My point isn’t that the words do/don’t appear in the article, but that Starving Artist’s tunnel-vision definition of “media bias” is the problem.
SA claiming “Oooh, there aren’t any reporters complaining about having their liberal biases reined in, so the article is a big load of poo!” conveniently sidesteps the fact that the media conglomerates that own the mainstream news media outlets have a well-documented vested business interest in maintaining a pro-Republican bias.
Tom Brokaw’s In God We Trust on Dateline Friday night (a look at evangelical Christianity) was rescheduled in Nashville for 3:34 a.m. and replaced with Franklin Graham in Melbourne.
Franklin Graham is evangelical, but far more fundamentalist than his father, Billy, and very devisive.
This decision was certainly not in keeping with community standards since Nashville is a liberal city and voted blue in the last election.
I don’t know if it was in support of Republicans, but the owners of the local NBC affiliate certainly muzzled Tom Brokaw in Nashville tonight.
This is a sick society.
Agreed. But it doesn’t show that he failed to read the article, which is what you said.
You have to actually land the punches on Starving Artist, to prevent him claiming, even if only for the benefit of lurkers and observers, that the glancing blows were complete misses. Surely you’ve got enough experience with him to realize that.
I have to admit this made me laugh out loud.
Yes, you are quite right as usual. However, I can see already the accusations of equivocation and dancing on the head of a pin that such phrasing would bring.
True, and yet I see that kind of comment around here all the time, and you know what they say: you are what you eat. I suppose I’ve just read too many of the type of comment you mention above.
Most certainly not.
Traduce with my polemics??? Man, I’m gonna have to remember that one. 
The answer is difficult to provide because frankly, thoughtful, reasonable people on the other side such as yourself and Zoe are in such short supply around here. There are a few others who surface now and then, but they don’t seem to stick around long.
With you and Zoe it would be possible to have wonderful discussions regarding our beliefs and motivations and why we feel the way we do. We would treat each other with respect born of affection and regard, we would make allowances for things we strongly disagreed with which would allow us to continue our discourse in a friendly and productive vein, and we would tailor our own comments in such a way as to try to get the other party to truly understand the point we’re trying to convey. And, although try as we might, we still never get the other person to see our point of view, we respectfully, reasonably and affectionately agree to disagree and go on our merry way until next time with no hard feelings and no damage done to the regard we have for each other.
But such people around here are in short supply. It’s mostly a battle of hard-headed, angry, insulting liberals against hard-headed, angry, insulting conservatives…and when I see the type of treatment even guys like Sam Stone come in for around here, I think what the hell…I’ll just fight fire with fire.
And of course, what with all this fire flying around, I get burned sometimes. 
Oh, come on now, you guys. It’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than that impotent post of rjung’s to convince me that the likes of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Ted Turner, et. al. would sit still for being muzzled by their corporate owners, much less on a consistent enough basis for it to make any difference in the tone of their reportage.
Detest them though I may, I do believe they have far too much integrity and they care far too much about the news, and they care far too much about the harm that right-wing nutjobs want to inflict upon the reasonable, right-thinking people who make up the rest of the country, to ever sit still for being muzzled politically by their bosses. I’m gonna have to see some heavy-duty proof before I believe anything like that, and jungie’s post falls far short of providing it.
So the bell rings and I come out of my corner. I see an opening and go for the jab.@
He weaves and all I get is air.@
I recover and give him my best set of combos, a couple of hooks and a jab.@
My last punch, nothing but air, he crumbles. He’s laid out flat on the canvas@
The ref’s giving him the ten count, so I go to a neutral corner@
But before I even make it halfway across the ring, he’s back up@
Sweet jebus, I’m fighting the fuckin’ terminator! :eek:
Just another fresh example of media bias for Starving Artist to ignore:
Too Many Liberals?
Olbermann says MSNBC bosses upset by liberal guests
“Good gravy, man! Two liberal guests out of nine? That’s nearly 25%!” :eek:
Okay then, I’ll give you my take on it. Media bias is evident every time you see a news program run footage of some impassioned left-wing politician addressing a crowd over his (and their) latest outrage, complete with fiery rhetoric and footage of the crowd clapping and roaring their approval…followed by the stone-faced anchor reporting lamely that “the White House denies the allegations.”
Or when you see someone like Jane Pauley, Paula Zahn or Katie Couric virtually drooling with delight and all smiles while interviewing someone like Hillary Clinton vs. their cool, stern, ever so slightly dubious and skeptical countenance when interviewing someone from the right?
And of course the big daddy of them all was when they all joined in the drumbeat day after day to drive Richard Nixon out of office…this after years and years of Nixon hatred by the press. (Remember Nixon’s famous “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” comment…and this was years before he became president.) The press was out to get him from the get-go and once they got the opportunity, they beat the country over the head with it day after day after day until they finally succeeded in driving him out of office. Dan Rather, in particular, was quite transparent in his loathing of Nixon and made little attempt to hide it.
These are only a few examples of the kind of things that go on routinely and thousands of times over the course of a year in the media’s reportage. If you truly have an open mind about this issue, I would strongly…and I mean very strongly…recommend you read Bernard Goldberg’s book Bias. It’s written by an admitted left-wing reporter – and a CBS one at that – but one who is willing to tell the emperor he has no clothes.
It describes much better than I would ever be able to do examples of the left-wing bias that is so common to the news business, and it does a very good job of explaining how and why it has come into being and flourished. It also answered a great many of the questions I had about how the news business could become so biased and remain that way given that they must be regularly antagonizing a huge percentage of their viewing base. (The answer, in short, is simply that they don’t see the bias so they therefore don’t realize they’re making anyone unhappy. There is only the group they belong to: the sane, compassionate, reasonable right-thinking American citizenry…and right-wing nutjobs.)
If you can truly read it with an open mind and not listen to the rhetoric that my recommendation of it is sure to engender here, I think you will find a great many of your questions answered. You may or may not agree with what he says and how he sees things, but you will gain an excellent perspective as to how those of us who see media bias perceive it.
Keith Olbermann is probably the most blatant – and aggressively so – liberal news personality out there. I remember shortly before he left his last job, he read a letter berating him for his unabashed support and defense of Bill Clinton and stating that Clinton was probably going to be sorry to see Olbermann leaving his job. Olbermann’s response was to grin and say that he would be honored for Clinton to think Clinton was sorry to see him go.
And of course, he eventually popped up on MSNBC where he is now.
I’ve mentioned several times on this board the fact that the major news outlets are making conscious and concerted efforts to tone down their liberal bias in the face of the tremendous success of right-wing talk radio and the Fox network and its personalities like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. They’ve finally awoken to the fact that, like it or not, a huge portion of the viewing public sees them as biased and resents the hell out of it, thus they are turning in droves to Fox, Limbaugh, etc.
It is understandable that the executives in charge of Olbermann’s show, which garners dismally low ratings, would worry about being perceived as championing liberalism.
It must be remembered, when considering my words, that in my view media bias is a decades-long issue. The fact that the media has now been forced to make adjustments in order to try to hide it in no way means its prevalence has been diminished.
Aw, shucks…you flatter me.
You’re really elucidator, aren’t you?
If not, I suspect poor luci’s rep as the funniest Doper may be in peril.
Facts are not bias Starving Artist.
You are confusing truth with bias. Fact is, for someone like Nixon to become president and then reelected, a big chuck of the media had to be fair or biased to him, just as it happened then to a devious person like Bush.
New recordings released recently showed without a doubt that Nixon indeed was a crook and a racist. Since that was the case, are you denying that the media should not be doing what was needed? In other words, that to show no bias at all the expected thing was to be in favor of a crook and to then hide those unfortunate facts?
Bottom line: the media is a business, if more papers will be sold now if the truth of what is going on with the certified lies of the current administration, it will be published.
The latest polls are showing that the opinion of the owners of the eyeballs is changing and they are looking for information that was discussed virtually only in places like the SDMB and obviously dismissed by people like you.
And when even outfits like CNN ignored that evidence discussed here until know, you bet they were biased, but toward unreal and in the end untruthful positions. With Fox you get it, with the mainstream, the 2 point of view approach many times benefited the lies of the administration since moderates assume the truth was in between, problem is the lies got in the end more play than the truth until recently. The truly biased media of the left is virtually out of the picture, but is growing, as other poster here noticed: if the media was liberal, Michel Moore would never had had the need to make Fahrenheit 9/11, and that blockbuster did prove that there is a growing audience for a liberal point of view.
Nope.
T’anks.
But I 'spect you’ll flip/flop on this too. 
By the way, crowmanyclouds, welcome to the Dope!
The Dope, heroin for the mind!
A month for free, an addiction for life. 
Again SA, these are your opinions. No offense, but that proves nothing except that you see a left wing bias. I’m not trying to blow you off, but your giving me the same stuff as earlier.
I’m not saying that there isn’t a bias in the news media. There is a massive bias towards sensationalism and ratings, not politics. That explains why both parties get ripped into by Matt and Katie when popular opinion turns against them. It explains why they can spend weeks of coverage on runaway brides. It explains why they toss weathermen out into hurricanes. It perfectly explains why they are more obsessed with car chases, blood, and destruction and less on actual journalism. This even explains why Fox News sucks so completely and why the media doesn’t even question any cracker jack facts that get thrown at them.
This sensationalist bias then gets filtered through your own political views and emerges as a left/right wing bias.
There is so much wrong with the media these days. Pinning it on political bias is the next closest thing to useless.
ABC’s blog ‘The Note’ was pretty honest about liberal bias a while back:
In other words, every time a reporter asks a president, “What is your plan to solve high gas prices? (or labor costs, or alternative energy or whatever)”, there is an implicit, and biased, assumption that the job of a president is to come up with a plan to solve the problem. You NEVER hear a reporter say, “What is your plan to ensure that the government stay out of issue X”? Even though it’s just as valid a question. Unless, of course, issue X is abortion or other things the liberals hold dear.
Go look up the number of times a conservative thinktank like Cato, the Heritage Foundation, or the American Enterprise Institute is referred to as a ‘conservative think tank’, while liberal thinktanks like Brookings or the Economic Policy Instutute are simply ‘Washington-based’, or ‘Academic’. Studies from the AARP or Handgun Control, Inc. are given straight-up reportage, while a study from the NRA or tobacco industry are treated with suspicion and hostility.
If you want a recent example of bias, consider the immense amount of coverage being given to the indictment of Scooter Libby. Compare that to the coverage given to the indictments of TWO of Clinton’s cabinet members. Can anyone remember who they were? Maybe not, because it didn’t make much news. (Henry Cisneros and Mike Espy, btw).
Another example: The demonization of Ken Starr. How many stories did we have to endure that attempted to trash the reputation and motives of Ken Starr? Compare to the fawning commentary about Patrick Fitzgerald. People forget that the Starr-Ray investigation actually led to 14 convictions or guilty pleas. But ‘everyone knew’ that Starr was just a Republican lackey out to get any Democrat he could. For that matter, the sudden importance of perjury as a crime seems rather new, since the mainstream line against Clinton was that he was ‘trapped into lying’. No one’s asking if that’s what happened with Libby (I don’t believe it was, but I have no idea because no one’s investigated the possibility that I know of)
Look how the Katrina reporting glossed over the failures of the Louisiana state and municipal governments (run by Democrats), and focused on the failures of the Republican federal government. Does anyone doubt that if the tables had been turned and it had been a Democrat in the White House and Republicans in the state and local governments that the reportage would have been very different?
Then there’s the war coverage. ‘Everyone knows’ that Iraq is a ‘disaster’, because that’s the narrative, and that’s all we hear. It’s a lost cause, no way to win, quit while we’re behind, quagmire, another Vietnam, yada yada yada. But every time we hear from a soldier who’s actually in the middle of it, we get a very different picture. They always say, “The Iraq we know is not the one we see on American TV. They’re not getting it right.” But you might not even know about that, because you generally only get to read such interviews in the right-wing press. Every time there’s a vote where huge numbers turn out peacefully, everyone is caught napping. Because there are two sides to the war narrative, but the media has only picked one to hammer on relentlessly.
If the media had a right-wing bias, we’d be subjected to endless stories about the horrors under Saddam’s regime, ‘feel good’ stories about the huge numbers of cars, satellite dishes, and refugees flooding back into the country. We’d have embeds with Iraqi units, reporting on how they are improving and the sense of pride they have in protecting a free country instead of fighting for Saddam. Every time a new power plant opened, or a town school was rebuilt, or a Saddam-era mass grave discovered, or a gift of appreciation being given to American military commanders by local officials, it would be news. Then we might get a picture of a country slowly crawling back from the abyss, with growing pains but steady progress. Instead, we get ‘quagmire’.
If we had a balanced media, the UN oil for food scandal would be making more news. It is exposing corruption at the highest levels in countries all over the world. In fact, U.N. corruption, incompetence, and bad behaviour is generally ignored by the mainstream media. The vicious anti-semitism that broke out at the Darfur conference, causing the U.S. and Israel to boycott it, isn’t seen as a real problem.
Just for a minute, consider wrapping your head around the notion of what we’d be hearing if the U.N. were actually a right-wing organization opposed to liberal principles. What do you think the media would be saying then? When Blue-helmeted soldiers are found to be raping and stealing from the populations they were sent to protect, what do you think you’d hear from the left? If that Darfur conference had been a right-wing conference in 1980’s South Africa, and instead of anti-Semitism the U.N. had passed a resolution supporting apartheid, what would we have heard from the left? Just imagine the number of Orwell quotes alone we’d hear!
And the list goes on. A pet peeve of mine is the constant reporting of ‘price gouging’, which NEVER goes on to explain the economic rationale for it. It’s ALWAYS presented from the liberal viewpoint - some crook taking advantage of people in their time of need. It’s completely wrong, but consistently reported this way.
I remember when Reagan proposed welfare reform, and how it was reported in the media. Republican fat-cats screwing over the poor to line their own pockets. Evil Reagan making fun of the poor for political gain. Why, if we limited welfare, the streets will be filled with the homeless and destitute! The beast. Those of us who were saying that reform would help the poor in the same way that cutting off heroin helps a junkie just weren’t listened to.
Then when welfare reform came along in the Clinton years, the press reception turned almost on a dime when Clinton went from opposition to acceptance, and suddenly it became okay to report the ‘good news’ about the effects of welfare reform. Now it’s seen as a huge success (and a rather obvious thing to do).
When researchers actually go about trying to catalog bias, they find it all over the place. For example, from Wikipedia:
Those of us who follow gun reporting are well aware of this. We’ll read in a conservative or libertarian paper about someone thwarting a crime with a gun. Then we’ll go look up the story on google, and find no mention of the gun at all (just ‘stopped by an alert citizen’ or something). When you see that same omission, over and over again, it’s inescapable that there is bias at work.
Unlike you I don’t ignore the evidence of bias. One has to consider that, but the fact is that there is even more omissions reported by the left and this is evident only by looking at the first page of commondreams.com. In the end, the reality is that the bias remains to their efforts to be fair. The fact that both the Left and right can find examples of bias does IMO demonstrate that mainstream is centrist, or attempts to be. However, the fact that the owners of the media are corporate shows that it is naive to assume that reports lean more to the left than to the right.
I can grumble that the lack of bias in favor of the left is leaving many important issues out of the picture, but I have seen before that many times common sense positions, scientifically based positions and even some common decency ones are dismissed as liberally biased positions.
For example the gun issue: I dealt with this before, I do think that it shows bias towards your trade rather than a liberal or conservative position, by its own nature, reporters many times have to avoid using guns when they go to dangerous territory as to show impartiality. The halls of the media buildings have remembrances of fallen buddies in wars and even in violent situations in the USA too. Heck, I would not be surprised to find that there is a policy against guns at FOX news HQ too. So I do think the gun bias is a wash regarding the issue of a political bias, the bias in this case is because of the trade they have.
And a fine job you did at it, too. I was truly impressed. My point is that, by his own admission, SA is a mind not to be changed by your refutations and rebuttals. In that sense, he is indistinguishable from the Terminator. But the outcome of the match is, to continue the metaphor, in the hands of the judges: the observers, and the lurkers. It is they who will be tallying up the points and awardng the round.
From his continued protestations that blows do not find their target, I infer that SA believes (or hopes) that enough of those judges are unobservant that his denials can swing the point count toward his column. While that may not be so, I do believe it serves us better to approach arguments with him as though it is, if only to deprive him of the tactic.
And allow me to echo Finn’s welcome.
I forgot to add this: so as to reset the bias detector[sup]TM[/sup] of many: let us see once again what trully left wing bias would be if it were to appear in the mainstream: Here is former radio talk show Bob Witkowski (I DON’T HAVE TO SUPPORT THE MORON. I’M AN AMERICAN, NOT A JOCKSTRAP!) commentary and reports.:
http://www.atwitsend.org/currentcommentaries.html
A Gun-Toting Liberal , BTW.