me about what liberal or left media that obnoxious moron O'Reilly is foaming about. America is in so many ways much more conservative than Europe that it always cracks me up to hear something like that.

 

Please. Not even the republicans are trying to pull this bull**** anymore. Aside from the fact that our own intelligence agencies already concluded that Iraq was no threat, the weapon inspectors in Iraq had already concluded that there were no WMD. You are trying to re-write history.

Again, you are missing the point. It isn't that the media intentionally concealed the truth. That isn't what happened. What they failed to do was check the administration's facts. In other words, they gave them a pass.

For the same reason they didn't cover the 350,000 Ohio democrats that republicans kicked off the rolls in 2004, maybe?

 

@Drew

Sorry to bring up old posts, but before I'm willing to believe a survey I believe in following the adage of money talks and bull**** walks

It is a good read.

 

Ok, I see where a lot of this confusion and animosity is coming from. I wasn't trying to say that, back then, no one said anything before the war. I was saying that, here and now, no one had mentioned 'before the war' until Drew brought it up. Also, while I'm still not 100% sure there were no WMDs, I'm willing to bet there weren't at this point. The point I'm trying to make is that, at the time, we had reasonable doubt on the topic. I mean, Saddam didn't let the weapons inspectors in, then let them in but confined their searches and escorted them with armed guards, then kicked them out, then let them in again, again with confined searches and escorts, then kicked them out again, then let them in freely, then confined them, then kicked them out again, or something like that. You don't do that if you aren't 1.)worried about what they would find or 2.)absolutely nutzo. Now Saddam was arguably absolutely nutzo, but nutzos in power tend to try to make WMDs these days, so...

Anyway, yeah, that's rather tangential and I hope I cleared up any confusion about what I was trying to say.

Drew:
News fails to check facts all the time. I think I've seen at least 5 cases of this on the CNN website alone since this year began, and I don't even remember seeing any retractions when they got called on it, though they did at one point write an article on how badly people had responded to them and their article. It was really funny because the article and the article on the response were right next to each other, yet no where did anyone at CNN say 'We were wrong and we're sorry.'

Actually, I remember hearing about that. It made news for a while, but seemed to loose steam pretty quickly, and not in a 'the story just disappeared, it must have been quashed' kind of way, but more of a 'meh, no one really seems to care, let's let Bob in accounting write an article on it'.

 

NOG

The point I was trying to make with 'gullible' and 'incurious' was that the US audience for a very long time gave the administration the benefit of a doubt and directed toward Saddam the assumption of guilt. Now nobody can prove that he has nothing. And because according to Wolfowitz the WMD only were the reason everybody could agree on that's beside the point either. The US wanted war with Saddam, among other things to make an example, whatever Saddam did. I don't believe that Saddam could have done anything short of immolating himself and the entire baath party to satisfy US demands and prevent a US invasion. And if you do believe so, brilliant, I have a splendid bridge in Brooklyn to sell ...

From what I recall the only folks who correctly addressed the sanctions and inspections regime and the actions of the Iraqis were folks like Scott Ritter. For this he was called a traitor and publicly detested and/or shunned. Why? Because nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, because if true it stood in the way of a good blood letting. Was he right about Saddam's WMD? Yes he was. Did he get any apologies from the dastardly media mob that went after him with torches and pitchforks? No; probably because nobody likes to be reminded of such things afterwards. Oh, I forgot the best joke of them all As an ex-inspector he was biased in favour of the inspectors LA-LA-LA!

I still believe the deeper reason why many people in America supported the war on Iraq was not so much because EDIT: the disinformation campaign convinced them of the 'Iraqi threat' but because the campaign directed the post 9/11 anger towards Iraq and Saddam Hussein - which played well into /EDIT an unspoken of (except on the hard right) desire to, finally, after 9/11 see a head on a spike, and Saddam's head came in just fine. That means that there can be an audience bias as much as a media bias, EDIT: especially insofar as the administration directed their campaign as much at the media as at the citizens that didn't happen to be journalists. /EDIT

PS: America's media are largely market driven. They tell what sells, and that that reflects customer preferences and views. A guy like Keith Olberman with his special comments getting airtime today is an example. An item like that would imo have been impossible after 9/11. Customer tastes have changed. The media didn't get more liberal or conservative. It's just so that the public climate now allows for a show like Olbermann's. The post 9/11 spell has worn off a great deal.

But I digress. If anyone wants the Iraq war and the elusive WMD in a thread of its own, go ahead.

 

Well, one thing it seems we can all agree on is that the media presents what they think will get them the most attention and but it still seems to me that, when given the choice, they tend to favor liberal values.

 

Snook, at the current time, most republicans don't support the republican party. Not only has polling confirmed a mass defection of republicans over the last 4 years (due primarily to the war in Iraq, our burgeoning deficit, our flagging economy, and the Abramoff scandal), but this is also borne out by the fact that in the 19 states where the democrats and republicans both held primaries on Super Tuesday, the democrats had 14,460,149 voters and the republicans had a mere 8,367,694. Frankly, Snook, supporting the democrats at this point in time is not an indicator of liberal bias. It's an indicator of dissatisfaction with the current administration.