Ongoing Evidence Of Media Bias

Steve Schacher · February 14, 2004

Here is more evidence of media bias. Keep posting ongoing media shenanigans to this topic.

quote:

I apologized to an important political figure in Washington last week on behalf of my profession. I started my professional life as a journalist. Later, when I came to Washington, it was to work with the media from the inside. Then throughout my career, which has included the initiation of eleven conservative institutions, I always considered myself a journalist. When, in 1980, we began to publish what is now Stu Rothenburg's Political Report, I insisted on journalistic standards. Former Speaker of the House, Tom Foley (D-WA.), called me once and said Stu had written the most objective report about his race that anyone in the media had written. He was shocked. How could a conservative think tank produce a balanced report on politics? It is because we set out to tell the truth. Even though I now am in my eleventh year of writing commentaries, I try to be balanced even when I strongly advocate a point of view.

The reason for my apology was that throughout this primary season we have been hearing about the record turnout of voters participating in Democrat caucuses and primaries. I bought the lie. The truth is that, except for Iowa and New Hampshire, there has not been any sort of record turnout for the Democrats.

Even in New Hampshire the vote was far less than what the Republicans had when they last had a contested primary in 2000. The Democrats this year had 219,787 votes in their primary. The GOP in 2000 had 239,523 votes. That 20,000 difference is major in a state the size of New Hampshire.

Let's examine the turnout in some of the other states which has gone absolutely unreported anywhere:

In Missouri, 416,104 voters turned out for the Democrats. But in 1988, when there was also a hotly contested race, the Democrat turnout was 527,805. I guess local boy Dick Gephardt dropping out didn't help any this year. And the Republicans in 2000 had 475,705, by the way.
Or how about North Dakota? Do you know the total vote up there this year for the Democrats? It was a mere 12,512. By contrast, in 1992 when the Democrats had a lively race (when Bill Clinton was nominated), the Democrat turnout was 32,786.
In Oklahoma where you had a very hot race between Wesley Clark, John Edwards and John Kerry the Democrat turnout was 302,169. By contrast, in 1992 it was 416,129, a difference of more than 100,000 votes.
In South Carolina it is true that the Democrats with 291,175 bested their 1992 showing of 116,414. They had local favorite son John Edwards (He was born there) on the ballot. But contrast this with the 2000 GOP contest where George W. Bush and John McCain shot it out. The Republican total four years ago in South Carolina was 565,991.... a difference of 270,000-some votes.
Or how about Michigan? I heard several media reports about the supposed record turnout there with people standing in line and the possibility of polling hours being extended. This for a total vote of 162,929. That's nice, except that in 1988 there were about 212,000 Democrats who voted. Get this; in 2000 1,392,023 Republicans went to the polls to vote for delegates for President. That's a difference of a little more than one million one hundred thousand votes.
The Democrat turnout in Washington State was really anemic compared with even four years ago when Al Gore had things wrapped up, but even then the GOP turnout was about 350,000 higher than the Democrats that year.
Now let's look at New Mexico. You know, the state of intrepid vice presidential possibility Gov. Bill Richardson. The Democrat turnout this year was 94,108. Even in 2000, with Al Gore having things totally in hand, there were 132,280 votes. Ah, but in 1992 when Clinton was slugging it out 181,443 voters came to the polls. And here's the point: New Mexico has 495,000 registered Democrats and only 310,000 registered Republicans. Still, only 19,000 more Democrats voted in an early 2004 primary than Republicans who voted in a very late 2000 primary.
In Arizona the Democrat turnout was 224,020, which was slightly up from the Gore year of 2000 when 193,433 turned out. But look at the GOP turnout in 2000. It was 290,637.
In Delaware there are 224,000 registered Democrats. Only 175,000 Republicans are registered. Yet only 1,100 more Democrats voted in the hotly contested primary this year than voted in the similarly hotly contested Republican primary in 2000.

I could drone on and on but my apology was precisely for this point. Not only did the media outright misrepresent what was actually happening on the ground in these elections, but there was no context presented. It is true that in Iowa there was the largest turnout ever, about 122,000 Democrats compared with 85,000 Republicans in the celebrated Republican caucuses of 2000. And that point was pushed over and over again. Yet, Iowa is the ONLY state where the Democrat figures compare favorably not only with contests in 1988 and 1992 but with the Republican figure from 2000. In every other place the Democrat figures are down from previous years or, as in New Hampshire, still under-perform compared with GOP turnout in 2000. And as I mentioned, in states where there is actual registration, the Democrat performance was not impressive.

I say all of this not to be partisan. (Indeed, my commentary, which recently suggested that Democrats might win the Presidency, upset many in Republican circles.) I say this rather to call attention to the really shoddy reporting on the part of the national media. The Internet now gives all of us the opportunity to look up data easily and in one-tenth of one second. There is absolutely no excuse for not reporting things in context. And there certainly is no excuse for reporting that there is backbreaking record turnout when it is less than the last contested primary.

I suppose I will have to keep on apologizing for what I still consider to be my profession, but why folks? I know the national media tends to be lazy but this is absurd.

Paul Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

Steve Schacher · February 20, 2004

From the Media Research Center, the latest piece from Brent Bozell called The RNC Agenda vs. The Media Agenda:

quote:

For several weeks now, the national media have looked like the servile monkey to Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffeÔÇÖs organ grinder. Not only have they pounded the Democratic attack line against the President, chanting "questions linger, questions linger, questions linger" about BushÔÇÖs honorable National Guard service, they have touted the efficiency and electability of John Kerry, and implored his remaining opponents to quit immediately.

Then, after all the Bush-bashing and the Kerry-boosting, they unveil a new media poll and squeal with excitement that KerryÔÇÖs opened a lead. Who would have guessed media manipulation had anything to do with those numbers?

On February 12, Republican Party leader Ed Gillespie, one of the few spokesmen allowed to deviate from the Sesame Street sweetness of the Bush team, gave a speech in Reno that revealed what could be called the Republican news agenda, the stories they would like to see the media develop and underline for the voters. Needless to say, the silence is so deafening you can hear the crickets chirping. So letÔÇÖs review some of GillespieÔÇÖs list of particulars:

1. John Kerry has a long record of voting to slash spending on the military and intelligence agencies, even as al-Qaeda & Co. bombed the World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole. Network coverage? None. TheyÔÇÖre too busy replaying footage of Kerry in Vietnam, as if thatÔÇÖs a coherent answer to KerryÔÇÖs ultraliberal voting record.

2. Our forces found a 17-page memo in Iraq, allegedly written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian with ties to al-Qaeda. The memo indicates that the resistance is recognizing our resolve to win the War on Terror. Of the United States, it says, "Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By God, this is suffocation!" You mean, weÔÇÖre winning? This doesnÔÇÖt sound the nightly network news tone, does it?

On the evening of February 9, the Big Three networks warily acknowledged the memo as potentially authentic, but only CBS quoted this "suffocation" line. Reporter Elizabeth Palmer immediately added: "But the letter, even if it's genuine, doesn't prove that al-Qaeda is responsible for violence in Iraq. On the contrary, it may be an appeal by desperate local operators to al-Qaeda to get involved."

Unsurprisingly, ABC preferred a different line, one that demeaned the United States. Martha Raddatz pointed out that the letter says of Americans: "As you know, these are the biggest cowards that God has created, and the easiest target."

3. Gillespie reported that Sen. Bob Kerrey, the Vietnam veteran and Democratic presidential candidate in 1992, told the New York Sun that he supported the Iraq war in no uncertain terms: "It breaks my heart whenever anybody dies, but we liberated 25 million people who were living under a dictator. It puts us on the side of democracy in the Arab world. Twenty years from now, we'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who says it wasn't worth the effort." Network coverage? Zero.

4. The bald-headed leftist pop musician Moby was quoted in the New York Daily News as promoting the idea that his fellow Kerry supporters should work to "punk" Bush supporters by planting lies in Internet chat rooms. He suggested telling pro-lifers that President Bush drove a former girlfriend to an abortion clinic, and paid for her abortion. Network coverage? Zero.

5. Gillespie noted that Teresa Heinz Kerry gave over $50,000 to the League of Conservation Voters, which endorsed her husband's candidacy in January and has run ads on his behalf. Network coverage of this conflict? Zero. Instead, ABC touted the endorsement in two evening stories on January 24, and George Stephanopoulos touted it again on his show the next morning. On January 15, NBCÔÇÖs Kelly OÔÇÖDonnell aired an entire story giving environmentalists free rein to attack Bush, beginning with the sentence: "The League of Conservation Voters grades the President with the first 'FÔÇÖ in the groupÔÇÖs 34-year history."

6. Finally, the Kerry campaign engaged in nasty push-polling tactics in Iowa. Gillespie underlined: "ItÔÇÖs on videotape!" A documentary filmmaker covering the Dean campaign was present in a home when the Kerry campaign called on the night of the caucuses and accused Howard Dean of being an environmental racist.

Gillespie cited an ABC News report as the source. HeÔÇÖs right, but thereÔÇÖs a little problem. Protective ABC only put this January 17 report by Jake Tapper on its

Web site

, and spiked it from appearing on television, despite obtaining the damning videotape. CBS and NBC never bothered to cover this, either.

Does this litany of Democratic favoritism give voters any confidence that the TV networks will be reliable referees of the campaign this year? The proper confidence level in network news coverage? Zero.

Steve Schacher · March 12, 2004

From the Media Research Center, a review of the coverage of the Susan Lindauer story, where the media ignore that she worked for them and for Democrats:

quote:

Susan Lindauer, a former reporter for U.S. News & World Report, whose byline appeared over some 1991 stories about the ÔÇ£Air SununuÔÇØ scandal, was arrested and arraigned in federal court in Baltimore on Thursday, charged with various counts related to working for and accepting payments from the Saddam Hussein regime, in violation of working with a terrorist state. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Fortune before jumping to U.S. News in 1990 and then, by 1993, moving into a career as Press Secretary to a series of liberal Democrats: Then Congressmen Peter DeFazio and Ron Wyden of Oregon, Senator Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and, briefly in 2002, for California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren.

But while CNN and FNC stories noted her specific journalistic associations and how she toiled for years for Democrats, the CBS and NBC stories on Thursday night skated over both parts of the resume, despite the fact that AP stories fully outlined her background, with NBC not even alluding to her Democratic connections, though both networks made sure to mention how sheÔÇÖs a ÔÇ£distant cousinÔÇØ of White House Chief-of-Staff Andy Card.

ABCÔÇÖs World News Tonight did not mention the arrest of the resident of Takoma Park, Maryland, a city which has declared itself a ÔÇ£nuclear-free zone.ÔÇØ

On ThursdayÔÇÖs CBS Evening News, anchor John Roberts referred vaguely to how she ÔÇ£worked at various times for four members of Congress.ÔÇØ Reporter Jim Stewart noted: ÔÇ£A former journalist who briefly worked as a speechwriter for Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, Lindauer comes from a political family. Her father once ran for Governor of Alaska. White House Chief-of-Staff Andrew Card is a distant cousin.ÔÇØ (Stewart also passed along how her neighbors said she was a ÔÇ£klutzÔÇØ as one recalled how ÔÇ£she couldnÔÇÖt even turn on her lawnmower last year.ÔÇØ)

Over on the NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw announced: ÔÇ£An American woman is being accused tonight of conspiring to act as an agent for Saddam HusseinÔÇÖs intelligence service. Susan Lindauer, who describes herself as an anti-war activist, is a former journalist. SheÔÇÖs also the second cousin of White House Chief-of-Staff Andy Card. She was arrested today at her home outside of Washington, DC. Prosecutors say she went to Baghdad and then returned to the United States on IraqÔÇÖs behalf to try to persuade administration officials not to go to war. For her part she says she is innocent.ÔÇØ

Steve Schacher · March 13, 2004

From MediaChannel.org, a story called TV News Runs Hot for Kerry, Cold for Bush

quote:

TV News Runs Hot for Kerry, Cold for Bush

NEW YORK, March 11, 2004 - Mainstream news organizations may "filter" the news, as President George W. Bush claimed late last year, but not to omit good stories from their Iraq coverage, but to broadcast more negative news about the president himself, according to a report released today by MediaChannel.org and Media Tenor.

The report reveals a strong negative cast to ABC, CBS and NBC news coverage of the president thus far in 2004. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry, Bush's certain opponent for November, has received more positive coverage by the same three networks.

According to data compiled for MediaChannel.org by international media monitoring firm Media Tenor, network news broadcasts in January and February contained on average nearly three times more negative news statements about President Bush than about Senator John Kerry.

During these two months the networks devoted the bulk of their reporting on Kerry to the candidate's string of victories in early primaries and caucuses. Network coverage of President Bush during this period tended to focus on questions about his WMD intelligence in the run-up to the war with Iraq, his military service record during the Vietnam War, analysis of his performance during the State of the Union address, and comparisons of his re-election campaign with the hotly contested race involving Democratic candidates.

Of the 2,895 statements made about Bush during the nightly half-hour network broadcasts, Media Tenor analysts counted 834 (or 28.8 percent) of statements as negative. Only 10.4 percent of the 1191 network statements about Senator Kerry were negative.

Over the same period, the networks shone a more benevolent light on Kerry. In the first two months of the year, more than 35 percent (or 422 of 1191 statements) of network coverage of Kerry was counted as positive. Bush's positive coverage rating amounted to only 11.9 percent of the total statements made about the president during the half-hour network broadcasts.

CBS Evening News with Dan Rather leads the networks in negative coverage of the president and positive coverage of Kerry. More than 35 percent of the Bush-related statements made during CBS' nightly broadcast portrayed the president in a negative way. Only 8.9 percent of Bush coverage on CBS was counted as positive.

By comparison, ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings was more neutral towards the president. Media Tenor rated ABC's Bush coverage as 22.7 percent negative, 12 percent positive and 65 percent neutral.

CBS shone more brightly than the other networks when covering Senator Kerry. Media Tenor classified more than 38 percent of their coverage of the Democratic candidate as positive, ABC and NBC's news programs were positive on Kerry 33.4 and 35.9 percent of the time, respectively.

"Bush continues not to be able to leave a convincing impression on TV news," said Roland Schatz, president of Media Tenor. "While the president received the largest share of media coverage against the field of Democratic candidates, the focus was on negative, not positive, stories about Bush."

Media Tenor analysts pore over transcripts and watch the half hour-broadcasts to classify news statements as negative, positive or neutral. Their data for the first two months of 2004 show that more than 55 percent of all statements about the candidates were neutral -- or neither negative nor positive towards the candidate. When considering the remainder of statements, President Bush received far fewer high marks than his likely opponent for November.

MediaChannel earlier this week shared the data via fax with the anchors and executives at NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight and CBS Evening News. They have yet to reply to requests for comment.

-- Timothy Karr is executive director of MediaChannel.org, which last month launched Media For Democracy 2004 (

www.mediafordemocracy.us

), a citizens-powered initiative to hold mainstream media to a higher standard of election coverage.

Darkling · March 13, 2004

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Schacher:

Here is more evidence of media bias.

You guys seem surprised that Journalist have a bias against Republicans, but if you take a look at their Median Salary you will understand why it is that they are so biased against the Republican Party. The Republican Party is about creating opportunities for you to advance, but since Journalists carreers pretty much have no advancement, their only hope is for some sort of government program or handout to help them out.

Steve Schacher · May 26, 2004

Here's a very interesting survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It got minimal press, just like the previous study from 1995 that found similar results.

Bottom-Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage, Say Journalists: Press Going Too Easy on Bush

It is well worth the read. Examine the numbers in the charts carefully, especially the comparisons of opinions by the media vs. opinions of the general public. Don't miss the links at the bottom of the page to navigate the entire report.

LostInSpace · June 10, 2004

Here's another great example of media bias

Italian, Polish Civilian Hostages Rescued near Baghdad Now I can't find this anywhere on CNN the only thing I did find was this 6 European soldiers killed in Iraq attack . Amazing not one word about the rescue only the deaths. What am I saying, like I expected it to be any different. We all know what the current media machine is aimed at. If you don't believe me, do the search on CNN yourself. Now if CNN was not biased they would have both articles.

Steve Schacher · June 20, 2004

From Gray Lady spikes Karzai story at WorldNetDaily:

quote:

Perception verses reality ÔÇô it's a point that needs to be made until the cows come home.

Did you know that on Tuesday of this week Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, addressed a joint session of Congress? Did you know that not one word of that address, nor even any mention that the event even occurred, appeared in the following day's national edition of the New York Times?

Aide from a photograph of President Bush and Mr. Karzai on its front page, and a caption mentioning that the two had a news conference in the Rose Garden, the June 16 edition of the New York Times contains not a single word about what Mr. Karzai said to Congress, to Bush or to the American people.

Why the cover up?

Here is the text of Mr. Karzai's address to Congress. If you actually click on that link, you'll find that you must pay a subscription fee to read the full text of the speech. That link, by the way, was only one of three links on Google News regarding Karzai's appearance before Congress. The other two were this abbreviated AP wire story and this pitiful UPI wire story. [Editor's note: Karzai's speech in full is posted at Foxnews.com.]

I could not find any coverage in print of the long list of issues President Karzai took special care to raise about the progress in Afghanistan ÔÇô 30 percent growth in the Afghan economy, dramatic progress in the country's infrastructure, schools, health-care system and most important, in Karzai's view, the outstanding progress the country has made in restoring basic civil rights to women.

How did I learn all of this? I just happened to catch Fox News's live coverage of the president's press conference; otherwise, I would never have known about Karzai's address to Congress. And I consider myself a news junky!

The New York Times' treatment of Karzai's visit is not the tip of the iceberg ÔÇô it's the larger part of the iceberg, the part beneath the water that the public never gets to see.

Also lying beneath the surface, virtually unseen, is one of the greatest economic booms we've seen in 30 years. But a recent poll shows just how that reality has diverged from public perception of reality. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Associated Press, 57 percent of the public believe the nation has lost jobs in the last six months. That's the perception. What's the reality? Exactly the opposite! During the last six months, the economy generated nearly 1.2 million new jobs.

How could the American people be so misinformed?

The Times typically relegates good economic news to the inside of its business section, almost always using a wire story, rarely assigning any of its own reporters. They made an exception when the extraordinarily strong May payroll numbers came in: The story appeared on the front page, but only under a one-column headline.

Compare that to the four-column headline appearing Thursday, "Panel Finds No Qaida-Iraq Tie," a story which is being widely criticized as a complete distortion of the facts. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq was directly involved in the 9-11 attacks, but there were "clear ties" ÔÇô not "no ties" ÔÇô between al-Qaida and Iraq before we took military action against Saddam Hussein. The Times reported the exact opposite of the truth in its banner headline.

How could the American people be so misinformed?

It's a question that the New York Times and editorial boards across this country have a responsibility to ask themselves. Where is Times's public editor, Daniel Okrent, when you need him?

Steve Schacher · July 14, 2004

High Bias

"Mainstream" reporters aren't just liberal-- They're fanatical, by BY ORSON SCOTT CARD.

This contains some nice examples, with explanation, of how bias works in reporting.

quote:

When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.

Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing?

Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer.

It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage).

I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News.

So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.

But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.

So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?

One recent morning--the Sunday before Memorial Day--I picked up the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and started looking through national news coverage. You know, the stuff that is filtered through the lens of liberal bias long before it even reaches local papers, which rarely revise what they get off the wire services.

In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror."

Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right?

Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point.

The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it.

This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically.

Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs."

Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media.

The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt.

Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why?

First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids.

Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness.

In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it.

But let me go on. A story about terrorists murdering civilians and taking hostages in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, never actually uses the word terrorist. Instead, the killers are "gunmen" (in the headline), "suspected Islamic militants wearing military-style uniforms" and "attackers" (in the body of the story).

Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America.

That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on?

This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us.

Let's go on to the coverage of Bill Cosby's remarks on the self-defeating actions of some segments of the American black community. In the Asheville Citizen-Times, it's hard to find what is newsworthy about the article at all. Mr. Cosby's remarks are reported as taking place "earlier this month," and there is no event since then to justify considering this new article as "news."

In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him.

After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"?

Mr. Tillard is first quoted as saying that "Cosby 'could absolutely have' gone even further," and though slavery and Jim Crow had hurt African-Americans, "at the end of the day, we have got to turn the tide." But then Mr. Tillard is quoted as explaining that the real danger of Mr. Cosby's remarks is that white people (i.e., racists) will "seize upon that and try to castigate the African-American community. The conservatives and liberals are far too quick to seize upon a statement and say to the rest of us, 'See, see, it's not us, it's you.' What they have not wanted to acknowledge is that there are still legacies of slavery."

How is this biased? In this editorial-masquerading-as-news, Ms. Hajela is providing us with a "clincher" that tells us what we are supposed to learn from all this: that it would be a bad thing for Americans to let the racists off the hook by telling blacks that they are causing some of their own problems.

Harmless? Sure. In fact, I agree with Ms. Hajela's editorial. But it was in the news pages, and it was not news, and it was not impartial. It was shaped and designed solely to cause readers to reach a certain opinion.

Nobody was quoted as saying, "Cosby was absolutely right, it's ridiculous to keep complaining about things that are completely under our own control. We can teach our children to learn standard English and get a good education. We can teach our children not to become criminals, and can hold them responsible for their actions when they do commit crimes, instead of blaming racism."

Ultimately, both the "pro" and "con" quotes said the same thing: Mr. Cosby had a point, but he shouldn't say it openly because it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Very PC. Don't we all feel better now?

Then there's the half-page tie-in to the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," with the headline "Could It Really Happen?" The answer, buried deep in the story, is that of course it couldn't. Geochemist Wallace Broecker, who is the most-quoted source, is paraphrased only in the final paragraph as saying "Hollywood's idea of 'abrupt' is much swifter than nature's, however. Climate shifts unfold over years and decades--not in two reels, said Broecker."

This is as vague a way of saying "What this movie actually shows is scientific nonsense" as you could possibly imagine.

The bulk of the article--especially the crucial first paragraphs and the large-type inset, which are all that most people ever read--say quite a different thing. In answer to the question "could the climate really go bonkers, just like that?" the answer in the article was "Maybe. That was the consensus among researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a leading center for climate studies."

The next paragraph includes a quote from the observatory's director, G. Michael Purdy: "This is not fantasy. It's happened before. It's well documented."

Which quote will leave the clearest impression in the readers' minds? The fact is, what Mr. Purdy was saying was "not fantasy" and has "happened before" is Manhattan being covered in ice. That was during the Ice Age. It didn't happen in one big storm. And it wasn't caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions.

Furthermore, any institution calling itself an "earth observatory" has a built-in bias. They want to wrap themselves in the much more fact-based science of astronomy, but this isn't an observatory as most of us understand it, it's a group of scientists who have gathered together specifically because they already are true believers in a certain set of viewpoints about the human impact on the environment.

And the large-type inset absolutely treats global warming as a fact (it is still only a suspicion, by rational standards) and ends with this statement, attributed to no one: "Scientists believe this is probably due to man-made 'greenhouse gases' in the atmosphere." Which scientists? Are there scientists who disagree? These matters are not even addressed.

The whole point of this article is to make sure that the people who read it take "The Day After Tomorrow" far more seriously than the film deserves. Why? Because global warming has become one of the weapons used in the political war to bring down Western civilization, and without necessarily realizing it, the left-biased news media are completely buying into that political agenda.

Keep in mind that there is no way of knowing whether human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing or preventing disaster, mostly because we don't yet understand the causes of the natural cycles that lead to ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. So at this point, there is zero scientific basis for action. There is only the quasireligious premise that any human change to nature is dangerous and bad. Therefore, if human activities produce gases that might cause a disaster, then we can't afford to wait until the connection is actually proven. We must stop emitting those gases right now.

What they don't tell you is that the only way they are proposing to stop emitting those gases is to have such a drastic change in the activities of Western civilization that it might well lead to devastating impoverishment, and probably to famine and a catastrophic drop in the human population.

But the reporters covering science in America today are so wretchedly miseducated that they don't even know what questions to ask when interviewing biased sources. And they are perfectly willing to make ridiculous statements--which would include any sentence beginning with "scientists believe."

This is the postreligious equivalent of a fundamentalist preacher starting a sentence with "The Bible says." It invokes authority without context, without understanding, and without admitting the possibility of error. (Most self-respecting fundamentalist preachers would at least tell you which book in the Bible they were quoting.)

The fact is that Mr. Broecker is an important scientist, and his model of the "conveyor belt" of warm water in the Atlantic provides a plausible explanation for how ice-age climate changes might happen and why they seem to be restricted to the northern hemisphere, at least in the most recent ice-age events.

But the article in the paper was not science or even respectable science reporting. It was designed as propaganda to convince readers that smart people all agree that global warming can cause an ice age like the one depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow," unless we make the radical changes required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to levels that true believers claim (but cannot prove) would prevent this disaster.

If the evidence of global warming were a report of burglars operating in your neighborhood, there's enough of it to cause you to check that your doors and windows are locked--but the true believers want you to respond by boarding up your house and moving to another state.

In every case of bias I just cited, the writers would almost certainly be outraged at my accusation that they were doing anything other than reporting the facts as clearly and fairly as possible. It doesn't occur to them that they are biased because they live in a box filled with people who share exactly the same bias. But that's how we human beings create our working definition of sanity--someone who shares the same worldview as his neighbors is "sane," and those who don't are crazy.

The left-wing news media live in a tiny village of people who all think (or pretend to think) exactly alike. Therefore, to them any reporter or media outlet that rejects their premises must be insane or dishonest, and instead of seeking to refute them with actual evidence, they merely call them names and accuse them of venal motives.

The fact remains that on Fox News, and only on Fox News, we get television reportage that gives us at least two sides of every important issue. On all the other TV news outlets--and "mainstream" newspapers--we mostly get coverage that is hopelessly biased. The madmen have taken over the asylum and now, dressed in white lab coats, they pronounce the rest of the world insane.

Keep in mind that I found these egregious examples of bias in a single issue of a single newspaper, randomly chosen. I could do the same thing with any national news broadcast or with any paper in America except the occasional paper that still has a toehold on reality.

I wrote this essay for a newspaper that is also biased. The only difference--and it's all the difference in the world--is that the Rhinoceros Times admits that it's a conservative paper and reports events through conservative eyes. Likewise for this Web site.

Fox News Channel, on the other hand, claims to have only one bias--it is definitely pro-American--and it presents all the facts and every viewpoint and leaves the decision up to the viewer. Imagine if these news stories had been written from that perspective. They would be barely recognizable--and some of them would not have been written at all.

What makes the liberal bias in the mainstream media so pernicious is that they deny that they're biased and insist that their twisted version of events is "reality," and anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally or morally suspect. In other words, they're fanatics. And, like all good fanatics, they're utterly convinced that they're in sole possession of virtue and truth.

July 14, 2004

I have every SciFi book Orson Scott Card has written. I respect him as a writer very much.

Good find Steve.

street228 · July 14, 2004

All these observations, most likely, have merit, but to deceive one's self, to believe this "YELLOW JOURNALISTIC" pactice, is present: ONLY within the radical left's presentations, and NOT to be equally contained, within the radical right presentation, is nothing more than SELF DECEPTION.

Personally, I SEE it, in BOTH presentations, throughout the media, as a whole.

AND speaking of FANATICAL, just an observation, but I see plenty of FANATICISM coming from BOTH, as well.

[ 07-14-2004, 03:43 PM: Message edited by: street ]

Steve Schacher · July 14, 2004

Post your observations here so we can all see them.

street228 · July 14, 2004

quote:

This contains some nice examples, with explanation, of how bias works in reporting.

quote:When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.