Mr. Smashy, in the article linked in the OP it states that CNN finished as second most trustworthy among democrats, independents, and republicans, in addition to placing second overall. What does this tell us, if anything, about CNN’s bias?
Well, I can’t say what it tells you, but it tells me that time heals those Lincoln Bedroom wounds.
Perhaps in 10 years we’ll see similar levels of trust for CBS etc, especially if Fox is caught in some kind of reporting scandal to help the Republicans… the odds of which I’d put at 50/50.
CBS didn’t get “caught” in any scandal. The Bush draft dodging story was true, and CBS did not forge anyrthing. At worst, they were themselves deceived by some documents, but the substance of the story remained true. There was no intent to deceive on the aprt of CBS.
A Fox News producer was caught on camera leading a bunch of teabaggers in a cheer. Imagine if someone from CBS had been caught cheerleading war protesters or WTO anarchists. Rush Limbaugh would never shut up about it.
Hell, look at that Bush draft dodging thing. The right wing still clings to that like gold. It’s all they’ve got. Meanwhile, Fox News blatantly and repeatedly doctors videos, runs false crawls and sponsors and hypes partisan political events, and the righties think it’s “trustworthy.”
I’m not sure I understand your response completely and I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Perhaps I didn’t word my question clearly enough. What does CNN being trusted equally by opposing parties indicate about their bias, if anything?
That they smartened up, took the message in Fox’s extraordinary success to heart, and changed their ways.
And kudos for them for doing so. IMO, CNN is still somewhat biased toward the left but not as much as it was a decade or more ago. It, more than any other MSM news outlet, has worked to recognize and correct its bias. And again, kudos to them for doing so.
They saw the success of a thoroughly, overtly, and unashamedly biased right-wing “media” franchise and it inspired them to abandon their own [alleged] biases?
There’s no such thing as “the MSM.” Just FYI. Rush Limbaugh made that up. There is not, and never has been any kind of monolithic “liberal media” conglomerate, although there is now a robust conservative one.
Yes. Decades of left wing media bias by the MSM is exactly why Fox came into being and became so successful in the first place. CNN recognized that a huge percentage of the population had indeed recognized and been put off by that bias – bias which they were very likely unaware of themselves, believing, as most lefties do, that the country is roughly devided into two groups – normal, sensible, proper thinking people…and right-wing crackpots. Upon learning that roughly half the country consisted of right-wing crackpots, they decided to change their ways. Now, whether this was due to intellectual honesty and a genuine desire to present the news in an unbiased way or merely the result of competitive pressure for ratings is anybody’s guess. But either way, they’ve taken pains to be more objective and I applaud them for it.
I’d applaud them even more if they hadn’t inflicted that reprehensible harridan Nancy Grace upon the country.
He may have coined the term, I don’t know. But if so that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist; only that he gave it a name.
FWIW, I’ve been both aware of, and highly resentful of, liberal bias in the nation’s media since the sixties, which is when I first recognized it.
It has never existed at all. The “liberal media” is a right wing myth.
Yes. The way that story played out was an amazing demonstration of how adept the right-wing is at twisting the news. Very major transgressions by Guardsman Bush, that were never really disputed … but the story that lingers is CBS’s almost irrelevant faux pas. ('ve wondered if someone in the Rove-Cheney-Bush camp arranged for the faulty evidence to fall into CBS’s hands to start with.)
Another example: Valerie Plame’s husband finds important newsworthy evidence about Iraq and White House lies. White House illegally outs Plame, with assistance of right-wing newsmen. Then, with all this crime to choose from, attention focuses on … an innocent N.Y. Times reporter who ends up in jail!
Of two 2004 Presidential candidates, Bush was indisputably a shirker, Kerry indisputably a war hero. Yet voter surveys show that Kerry probably lost that election due to “doubts about his military record”, doubts due exclusively to right-wing (“Swiftboat”) lies.
I’m bemused by your views, and wish to urinate on your newsletter.
If CNN believed that the country is divided into only two groups, why would they decide to target their reporting at the non-existent middle? That strikes me as a not entirely sound business decision.
I believe CNN and the rest of the MSM has felt for decades that they were reporting objectively and were blind to their own bias. Either that, or they arrogantly and knowingly slanted their coverage to favor the liberal POV because they had the playing field all to themselves prior to the arrival of Rush Limbaugh and Fox. So when I speak of their view that the country consists of normal, proper thinking Americans and right-wing crackpots, I have in mind that they regard the right-wing crackpot faction to be a small minority and not worthy of consideration.
So when I talk of two groups, I’m not saying they were equal in size. I think it’s come as quite a shock to the MSM to learn that such a large percentage of the population regards it as biased and untrustworthy.
There are people on this board who will tell you that media bias is all a concoction of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, and that the only reason anyone believes it is because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking it. But the reality is that Republicans and conservatives have been largely seething for decades at the way the media champions liberal causes and slants its coverage accordingly, and Limbaugh and Roger Ailes’ genius has been to tap into that resentment and champion the other side.
Yes, Fox is biased. Limbaugh clearly is. But those are only two entities, and fairly recent ones at that compared with the decades of slanted coverage coming from the likes of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, Time, Newsweek, USA Today, the LA Times, the NY Times, the Washington Post, etc., etc. And this doesn’t take into account the entertainment media which is also overwhelmingly liberal.
So for decades it was liberal this and liberal that and conservatives had no voice. Now they do, and people are flocking to it accordingly, even if it means they find themselves having to weed out the honest wheat from the dishonest chaff that frankly does find its way into Limbaugh’s and Fox’s reporting. Conservatives are not as stupid as people around here like to think though, and they can tell when Fox or Limbaugh are spouting bullshit. The thing is, bullshit aside, Fox and Limbaugh (and to a degree, Drudge) are the only places people are going to find liberal politicians’ feet held to the fire in the way that Republicans are by the rest of the media. As an example, look at how shocked lots of people were when during the primary run-up to the last election people found out how devious and dishonest and scuzzy the Clintons were. Those of us who were listening to Rush Limbaugh in the early 90’s already knew about it because Limbaugh was busting Clinton’s chops on a daily basis over one lie or another during his campaign against Bush 1, but the rest of the country never heard about them from the MSM which typically wanted the Democrat to win and skewed their coverage accordingly.
Ah, so CNN has always tried to target the non-existent middle, and the success of Fox News has made them re-double their efforts?
Equal size or not, you are attributing two beliefs to the management at CNN; that there is no middle-of-the-road audience, and that they must target it. Taken together, that doesn’t make sense.
And liberals are not as stupid as you think.
Funny, a friend of mine had that very theory. The reasoning being that after the memos were exposed as fakes, that CBS would get ripped for it and that as a result other news organization would become afraid of going anywhere near the topic of Bush’s military record, thus quashing any discussion in the MSM of his less than stellar service. And that is in fact what happened. Has any other major news organization since dared to investigate his time in the National Guard.
It would have been a risky and devious move on the part of the Republicans, but they’ve never been ones to shy away from political trickery.
According to this poll, 36 percent of Republicans believe Obama is not a U.S. citizen and 22 percent are not sure.
I haven’t said anything about a non-existent middle, redoubling efforts or targeting audiences.
CNN was simply doing what the news media has done for decades – presenting the news to the general population and slanting it to be essentially pro-liberal and anti-conservative. My belief is that CNN was largely ignorant not only of its own bias but that of the rest of the mainstream media as well, and that it was also ignorant of the resentment that bias was creating among the nation’s conservative population.
Then with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox and the large number of disaffected listeners and viewers that began flocking to them, CNN, to its credit, took a good, hard look at its coverage and began to present the news more fairly and objectively.
MSNBC took the opposite tack and decided to come out of the closet and stop even trying to appear impartial – and in the wake of declining readership, Time and Newsweek magazines have followed suit, stating clearly their intent to abandon the notion of objectivity and to pander openly to their liberal constituency.
CBS, NBC, ABC, etc., have opted to stick their heads in the sand and continue to claim impartial coverage while presenting a sanitized view of liberal politicians and political goals, and a skeptical, critical and largely negative view of conservative politicians and political goals.
And so we come to where we are today, with conservatives (and apparently a good number of fence-sitters) flocking to Limbaugh and Fox News despite their occasional lapses in honesty, while lefties bemoan that fact and wonder why so many people still find them more credible. And the reason is that they are more credible, even with their occasional lapses in honesty, than the MSM, which is always and consistently biased in the other direction and characterized by a dishonesty that is far more subtle and insidious than the rather blatant, rah-rah type of dishonesty that can sometimes be found with Fox and Limbaugh.
I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I’m a tad skeptical of a poll conducted by the Daily Kos purporting to describe what conservatives think. Most of those figures are so ridiculous it’s laughable.
You really believe that, don’t you? And the terminations of both Rather and his producer Mapes, which occured for exactly that issue… was because… why again?
Seriously, even virtually everyone on your side of the political aisle admits that those bad actors at CBS were using the trumped up ‘evidence’ to push their agenda, long after everyone else realized it was bogus.
As for the substance of the story being true, OK I’ll say this for the 10th time on this thread, since people don’t seem to get it: it doesn’t matter. It’s the perception that matters, the perception that CBS was trying to skew (or ignore) the evidence to push their non-politically-objective agenda.
Same thing with the East Anglia Global Warming stuff. It looks like they are cooking the books, and public opinion moves away from the theory they were evidently trying to push. It doesn’t matter if it’s actually true or not.
I dunno.
Unless that they are *almost *back from the Rick Kaplan/Lincoln Bedroom scandal of the Clinton years. Which might be a bellweather of how long the halflife is of these things (ie CBS is fucked).
What do you think?