Yeah…but the net effect of this seemed to be to set low expectations for Bush that were then met with statements about how he clearly was very Presidential tonight because more than half his sentences contained both a noun and a verb! (I exagerate only slightly.)
Well, this is the fascinating aspect of the whole thing! Yes, the statement was said in a jestful manner, but did Cheney later admit that in fact he is extremely indebted to the government, and in particular to the access that being in government before becoming CEO bought him? I think not!
The pathetic thing is that noone bothered to question this assertion…which although said jestfully was not meant to imply that “in fact, I know that I am really quite indebted to the government…way more than the average person on welfare”. Or do you think that it was meant to imply this?
Ah, I had forgotten the Time magazine cover of Newt Gingrich as the Grinch. Did’nt that come out the same time as Newsweeks cover of Newt as Ebeneezer Scroodge?
And remember when Boy Clinton refused to sign the budget and consequently parts of the government shut down? I recall the mainstream media blaming that on the Republican congress.
And boy, there sure are a lot of stories about the homeless lately, is’nt there. Must be a Republican in the White House.
And ever notice how the media uses the term “undocumented immigrants”, when they are refering to illegal aliens?
And then notice how the press capitalizes the term “Saturday Night Special”, as if it is the brand name of a handgun? What about the media intentionally trying to mislead the public by refering to semi-automatic rifles as “assault weapons”?
Gee, I wonder why some “hate crimes” are put on the front page, but other “hate crimes” go on the back page.
I don’t really disagree with this. But let’s get our positions straight. I say the media treated each in the same manner, but the way the ball bounced was such that Bush’s handicap was easier to overcome in a debate format (I actually seem to recall predicting this outcome in some thread or other). You say (apparently) that the media was biased in favor of Bush and therefore deliberately chose to attack him in such a manner that would enable him to overcome it easily. I’m quite comfortable with my position here, to put it mildly.
Context is everything. The joke was not about the subject of how Cheney amassed his wealth, or whether he was indebted to the government. Rather, the issue being discussed was how good of a job the Clinton/Gore administration had done over the past 8 years, and how much they had benefitted the American public. The ensuing exchange, as I recall it, went something like this:
Lieberman: You seem to have done rather well yourself over the past 8 years.
Cheney: The government had nothing to do with it.
Lieberman: Yeah, my wife is always telling me I should go into the private sector and make some money.
Cheney: Well I’m trying to help you do just that.
Clearly, there was no attempt to imply anything about Cheney’s indebtedness to the government - the whole thing was a joke, and was about how good of a job the Clinton administration had done. For you to equate this with the media holding Al Gore accountable for serious claims that he made in his campaign is absurd, IMHO.
There was a poll done a couple of years ago asking various reporters and on-air personalities which political party they supported. 89% of respondents said that they voted Democrat. 7% voted Republican, and 4% other.
Do you have a source for this? I hear things like that, and the Journalists when asked/polled why they got into the field answered overwhelmingly to change the world or something to that effect, but have never seen a legit source for any of those.
Jackmannii replied to me: *“I continue to be puzzled at what still looks to me like a conflation of two separate categories in the survey, namely ‘investigative’ and ‘national’ reporters. Could you take pity on me and quote the exact part of the report that you are paraphrasing with this remark? Thanks.”
Review the IRE study data.*
Was that an answer to my request? I cannot find that phrase in the report I linked to.
You cite stats on the question of whether “national” reporters avoided stories potentially damaging to their organization, its parent company or advertisers - and it turns out that a grand total of 3 percent of those surveyed said that was commonplace - hardly a manifestation of the Omnipresent Corporate Media Octopus (OCME).
(Um, shouldn’t that be “OCMO”?) And as I noted, a grand total of between 20% and 30% said that it occurred with a frequency somewhere between “rare” and “commonplace”, while only a quarter to a third said that it never happened or that they didn’t know. I think that your objection that this doesn’t equate to some kind of OCME/OCMO ubiquitous total corporate control of the media is something of a strawman. I didn’t claim that there’s ubiquitous total corporate control of the media, I claimed that there’s strong evidence for significant corporate influence on the media, and I think that the study I cited bears out that claim.
I have yet to see any actual examples of the corporate media abuses you seem to feel are rampant, much less that they benefit right-wingers. All you’ve come up with is an Internet survey of the type that selects for respondents who are most apt to be dissatisfied with their jobs, and into whose results you read what conclusions you wish.
I think you’ve somehow got a mistaken idea about the methodology of the survey (described in a link at the top of the page I linked to earlier). It was not in fact an “Internet survey” that “selects for dissatisfied respondents”; it identified specific media outlets according to published circulation numbers and selected individual respondents on the basis of their job titles within the organization. (Your confusion may have been caused by the fact that the sample of 90 investigative reporters who were surveyed separately from the local and national journalists were in fact surveyed online.)
As for your request for “actual examples” of reporting affected by pro-corporate bias, sure, I’m happy to show you as many of them as you like. It seemed to me that simply citing such instances might fall into the category of what Demos (you don’t mind if I call you Demos, do you? your full handle is something of a mouthful (handful?)) described as “anecdotal evidence”. I thought it would be sounder procedure to look at statistical data on what journalists overall have encountered in their own experience. However, if individual examples are what you would like to see, individual examples you shall have. I’ll go collect some and come back with them in a subsequent post.
It still boils down to an Internet survey, claimed to be conducted on a secure site according to the authors. As far as selecting for dissatisfied reporters: The individuals who choose to respond to a survey about pressures on reporters are more likely than the sample as a whole to feel strongly on the issue, thus potentially resulting in overestimation of the percentage of reporters who feel economic pressures of one sort or another.
Again, I think you’re reading too much into a survey that focused primarily on factors affecting local reporting, not a “corporate media bias” having any significant impact on the major media.
I await your specific examples of reporting slanted to the Right as the result of “pro-corporate bias”.
And as for Gadarene’s thesis:
"It’s my perception that mainstream media tend to be:
h)(wording from earlier in this thread) generally perceived by liberals to be not as liberal as they would like, and by conservatives to be not as conservative as they would like, regardless of actual cant"
If I understand this correctly (taking into account your reference to Fred Friendly’s blowup with CBS) your perception is that a major media preoccupation with making money makes them de facto conservatives, or that they preferentially dump stories favorable to left wing causes so that they can make more money. The latter explanation would seem to conflict with your perception of an “audience-driven” media.
Jackmannii: *It [the Pew/CJR study] still boils down to an Internet survey, claimed to be conducted on a secure site according to the authors. *
Well, that sounds somewhat misleading, as the term “Internet survey” is generally used for the kinds of Web poll where respondents are completely self-selected. The study in question, on the other hand, was a traditionally designed survey of a specific occupational group with targeted respondents who were initially contacted by letter, and who received follow-up letters and telephone calls to encourage them to complete the survey and had the option of doing so by mail or phone instead of at the secure Website. In other words, it was a typical research survey that happened to include electronic methods of data gathering. If that’s what you call an “Internet survey”, okay, fine, it’s an Internet survey.
As far as selecting for dissatisfied reporters: The individuals who choose to respond to a survey about pressures on reporters are more likely than the sample as a whole to feel strongly on the issue, thus potentially resulting in overestimation of the percentage of reporters who feel economic pressures of one sort or another.
Maybe, but that is mere speculation. If we’re thinking up reasons why the sample might not have been truly representative, I could speculate that the journalists who experienced the most corporate pressures were “more likely” to be underrepresented, as their experiences would “potentially” have resulted in their moving to alternative media and/or getting fired.
Again, I think you’re reading too much into a survey that focused primarily on factors affecting local reporting, not a “corporate media bias” having any significant impact on the major media.
I don’t understand where you get the idea that the survey “focused primarily on factors affecting local reporting”, as in fact the national and local journalists were asked the same questions, and a significant proportion in each category did have more than occasional experience of corporate pressures on their media organizations. In many cases, the local journalists had indeed been much more strongly affected by such pressures than the national ones, but that hardly means that the phenomenon is not significant.
Recall also that the “local newspapers” in the study were the 100 largest papers in the nation after the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Long Island/New York Newsday, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, Detroit Free Press, and Miami Herald—in other words, quite a number of major urban dailies that are the primary news source for millions of people. We’re not talking the weekly Shoppers’ Guide here when we refer to “local media”.
I await your specific examples of reporting slanted to the Right as the result of “pro-corporate bias”.
Again, you’re the one asserting a distinction between pro-right slant and pro-corporate slant. What I undertook to provide are examples of corporate influence in reporting. Since, as I have noted, corporate and conservative interests overlap to a large extent, pro-corporate bias is ipso facto largely equivalent to pro-conservative bias.
Mind you, I’m not maintaining this because I think it’s a good thing. If your resistance to this idea is indicative of conservatives wishing to distance themselves from corporate interests, I’m all for it. I think that it is generally healthier for a society to maintain a little more space between business interests and political activity.
For the present, however, like it or not, the fact remains that most of the typical corporate political priorities (including relaxed government regulation on environmental, workplace safety, and consumer protection issues; large-scale privatization; minimal legislative oversight of international trade, industry, and finance; sharp reductions in taxes, especially corporate taxes; and opposition to wage and benefit legislation) are very widely perceived, among conservatives and others, as being also conservative priorities.
Typical corporate interests and typical liberal interests also overlap somewhat, but much less and much less strongly—primarily on certain civil-liberties issues, since corporations often make money on various controversial forms of expression or activity that some conservatives would like to censor. But overall, “pro-corporate” aligns with “pro-conservative” much more than with “pro-liberal”.
So here are a few samples from a couple of FAIR summaries, documenting corporate influence on news media content and presentation.
And here’s an example not so much of pro-corporate bias per se as of the influence of a powerful owner exerted in favor of directly pro-conservative bias:
Your recent post was interesting, more for what it did not show than for what it did (something like “the dog that did not bark in the night”). You listed as an several (valid) examples of business interests that coincided with conservative interests, and several examples of corporate pressure affecting stories, with no overlap at all. Every instance of a business interest affecting reporting was an example of a business demanding (or editors demanding on their behalf) reporting that favored the specific business. There is nothing conservative or liberal about supporting the specific interests of any particular business. There were no examples of businesses pressuring the media on behalf of general conservative principles, such as the ones you outlined.
This is of course unsurprising - a business will feel a lot stronger about it’s own interests than it does about general principles that favor it along with business in general. So it is likely that the influence in favor of conservative interests is significantly weaker than the non-ideological influence in favor of specific advertisers. At any rate, you should not bring up one to imply the other.
Unfortunately for your case, corporate and liberal interests overlap quite often. There was another example of this discussed on the editorial pages of my local paper today involving the Centers for Disease Control, which has earned the enmity of some conservatives for expanding its areas of interest beyond traditional medical disorders into gun control and other social issues. The column (by Michelle Malkin) criticized lobbying efforts on behalf of the CDC by various large corporations, including Delta Airlines and Home Depot. And to turn around one of your examples of alleged pro-corporate bias, the Disney Co. has acquired a bad reputation among right-wingers for various reasons, including its production of films with supposed anti-family themes as well as liberalized benefits to partners of gay employees; therefore, we could easily take your example as proving a left-wing corporate media bias.
Like it or not, Kimstu, corporations are highly adept at milking left-of-center politicians as well as right-wing politicos for favors. I suggest you review the history of the Clinton Administration’s murky fundraising activities as well as the Democratic Party record in matching the GOP for soft money dollars. It’s not a pretty picture.
“But Clinton and the Dems are not truly liberals” I hear you cry. Which brings up the following point: you seem to be insisting that all those to the right of you on the political spectrum are right-wingers, which indicates that you are out of touch with the views of a vast majority of Americans occupying the political middle ground. Your characterization of me as conservative is indicative of this warped perception. As I’ve taken pains to point out repeatedly, the pro-left slant to major media reporting benefits numerous causes which I support, but which I oppose for its generalized pernicious effects on public trust and the stimulation of biased right-wing media “alternative” news sources.
This is sort of an interesting link to make you case since the whole purpose of the CRC (Capital Research Center) is to try to get corporations to realize how misguided they are being by supporting organizations that are antithetical to their interests!
Furthermore, their numbers have been disputed since, for example, their definition of “liberal groups” is broad enough to include the League of Women Voters (you know those highly-partisan folks who used to sponsor the Presidential debates) and the American Cancer Society (who admittedly is anti-smoking but, it has been noted, has interestingly kept remarkably quiet about lots of other issues in which corporations may be contributing to elevated cancer rates). [See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/29/071l-022900-idx.html ]
Also, the numbers that they talk about for the giving sound like such small potatoes compared to other things going on, like the funding of The Cato Institute, The Greening Earth Society, and all these other various groups, so I really think it is all a little fishy! The giving to supposedly left-wing groups seems to be to, say, the environmental groups that aren’t really engaged in much activism and could be interpretted as an attempt to support these voices in the movement over the more activist groups and to “look green” at the same time. I admit the patterns of corporate giving are interesting … But not for the same reasons that you and CRC seem to think.
All your examples here seem to concern social issues not economic issues. I believe we have already discussed the dichotomy between the two. And, I think you have to be pretty extreme before you view CDC and Walt Disney as left-wing. I personally found it rather ironic that the right-wingers take Disney to task for being “anti-family” because of their benefits for gay employees…One might think that they are “anti-family” moreso because of their brash and brazen commercialization and attempts to convert kids into precious little consumers! As an uncle, I can tell you that my nephews are in far greater bombardment from the materialistic messages than from any messages that it’s okay to be gay!
You think that you have to lecture kimstu and I on this?!? How many times have I personally put up the Billionaires for Bush or Gore link on the SDMB?.. http://www.billionairesforbushorgore.com/ [just to make it an even 50. ;)] I find it more than a little bizarre that this becomes an argument supporting your contention.
You’re damn right I am going to say this. And, in fact, you have very astutely above identified one of the big reasons why they are not … The Dems are only marginally less indebted to business interests than the Republicans. I wouldn’t say that Clinton is conservative. But, he is very much of a centrist. One of the whole ideas of the behind the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) of which Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman were members was to move the Democratic party to the right, especially on economic issues. One of the major incentives for this was presumably to capture more corporate dollars.
As for American public opinion, I guess we will continue to see this differently. For one thing, I think polls often show that Americans are further to the left on economic issues than one might expect, especially when you dig behind the “headline issues” where the media messages are less prevalent. And, I think that the opinion is to the right of where it might be were it not embedded in a society in which the media is corporate-owned and the messages being given through it (in advertising, as well as directly) emphasize materialism, acquisition of wealth, etc., etc. You have very popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan for women and GQ and Maxim for men that are little more than several hundred pages devoted to the message “buy, buy, buy in order to be happy”! (And, I am talking about the few pages of articles as much as the many pages of ads.)
Jackmanii,that survey mentioned above seems to have pretty good methodology. It wasn’t self selected like most of those useless internet “polls”, and although I dislike the scale they used it’s certainly valid.
In any case, FAIR has done studies with interesting conclusions noting that neither left- nor right-wing groups feel they represent them very well. Unlike most journalists who insist this means they’re doing a good job of being provocative, however, FAIR concluded that it’s more a problem of misrepresentation of everybody than anything else. The biggest problem they saw was that the media relies more and more on government and corporate sources than their own investigation. That can create a problem if the source a reporter or organization depends on threatens to turn off the info spigot unless an unwelcome story gets spiked.
(On the other hand, there’s just plain 'ol bias. I don’t know if there’s any Canadians here, but they could probably expound at great length on how fair and unbiased Conrad Black’s newspapers ever were.)
Kimstu: Demos or Demo will do fine. I cited FAIR for a reason, and it’s because their work is well researched, well documented, and has been published in peer reviewed journals on several occasions. On a board where citation is king, you don’t get much better than that.
