Old Media bias takes its toll

Newspaper circulation figures were released recently for the six-month period ending Sept. 30, once again showing significant losses for the big mainstream media dailies. Los Angeles Times daily circulation fell by 8 percent, its Sunday circulation by 6 percent; Philadelphia Inquirer daily was down 7.5 percent, Sunday by 4.5 percent; Washington Post daily was down 3.3 percent, Sunday by 3.6 percent, and so on.

On the heels of that announcement, a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs was issued documenting that a whopping 77 percent of midterm election coverage by the Big Three newscasts (ABC, CBS, NBC) was favorable to Democrats, while only 12 percent was favorable to Republicans.

The relentless, wholly unrestrained liberal bias of the Old Media over the past four decades has been undeniable to all but the media elites themselves, and those whose political views are so far off the left end that they truly believe the New York Times is playing it straight down the middle.

This consistently slanted reportage has resulted in a hemorrhaging of readers and viewers of "mainstream" news outlets over this same time span, and that in turn has led to the meteoric rise of the New Media (Fox News, Rush and talk radio, Internet websites and blogs, etc.).

As mainstream media elites Mark Halperin and John F. Harris readily (and commendably) acknowledge in their new book, "The Way to Win," conservatives have a point. The authors admit that the evidence of liberal bias is plentiful, and as Halperin said in a recent radio interview: "That has to change." Unfortunately, most of their colleagues not only still refuse to recognize the obvious, but they demean anyone who dares even point out examples of skewed coverage.

Halperin and Harris argue convincingly – as conservatives have for decades – that the Old Media's dismissive attitude of the heartfelt convictions of roughly half the country about its slanted coverage is both an insane business practice and a violation of the core mission of journalism. It's driving away what fair-minded readers and viewers they have left by the droves.

A great example is the Old Media's coverage of John Kerry's slander of our troops in California on Monday. No sooner had Kerry's camp emerged with a convoluted explanation of his remarks being a "botched joke" at the expense of the president (whose name was never mentioned in Kerry's offending remarks) than the Old Media elites picked up those talking points and ran with them.

Howard Kurtz echoed the sentiments of his fellow Old Media elites when he wrote in the Washington Post Wednesday: "There isn't anybody, including in the Bush administration, who believes that Kerry meant to insult the soldiers in Iraq with his clumsy joke."

Well, tell that to the soldiers who are serving in Iraq who created that now-famous banner (displayed so prominently on Drudge) which read: "HALP US JON CARRY – WE R STUCK HEAR N IRAK." Or tell it to the untold thousands of veterans and their family members who have been calling into and e-mailing radio talk shows and other New Media venues to express their outrage. Or tell it to all those Democratic candidates who called on Kerry to apologize, cancelled campaign appearances with him or simply ran for the tall grass.

What the Old Media elites willfully omitted in their reflexive defense of Kerry was the fact that this is the same guy who slandered millions of Vietnam veterans when he spoke before a Senate committee in 1971, comparing our soldiers then to the barbaric hordes of Genghis Khan. He is the same guy who, just last December, accused our troops in Iraq of breaking into the private homes of Iraqi civilians in the dead of night and terrorizing women and children.

So there was a pattern here that could be traced back more than three decades, but it was a pattern that simply didn't fit into the Old Media's obvious strategy of buttressing a beleaguered Kerry and providing political cover for Democrats in advance of the crucial midterm elections this upcoming Tuesday.

More damnable even than all this, though, was Kerry's laughable explanation of his statement before those students, where he said: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Kerry's camp now says he actually meant to say this: "Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."

These are two vastly different statements, yet Kerry and his supporters are trying to tell us that he botched it by just one word – instead of saying "you get us stuck in Iraq" (referring to Bush), he misspoke and said "you get stuck in Iraq."

This is a patently absurd defense. As Michael Medved has noted of the two versions, they include only 11 matchings words, while 23 words from the purported original text never passed Kerry's lips. And, again, President Bush's name was never mentioned in the actual statement.

Yet when Press Secretary Tony Snow gave his briefing Wednesday, there was NBC's uber-partisan David Gregory and the rest of the Democratic Party shills in the White House press corps lambasting the president for disparaging poor John Kerry when it was so obvious to everyone that it was just a botched joke.

There were no references to Kerry's 1971 slander of the troops; no mention of his sliming of them last December; certainly no comparison between the two versions of the statement. No, just a slew of attacks against Bush ... as Old Media circulation figures and viewer numbers continue falling.

I heard Halperin on Hugh Hewitt's Show. He's the political editor for ABC NEWS. He's a sober liberal who can't seem to live with the double-standard hypocrisy of his own business anymore. It's well-past midnight on that.

He recognizes the bias and admits that the eternal free pass for Democrats has much more to do with the party's intellectual laziness than meets the eye.

It all sounds good until Hewitt pressed him on his voting history. Halperin suggested that he's doing the country a huge favor by keeping his personal politics very personal. He seems to think that ABC NEWS is risking its glorious, time-honored credibilty...or some such thing.

Don't bother asking him about his beliefs on social issues, either. He's agnostic on that, too.

It's all for our own good.

"There isn't anybody, including in the Bush administration, who believes that Kerry meant to insult the soldiers in Iraq with his clumsy joke."

Of course Kerry didn't mean to insult the troops. There were no troops present at his speech. He would never have said such a thing in their presence ... just as he and Theresa make sure the servants are out of earshot before they joke about the hired help or an old time racist southern democrat -- Al Gore, Sr., perhaps -- would never make Sambo jokes to the maid's face.

Kerry was just patronizing some college students with some behind-their-backs humor at the expense of social inferiors. How was he to know the press would pick it up? After all, it's a reasonably fair assumption that most of the press shares his social prejudices. Somehow a ringer got in. Could've happened to anyone. Just bad luck.

I have been upset about the Liberal bias in the MSM since I became politically aware in the early 1960s. I would love to believe that this Liberal bias is why the MSM is in decline. I'm sure this is a factor but the advent of alternatives is, I feel, more the reason.

A large number percentage of people are not interested in news at all. It used to be ABCCBSNBC news & nothing else. They now have cable & satellite TV.

For those interested in the news the MSM still dominates although there are now alternatives, Fox News & the internet. Fox News in particular drives Liberals nuts because they don't want anything conservative available to the masses.

I have been upset about the Liberal bias in the MSM since I became politically aware in the early 1960s. I would love to believe that this Liberal bias is why the MSM is in decline.

Then you go back far enough to have been aware of social critic Vance Packard's muckrakers. He wrote (iirc) The Opinionmakers about the media and gave examples of their influence. A classic, associated with the 1964 presidential campaign, was a poll of likely or certain Republican delegates to the upcoming convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, the convention that nominated the great conservative Barry Goldwater. The poll asked two questions:

Whom would you prefer to see nominated?

Whom do you think the GOP will eventually nominate?

The delegates reported overwhelmingly that they personally favored Barry Goldwater, but they also reported that they expected the convention to nominate Nelson Rockefeller of New York. This, Packard showed, was because of the strong campaign mounted by The New York Times for Rockefeller and the Times's ability to propagate its message throughout media.

Packard also gave us some numbers from the Columbia School of Journalism's annual poll of incoming students, going back into the 50's, that showed the beginning of the upward climb of liberal bias and the growth of the motive among new entrants of influencing politics through the media -- expressed as "helping to solve social problems" or some such liberal formulary. As we know, after he wrote the book (1966 or thereabouts) the liberal self-description among j-school entrants rose to 90% or better in the 70's and 80's, but it was already strong when he wrote the book, and he commented on it at length.

'It all sounds good until Hewitt pressed him on his voting history. Halperin suggested that he's doing the country a huge favor by keeping his personal politics very personal. He seems to think that ABC NEWS is risking its glorious, time-honored credibility...or some such thing.

Don't bother asking him about his beliefs on social issues, either. He's agnostic on that, too.

It's all for our own good.'

Just like any other 'Journalist', Halperin doesn't have the guts to admit he votes Democrat. He's fearful of coming across as partisan.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.