So just because “everybody does it” we shouldn’t be concerned? Yes, all administrations and all congressmen use their official positions to promote their agendas both in deed by passing laws and regualtions and by propaganda. That’s what politics and governing are all about.
However to surreptitiously pay a newspaper reporter or columnist to promote your views under the guise of news or the columnist’s own opinion is beyond the pale I think. Even if George Washington, let alone Bill Clinton, did it.
If George W. Bush had in fact done a worse job than John Kerry, then ‘worse coverage’ is what an unbiased media *should *produce. You have to prove that this ‘worse coverage’ was not warranted to make your point about bias.
What Askance said. Also, it is not necessarily “biased” for the media to hit one candidate harder than another in a particular election. If Carter fared worse than Reagan in the news in 1980, would that be proof of “conservative bias” or “pro-Republican” bias? Or merely a reflection of the mood of the times? Also, as E-Sabbath pointed out, it is controversial whether Bush can be considered “conservative.” (And it is also a canard that Kerry is “liberal.”) If you want to show “liberal bias” in the media, you need to show a much more thoroughgoing pattern than could be discerned from coverage of a single election. For instance, in the same year, the same study showed, press coverage of Bush’s most important project, the Iraq War, was not predominantly “negative” despite complaints from some quarters that it was. Would not a liberal press have given us more consistently negative coverage of the war?
Not really because Neo-Liberalism is just as expansionist as Neo-Conservative. The only thing that really differs between the Liberal elite and the Conservative elite is tactics, and even those tactics are blurring together. Clinton was pretty conservative, Bush isn’t exactly conservative. There are plenty of liberals who have a stake in that war as well.
And I think something that is missed a lot of the time when people talk about the liberal media, they aren’t speaking only of news sources. They are also talking about Hollywood and The Music Industry, where propaganda is par for the course.
I am interested to see what the result from Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” will be. Ridley Scott has been showing the dark side of the empire for a long time with his movies, so I can’t wait to see what the director of Gladiator, Alien and Blade Runner will do with a Crusades movie.
The Columbia Journalism Review has an article describing how media outlets are paid to distribute these “news stories”. He summed it up in an e-mail posted on Tom Tomorrow’s blog.
In a nutshell:
–The government hires a PR firm.
–The PR firm hires a company to make the Video News Release (VNR), and another to distrubute it.
–The distributor pays for time on satellite news feeds for services like CNN, AP, Fox, etc., to distribute the VNR to local stations. The stations pay for the satellite feed.
So, through a couple of convoluted steps, the government is paying the satellite feed distributors to spread their propaganda.
Some news stations say that they were surprised to find out that these were government-produced stories. No one is free of blame there; the government shouldn’t make the videos look like legit news segments, and the stations should examine what they air a little more closely.
No that is not at all what I said. I stated it is certainly bad. My observation is that everyone is acting shocked and surprised, like this has not been going on continuously for years. There is no actual change except the publics perception. That was my sole point.
I find this funny as I have been pointing this out for years to people how the government uses media in this regard, and no one ever seemed to care. Now suddenly it is a big deal. Why? because the media saw an oppurtunity to put a spin on a very old story for the sake of creating news(aka ratings). This makes this story in itself not much more than propaganda.
It is the unforunate reality of the world in which we live. Something should be done about it, the question is what.