Friday, January 16, 2009
Who was in the tank? Well, I'll tell you ...
Last year, I caught hell every time I suggested that the mainstream media was in the tank for B. Hussein Obama. During a political discussion with a colleague yesterday, I mentioned the fact that there is a discernable left-wing bias in the mainstream media. I was promptly told, "You're crazy."
If being right - and in this case I mean correct, not conservative - means I'm "crazy," well, then, color me a full-fledged loon.
Just five days after the votes'd been tallied, the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, admitted that her paper had a pro-Obama bias during the election. You can read her admission here.
A couple of week's later, Time magazine's Mark Mark Halperin got in on the admission act. At a post-election conference sponsored by The Politico, Halperin unleashed on the media’s election coverage:
"It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war, Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."
Halperin cited two New York Times articles as examples of this slant:
"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her."
The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.
Why is all this important? Well, I'll tell you.
It is the duty of the mainstream media - meaning newspapers of record, network news organizations, the Big Three news magazines (Times, Newsweek, U.S. News), etc. - to offer balanced, unbiased reporting on the events of the day. We now know that a great many, if not most, of the media shirked its duty to report, not politic, during the 2008 presidential election.
Which begs the question: If the mainstream media was hell-bent on slanting its coverage in order to get Obama elected, what's it gonna do to make sure he stays in office past January 2013? I don't even want to think about it ...
If being right - and in this case I mean correct, not conservative - means I'm "crazy," well, then, color me a full-fledged loon.
Just five days after the votes'd been tallied, the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, admitted that her paper had a pro-Obama bias during the election. You can read her admission here.
A couple of week's later, Time magazine's Mark Mark Halperin got in on the admission act. At a post-election conference sponsored by The Politico, Halperin unleashed on the media’s election coverage:
"It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war, Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."
Halperin cited two New York Times articles as examples of this slant:
"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her."
The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.
Why is all this important? Well, I'll tell you.
It is the duty of the mainstream media - meaning newspapers of record, network news organizations, the Big Three news magazines (Times, Newsweek, U.S. News), etc. - to offer balanced, unbiased reporting on the events of the day. We now know that a great many, if not most, of the media shirked its duty to report, not politic, during the 2008 presidential election.
Which begs the question: If the mainstream media was hell-bent on slanting its coverage in order to get Obama elected, what's it gonna do to make sure he stays in office past January 2013? I don't even want to think about it ...
# posted by Joltin' Django @ Friday, January 16, 2009 
