All right, then I’m sure you can produce a thread much like this about, say, the New York Times.
:rolleyes:
Sure, most news outlets in the USA have a liberal bias. Just like most scientists, most educators, and most colleges. This has, in no small part, to do with the rampant anti-intellectualism on the right, but that’s a bit of an aside. So journalists tend to lean left. However, news outlets like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC, and the like do their best to act and appear unbiased and balanced. Some bias sneaks in here or there, but if the big story of the day is, “Huge IRS scandal uncovered, Obama targeting conservative groups”, you will never see a source like the Times or the Post shoving that back to D12, because despite the fact that it’s goring a liberal idea or personality, it’s news, it’s important, and it deserves the headline.
In this thread, you can see quite a few examples of FOX News completely burying the lede when it comes to big stories in blatantly biased ways. If the big story is, “Obama administration Job numbers really good”, they’ll run it… On the back page somewhere, in brief mention, and still try to make the administration look bad. But hey, good for them - outlets like Gateway Pundit or Breitbart wouldn’t even run that story - if they mention the job numbers at all, it will be to complain about why they aren’t better, or spin conspiracies about the “real” unemployment rate.
This is, fundamentally, the difference. Mainstream outlets and right-wing “news” outlets both have underlying biases through their employees. However, mainstream outlets strive against those biases, while right-wing outlets embrace them. So you end up with a situation as Vox describes here:
Liberal Ted Turner created CNN, an organization that, whatever its faults (and they are legion) saw itself, and still sees itself, as a neutral referee with transpartisan authority. It has cosmopolitan aspirations.
Conservative Roger Ailes (funded by conservative Rupert Murdoch) created Fox News, a channel that carried, and still carries, mostly talk radio–style right-wing commentary. Like talk radio, it is of the conservative movement, in a way that no mainstream media outlet would ever think of itself as of the left. The closest thing on cable, MSNBC, is running from the liberal label as fast as it can, “balancing” Rachel Maddow with a growing roster of conservatives.
[…]
Nonetheless, despite Fox’s current diminished state and demographic peril, it did its job: It threw open the door of the mainstream conversation to dozens of explicitly conservative news outlets. It established that “balance” in US media would consist of mainstream outlets striving to be neutral and conservative outlets openly leaning right.
Bolding mine. That, fundamentally, is the difference - “leftist” news strives for mainstream neutrality; “right-wing” news strives to further conservative goals. There is no equivalence here.
