Namely the windmill of the ever persistent complaint about biased and one sided the Main Stream Media is.
“My judgment is now clear and unfettered, and that dark cloud of ignorance has disappeared, which the continual reading of those detestable books of knight-errantry had cast over my understanding”-from Don Quixote
In my younger days, I subscribed to much of what passes for conservative orthodoxy today- I thought the New York Times was run by a liberal conspiracy, Richard Nixon was leading the US to victory in Vietnam, and any problems in the US were caused by those “effete liberals”. As I grew older though and branched out a little, experiencing more of what the world was really like-using my idle hours aboard ship to read more than just comic books- I slowly, but surely, came to a better realization-most things are not clearly black or white, and the heavier shade comes a lot of times from the particular interpretation you yourself put on something that you see or hear.
That’s why whenever I hear someone whining about how unfair and biased the media is-and this year its been particularly pronounced in its repeated use as a reason Obama won the election-I just shake my head in disgust.
Because the answer is probably yes the media-all media- is biased in one way or another. The better question we should be asking is: “So what if it is?” I especially find the complaint interesting from bloggers -who pride themselves are how smart they are-as they take that easy excuse time and time again.
Especially in today’s world with a glutted market of different media products. The simple truth is that most of what people are complain of as bias, is not bias at all. Its a recognition of the fact that having examined a particular set of facts-the writer or broadcaster of a particular story or column-has arrived at a different conclusion than you.
I’ve got a news flash for all the Hannity’s, Malkins, and devout Sarah Palin fans out there:
That’s exactly what the media is supposed to do.
Now I have no doubt that a certain type of person goes into and achieves success in today’s big TV and print companies have a probably more liberal bent, than say-Joe the Plumber. Perhaps that means though-that unlike Joe, they may have actually used the education they got.
Journalists-all journalists- take basic data and draw conclusions from it. When that happens, some degree of bias slips in. But unlike bloggers who can and print any old lie that comes down the pike-media outlets have to live with libel laws and copyright laws. Happens on both sides of the political sphere. To blame it all on a biased media is to shift the blame from where it really belongs, the lack of a discerning reader.
When you turn to certain media products you are buying a particular slant or viewpoint. I submit to you that’s quite all right. For example, when I turn to MSNBC I know their interpretation of facts reflects a certain viewpoint. I’m Ok with that-the odds are out of all the things I’m not happy hearing, there will be at least one or two things, or points of view that I had not considered. And probably ought to at least give a second thought to.
Its a lazy man’s argument, to simply decry the media. And its not supported well by the facts. If the media wanted to be really biased-it would help their overall bottom line- a lot:
Have I got skews for you
Showing that newspapers have a political slant that is economically rational does not necessarily answer the question of whether ownership or demand determines bias. Here, the academics are helped by the fact that large media companies may own several newspapers, often in markets that are politically very different. This allowed them to test whether the slants of newspapers with the same owner were more strongly correlated than those of two newspapers picked at random. They found that this was not so: owners exerted a negligible influence on slant. Readers’ political views explained about a fifth of measured slant, while ownership explained virtually none.
Which brings us back to the where the blame lies-the fault dear Brutus, is with ourselves.
Footnote:
Truth in advertising: I subscribe to about 7 periodicals besides the association magazines I receive of various veterans groups I belong to: The Economist, The Kiplinger Letter, Time, Esquire, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic Magazine. I also have internet sign-ups with the major papers in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore. I also buy a Playboy or two from time to time. That entire list is a comment on how really boring life is in Shopping Mall-that I am able to organize and read a fair percentage of what comes in both physically and electronically.
However it does provide me with a wide variety of opinon and subject matter to consider. Accordingly-while I am quite sure my reading habits are different than most-I have come to point where if there is a complaint I have about the media its not about bias any more. Its the same one I have about women. There are too many of them, and not enough time for me to sample them all. ( Or at least the ones I like!).
Well, you got lucky. You were spared a rant about your utter idiocy wrt bias because they way this site works is that if one attempts to post and has forgotten to fill out the headers along the way, the whole posts vanishes.
Lucky bastard!
Curtis
Well, as they say, I read on,
Not at all sure of the ethics of this but here, in whole, are the words of another brilliant man. Bill Whittle:
A FLAG, ON A HILL
As Civil War battles went, it was a small and insignificant affair. But in terms of story – and especially, in terms of lessons – it’s one of my favorites.
The war had not yet fully turned in October of 1864. And even though Stonewall Jackson had been dead for well over a year – killed by mistake by his own men at the Battle of Chancellorsville — the Shenandoah Valley still belonged if not to Jackson then to Jackson’s ghost, for it was there that he and his “foot cavalry” had won their eternal place in Valhalla. Jackson’s tactical brilliance and the endless series of Union routs still hung like clouds of gunpowder in the valleys and hollows of the Shenandoah.
And so it came as no surprise to either the Union or the Confederate soldiers on the banks of Cedar Creek to see, once again, a blue rout – men throwing down rifles and knapsacks and running for their lives, dodging perhaps the few hissing musket balls fired at their backs, but completely unable to escape the jeering and the insults and that high, horrible Rebel yell, as that pack of feral wolves descended on their camps, drank their coffee, ate their rations and sat going through their personal effects, admiring photos and reading letters from their sweethearts. Not a loss, but a rout. Another rout. The latest in an ongoing series of routs without end. Or so it must have seemed.
The Union general was a young man, new to his command, and who in point of fact had been back in Washington during the defeat. But as he rode toward the sound of the guns that morning, curiosity turned to apprehension, and apprehension to something worse, as he crossed Mill Creek and came upon a low hill, to see before him “the appalling spectacle of a panic-stricken Army.”
Phillip Sheridan was his name, described by Shelby Foote as a man with the face of a Mongol Warlord and hair so short and dense it made his head look like a bullet with a coat of black paint.
Sheridan’s first instinct was to form a straggler line and prepare for the final Rebel assault. But the Rebels were too busy celebrating. And after he caught his breath, Little Phil noticed something surprising: not a broken and routed army fleeing for their lives, but small groups of men boiling fresh coffee, speaking to one another calmly and cheering him as he rode by.
One of his aides described him at that moment: “As he galloped on, his features grew gradually set, as those carved in stone, and the same dull red glint I had seen in his piercing eyes when, on other occasions, the battle was going against us, was there now.”
You bet it was.
The closer Sheridan came to the battle, the more cheerful and animated his defeated men became. Encountering a small group of them, Little Phil would stand in the saddle, and give a jaunty salute – as if to congratulate them on a great victory, rather than another humiliating defeat.
The result was electric, if not universal. Amid the cheering, one infantry colonel – whose descendents perhaps would go on to become campaign advisors – stood in Sheridan’s path and begged him not to go on.
“The army’s whipped!” he cried.
“You are, but the army isn’t,” growled Sheridan, who then put the spurs to a horse who’s back was taller than he was and rode to the scene of the disaster, shouting, “About face, boys! We are going back to our camps! We are going to lick them out of their boots!”
His men were not beaten. They just needed leadership.
“We are going to get a twist on those fellows, men!” he shouted, pounding down the pike. “We are going to lick them out of their boots!”
And that’s what he did, too. He and his routed army went back to that field and licked those Rebels right out of their boots.
“Run!” he shouted, standing in the stirrups. “Go after them! We’ve got the God-damnedest twist on them you ever saw!”
Battles don’t always go that way. But sometimes they do. It depends on whether the individual soldier still has any fight in him.
It has been a source of delight for me these past few days to see nothing but evidence of this, all across our defeated lines. Nowhere have I heard a shred of defeatism or despair. On the contrary. In point of fact, the magnanimity and graciousness I have seen in defeat in so many places on the right tells me that this is an eager and seasoned army, one able to look defeat in the face and own up to the errors in tactics and strategy that got us there. And nowhere do I see a call to abandon our core principles and sue for terms, but rather that our loss was caused precisely by our abandonment of the issues which we hold dear and which have served us so well on battlefields past.
So consider this, my fellows in arms:
On Tuesday, the Left – armed with the most attractive, eloquent, young, hip and charismatic candidate I have seen with my adult eyes, a candidate shielded by a media so overtly that it can never be such a shield again, who appeared after eight years of an historically unpopular President, in the midst of two undefended wars and at the time of the worst financial crisis since the Depression and whose praises were sung by every movie, television and musical icon without pause or challenge for 20 months… who ran against the oldest nominee in the country’s history, against a campaign rent with internal disarray and determined not to attack in the one area where attack could have succeeded, and who was out-spent no less than seven-to-one in a cycle where not a single debate question was unfavorable to his opponent – that historic victory, that perfect storm of opportunity…
Yielded a result of 53%
Folks, we are going to lick these people out of their boots.
There is much to do. That a man with such overt Marxist ideas and such a history of association with virulent anti-Americans can be elected President should make it crystal clear to each of us just how far we have let fall the moral tone of this Republic. The great lesson from Ronald Reagan was simply that we can and must gently educate as well as campaign, and explain our ideas with smiles on our faces and real joy in our hearts. For unlike the far-left radical who gained the Presidency on Tuesday, we start with 150 million of the most free and intelligent and hard-working people in the history of the Earth at our backs, with a philosophy that — unlike theirs, which has resulted in 100 million dead in unmarked graves — has liberated and enriched more people and created more joy than any nation or combination of nations in our history.
How can we lose this greater fight, my friends? How can we lose, unless we give up?
media bias my ass.
150 million? About of 100 million of them should have voted, don’t you think?
I just can’t go down this road of how Marxist Obama is. All evidence is to the contrary.
But if I wrong-go ahead an fork your money over now. 🙂
That’s about the most moronic post I’ve ever read of yours! I feel dumber just for having read it.
??????
How so? Most readers don’t form their opinions based on what the media reports-so what does it matter if they happen to form conclusions you don’t agree with. The facts are still there.
Skipper,
Can I say that anyone who thinks you’ve fallen off the edge or otherwise diminished them is either willfully blind, ignorant, or otherwise incapable of cogent discourse. Not that I am attacking them personally, or anything. ICSMTH
As I read your post, I applauded your recognition that reporting (not just choosing the story to carry but what witnesses and facts to include) necessarily includes bias. What one chooses to view (whether Fox, CNN, MSNBC) or to read (NYT, Financial Times, Tribune, or Time or Newsweek or the Economist) offers the reader a point of view. Of course it does. The syllogism is true but absolutely bears repeating in the face of rants from elsewhere (and those on your own blog).
Curtis, none of your rant makes any sense to me. Perhaps you should have gone to bed earlier. Is it Marxist to recognize that the richest 1% of the country has gotten richer (and paid less taxes thanks to W, McCain and their cronies) while the rest of the populace has lost economic ground? Is it Marxist to believe that the middle class deserves a tax break at least equal to the one given to those making more than $250,000 per year? Is it Marxist to recognize that “trickle down economics” has failed as royally and finally as has the Soviet model did in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Is it Marxist to opine that regulation of business which deals with the public trust is necessary so that Boards of Directors do not reward officers with bonuses for gambling with someone else’s life savings? The belief that Boards will act in the interest of their shareholders has been proved fatally incorrect at AIG, GM, FMC, Lehman, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch and elsewhere. If your answer is yes to any of these rhetorical questions, then count me a Marxist (at which point I’ll ask you to chose your choice of weapon and location!)
And rrrockbeast, I’m sure you won’t miss the brain cells since your post seems incapable of rational thought in the first instance.
Skippy is too nice and much to much of a gentlemen (being an officer and all) to call each of you what you deserve.
I however, being little more than a mud Marine and an NCO, have no such reticence.
Respects
OAM
Bias? In the media? Surely you jest.
In an era when celebrity and media are an Ouroboros (I refer you to Exhibit A: American Idol,) and conglomerates often control vast stretches of the spectrum (from print to radio to television) in a given market, you’re seriously suggesting we have a problem? Sir, if I might, I’d suggest this is more like a certain captain insisting that it wasn’t an iceberg the Titanic collided with so much as cast-off bits from a cocktail chucked off of the bow.
There’s so much made of media bias by bloggers (and occasionally by the media themselves) it’s become sort of funny. People were proven wrong. Neo-conservative orthodoxy (as it stands now) has been significantly challenged and the proprietors of the company store sent packing.
I don’t understand what all the hype is about. I’m sorry, but all empire must end. You can either spend the next four years lamenting a return to the good-ol-days-that-never-were, or we can move on. And unlike “Big Tent compassionate conservatives,” I have a feeling that the people soon to be manning the tiller here are a little more motivated toward inclusion than their predecessors.
OAM,
On top of it all, I failed to put the quotes around the article I copied and pasted written by Bill Whittle. He’s an interesting guy and you can read more at eject, eject, eject.
Here is MY point about press bias. What part of you fails to comprehend that it has gotten so biased that even the MSM is apologizing or at least explaining their bias? The Washington Post came out and admitted it last week. MSNBC has always been a joke but then Chris Mathews confesses he not only has a tingle in his leg for Obama but now plans to devote himself and thus, by extension, his network to ensuring the ONE succeeds and is willing to go to any length to ensure that success. Seriously, read: http://www.julescrittenden.com/2008/11/17/giddy-sense/#more-7369. The media describe their infatuation with the ONE.
Why does this media bias bother me, you ask yourself? Well, to start with it’s dishonest and that has profound implications on how the electorate comes to view the candidates. Why is that you ask?
Why is that Bill Ayers and his homicide bombing wife only came to the light of day after the ONE was elected? Did you notice that the MSM appeared to take no interest whatsoever in these two until the day after the election? How odd is that?
Who are the friends of the ONE? I’m saying crawl into the wayback machine and ask yourself what you know from the media about the associates, friends and aquaintences of the ONE. No, I’m not talking about his reverend or his other reverend or his Rezko ties or his terror ties, I’m asking you what about his friends and associates. Who came forth and said, “sure! I knew Barry in college and we hung out all the time” friends. No interest? No curiousity? Compare that attitude with the media’s frenzy about Palin and her beauty contest days up to the present. We know everything about her and damn all about the man who went to court in order to fight a lawsuit requesting that he produce an American birth certificate and show that he is in fact, a natural born American. So Obama is all for habeus corpus when it comes to terrorists but willing to fight to the death to prevent habeus corpus for birth certificates. [I view this as a tempest in a teapot but don’t you find it all interesting that the man went to court to FIGHT a simple request that he prove his American citizenship?]
Both Obamas have been alleged to work full time for many years and that implies day care of some sort for the girls. Who did the Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird investigation on just who was providing that child care and whether or not they were citizens and also if their employer was paying all the appropriate FICA, etc taxes?
What was the ONE’s first job after graduating from Columbia? What did he do? Was he in management? Who were his coworkers and what did they think of the ONE? What about his second job after college? Who did he work for and who paid him? What did he do?
What was his first job out of Harvard Law and did you EVER bother to ask yourself why the editor of the Harvard Law Review does not appear to have been offered a clerking job with a noted solon of the legal branch? What’s the about? Where is the Justice or Court of Appeals Judge that talked about offering a clerking position to the ONE? What does his transcript reveal about his scholarship? What was his thesis about? What did Michelle mean when she told us that, “Barak will make you work!” Sounds all gulagy to me. You can draw your own conclusions.
Let’s turn to his role as a community activist whatever that is. I note that he recently announced his new chief advisor. Look at her record and look at the ONE’s record. I wonder what the press would have thought about their unique skills as community activists if they walked through the public housing of their constituency but we never saw that and never will.
Now I certainly don’t think that this constitutes a rant since it really amounts to nothing beyond a bunch of unasked and unanswered questions. I didn’t point out the ONE said that he would hold townhall meetings with McCain and didn’t or said he would take public financing and didn’t or who took all the locks off the credit card verifiability in order to take any donation from anybody from anywhere and nobody seems to care about that. You know, it kind of reminds me of the Senate race in Minnesota. Election returns delivered to the Secretary of State all proper and in order and then, mysteriously, for days after the election, uncounted ballots keep showing up and there is nothing at suspicious about the fact that 100% of them seem to have been votes for the democrat. So that Bill Whittle article from the top: ask yourself, 100% in the tank media, outspent McCain by 9:1 and still only won the race by 3% of the vote. One might be forgiven for thinking that with this kind of advantage he would have been able to win 49 states instead of, figuratively, squeeking by.
It sure is a pity how the market is reacting in response to the news that a socialist will be president with a totally compliant Senate and House. It must be that damned 1% out there profitting on the backs of the proletariot.
Let us turn to the taxes you’re so eager to pay. That 1% of the wealthy? It includes most of those in Congress. Isn’t funny how they’re always passing laws to increase their own taxes? You believe in the easterbunny and santa claus too, don’t you? Where do the Kennedy’s get their money? How much tax do they pay on all those offshore trust funds? What about Feinstein and her husband?
Me and Skippy are of an age, of the same paygrade and divorced with at least one daughter apiece. I don’t have to worry about the $250K tax limit, but that doesn’t apply to us since that’s for married filers. The cutoff point for us losers is either $100K or $60K or $40/year who will bear the tax burdens coming.
OAM,
Completely forgot: in addition to 3 or 4 words I seem to have dropped from my earlier post, I live in San Diego about a mile from Shakespeare’s Pub and my chosen weapon would be genuine 20 ounce pints of Guinness at one meter! Bring it on!
Half and Half OK? I never had a taste for Guiness straight up. But a Black and Tan? I can drink those all night long.
Media bias? Sure, for all the reasons stated above and then some. I work (unfortunately) at times for a branch of the broadcast media. What is not readily understood, nor I think has been expressed here, is that the media is in the business of making money. They will do almost anything to increase their ratings share, thereby extracting more money from their advertisers. That is the way the business works, be it cable, broadcast TV, radio etc.
A look at the ratings indicates that both Fox and CNN did very well this election cycle. People will watch what they think is “good” TV, therefore, it is not a stretch to say that the general population (through ratings services like Nielsen) voted their opinion that they wanted biased reporting. Otherwise, news programs like PBS’s McNeil Lehrer, which I found to be so neutral that it was boring, would have done better.
To state that the news media skewed the election is a denial of the facts that people were just sick of the way things were going and the executive branch’s refusal to acknowledge their concerns.
Oh, and why ruin a perfectly good Guiness with anything other than more Guiness?
Spin it any way you want to, but as this video shows, there was selective reporting going on — drive up one side’s negatives, ignore the negatives on the other side. And it worked:
Actually you proved my point. Besides the fact that Ziegler has as much of an agenda as any other media outlet-e.g. another right wing talk radio blow hard-looking at most of the stuff he has written he has ignored several key pieces of evidence. Not surprising especially for a man who aspires to be a Hannity protege. Thank you for reaffirming my point.
Stupid is as stupid does-and Ziegler’s so called documentary was designed with the outcome already foreordained-and like any other media outlet, he edited for his audience- people who already agree with him. And he makes money off it just like any other called media outlet.
Even if his central point is true-most Obama voters are stupid-how does that become any thing but the voters fault? All that really says is that Obama was actually able to connect with an audience better than McCain. Which is pretty amazing when you consider how much the McCain campaign went out of its way to dumb its campaign down to his target audience.Starting with choosing Sarah Palin.
Actually when compared to John McCain, Obama got the larger share of college educated voters at 67%. McCain got the slight larger share of high school dropouts at 54%. So your “bumpkin” argument falls apart.
The information was out there-all people have to do is go find it. I will agree with you though-the average American is too lazy to do so. Look a the methodolgy used in the video and the poll that followed -it has been justifiably attacked as the push poll that it is. What this video reminds me of is a rip-off of a pre-election Howard Stern Show segment. However, there’s one notable omission: Stern’s staffer interviewed at least one McCain supporter, and the McCain supporter was at least equally uninformed.
Believe what you want-but Republicans are deluding themselves if they think that McCain lost just because of the media.
You are free to water down your Guinness with whatever suits your palate.
I’m curious though, I wrote the above and then reflected on what you’d written. Were you deliberately invoking the One’s physical makeup? Cause, you know…
Caffery’s!
When I was in Nevada we convinced the club to stock it, Guiness and Boddington’s. We called the tap the “Holy Trinity”.
“Look a the methodolgy used in the video and the poll that followed -it has been justifiably attacked as the push poll that it is.”
What dark, stinky hole did you pull that one out of? Zogby is just a polling company — one of national repute. Here is what they said about those “justifiable attacks”:
“We stand by the results our survey work on behalf of John Ziegler, as we stand by all of our work. We reject the notion that this was a push poll because it very simply wasn’t. It was a legitimate effort to test the knowledge of voters who cast ballots for Barack Obama in the Nov. 4 election. Push polls are a malicious effort to sway public opinion one way or the other, while message and knowledge testing is quite another effort of public opinion research that is legitimate inquiry and has value in the public square. In this case, the respondents were given a full range of responses and were not pressured or influenced to respond in one way or another.”
So, if Skippy says it was a push poll, well that settles it, huh? Why listen to these guys that depend upon a reputation for objectivity for their livlihood? What do they know?
Not as much as you think you do. They gave the customer exactly what he asked for. Then Ziegler took it one step farther and extrapolated results that are only there in isolation.
I read the Zogby response. I’d encourage you to look at the remarks of some of the other polls that got it right about the election. Like RCP and 538-they attack Zogby for even getting involved with a slime ball like Ziegler. Like you said, they already have national business-they sure as hell don’t need his. All of the questions have some basis in fact but they also provide very little context, and quite easily match up with Republican talking points. It means then that either Zogby allowed his client to design the questions or Zogby has his own agenda.
As should be obvious, the veracity of several of these claims is — at best — debatable, yet they are apparently represented as factual to the respondent. It is not clear whether the respondent is informed of the “correct” response after having had the question posed to him.
Not all of the items in the poll are intended to apply to Obama or Biden. Several apply to Sarah Palin, although the items about Palin, while probably unflattering (“which of the four [candidates] has a pregnant teenage daughter?”) are nevertheless apparently true. The exception is a “twist” question about Palin in which the respondent is asked “which candidate said that they can see Russia from their house?”. Ziegler claims in the video that none of the four answers is correct because the statement was made by Tina Fay rather than Sarah Palin. (In her interview with Charlie Gibson, Palin said that “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”, not that she can see Russia from her house.)
To my mind, this survey meets the definition of a “push poll”, which the Random House Dictionary defines as “a seemingly unbiased telephone survey that is actually conducted by supporters of a particular candidate and disseminates negative information about an opponent.” That (i) several of the items on the survey contain information which, in addition to being negative, is arguably also untrue; (ii) Ziegler brags that the survey includes a trick question to which no correct answer can be provided, and that (iii) apparently only Obama voters were targeted by the survey (although this is not 100 percent clear), also inform my opinion that the survey can fairly be described as a “push poll”.
If it were just stupid voters, the election would have been a lot closer than it was.
Want to know why Obama won? Go read here.
Who cares now what these polls proved or disproved, the only real poll that mattered was the vote. So now it’s on to more bashing of what the Republicans shoulda, coulda or woulda done and how great the Dems were?
Skippy, stop throwing it in our face. Your guy won. Hope you and all the others get what you want by electing Obama. I only hope that what Republicans that are left in Congress have enough balls to stand up to any bills that are not in the best interest of ALL AMERICANS.
I think I see a Falcon jet about to drop another pump to help bail out another sinking ship and is that Barney Frank at the yoke?
About time to leave this one alone, but in the interest of staying on conclusion differences, and staying away from motive differences, I wish you could explain the veracity/relevance of these conclusions (which I assume you agree with?):
(S)everal of the items on the survey contain information which, in addition to being negative, is arguably also untrue — several meaning more than one, care to identify those?
(T)he survey includes a trick question to which no correct answer can be provided — isn’t the correct answer “No one”?
(A)pparently only Obama voters were targeted by the survey — so what?
So if these conclusions lead to “my opinion that the survey can fairly be described as a “push poll””, then if the conclusions are flawed, then isn’t the opinion logically flawed?
I did not bring up the subject of Ziegler’s silly video-just responded to it.
I just hate when something like that video makes the rounds of the blogosphere and it gets posited as an item of fact. The video in question has been repeatedly cited as gospel, as if the dissatisfaction with the economy, the war, the overall tenor of the Bush administration for the last 8 years had nothing to do with it.
Republicans pride themselves on being smarter than this. I am a registered Republican. The argument that the party was not conservative “enough” and that was why they lost is a hollow one. Demographics are changing and the Party of Lincoln needs to grasp that. They have qualified people who understand that-and are far more qualified than Palin to lead them home.
As for the Auto bailout-I don’t think you will see one this year. Barney Frank is just one voice and there are plenty of other voices, Republican and Democratic that don’t want to bailout GM.