I think “painfully true” is a better phrase. Because what puddleglum says is correct - the media did cover up for Kerry as much as they could. The head of ABC News sent out a memo telling his news staff not to cover Kerry lies but only Bush ones. And CBS did, in fact, rush out the forgery about Bush’s National Guard service without sufficient fact-checking, because (due at least in part to their biases) they thought it was actually true. It wasn’t; it was a forgery, and it only took a few hours to debunk.
See also the moderator jumping in to help Obama in his second debate with Romney. The media had left Obama to his own devices before the first debate, having come to believe in their own hype and Obama lost the debate rather badly. Then, in the second debate, the moderator jumped in to help him. Name one time that happened with a Republican.
Exactamundo. I’d guess that if there was any sort of calling on the carpet, it would be something like an editor noticing, because his biases informed him, that an article was too liberal, and calling the writer on the carpet for not being neutral. Meanwhile, a lot of more right-wing articles might seem neutral to the editor, because his biases are skewing his perception without him really even knowing it.
WRT the idea that institutional media bias is exercised in terms of what stories are run and where, I absolutely believe that. I’ve noticed that CNN has a distinct slant toward international social justice- even on the US CNN page, they’ll run some story about empowering women in Burundi front and center, and the story about something more regional will be buried without a photo, etc… down page.
I sense that most posters here in this thread fall into two categories: 1) “No, the media is not biased,” or 2) “Yes, the media is biased, but in a good way - they’re biased for my side.”
As this issue is about how media bias work, Dan Rather had to quit or dismissed in disgrace, all the ones in conservative media involved in the Benghazi propaganda effort or the one from the swiftboaters* got promotions or continue to get rich by making or fanning more conspiracies among the gullible republican voters. **
But, that was grossly simplified Velocity, to me the media is biased, but more professional that many right wingers think, and it makes them fall for false equivalencies regularly. So it does not really fit your definitions.
As many on the left can tell you, mainstream goes for leftists ideas just by serendipity. BTW I do make a habit of not going to left sites that ignore evidence or fall for their propaganda, but the only exception has to be made when one notices in discussions like this one that the opinion on what the mainstream media is doing, according to people on the far left, is ignored.
Items like this are common in their criticism of the media:
There is much more, and I have to say that some of it is silly and should be dismissed, but the point here is that many on the left do not see mainstream media as their media, while the right does think that FOX and others are “fair and balanced”
And thank you for showing all how it is not important for many on the right that swindlers can drive the agenda for many editors of the right wing media.
On edit: I realized also that I missed the Snopes link about the swiftboaters:
So yeah, Jerome Corsy remains an asshole of historical proportions.
But my reading of Voyager’s post was that most posters here don’t see it that way.
I don’t think the media is biased in a “good” way, even if I do agree with them on some issues I still consider bias to be undesirable. Media bias can be minimized, but there are countless instances where bias shines through.