An important study has found that if you rely solely on the mainstream media for your news and information, you've been conned and may well have voted for the wrong candidates for the wrong reasons.
"Even Harvard Finds the Media Biased." Yes, Investor's Business Daily (IBD), a financial newspaper, hit it out of the park with that headline and the story on this study, which it summarized as follows: "The debate is over. A consensus has been reached. On global warming? No, on how Democrats are favored on television, radio and in the newspapers."
IBD was too polite to also point out that Harvard is one of the centers of the left-wing liberalism, so when it admits to media bias in favor of Democrats, that carries extra weight. And here's something else that proves the point of the story: how the mainstream media blacked out the story, which runs contrary to one of its basic tenets that denies the liberal bias in the media.
IBD also did not point out that this pro-Democrat bias is just a marker for many other kinds of bias. As this column has often pointed out, the mainstream media has a whole panoply of biases that includes its anti-Republican bias, anti-conservative bias, anti-military bias, anti-law-enforcement bias, anti-religion bias and many more.
Finally, the IBD failed to point out how dangerous this bias is and how it seriously distorts the real world in the eyes of the majority of Americans who rely on it for their news and information. The bias gives the Democrat Party and its candidates an obvious advantage at the polls. It transmits a false picture of public opinion and voter sentiment to our legislators and public officials, what's going on in the war against terror, the impact of the surge in Iraq and the dangers of Islamofascism. The bias transmits a false image of about everything except perhaps what appears on the sports pages. It makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for American citizens to perform their civic duties.
The study examined 1,742 campaign stories appearing between January and May 2007 in 48 news outlets, including print, online, network television, cable television and radio.
Consider a few of the revealing statistics from this report, a joint survey of the project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Pubic Policy:
* The morning news shows produced twice as many stories on Democrats as Republicans (51 percent to 27 percent).
* Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) front page coverage was 70 percent positive and 9 percent negative. Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) was 61 percent positive and 13 percent negative. In contrast, for Republicans the tone was positive in only about 25 percent of stories and was negative in 40 percent of stories.
* PBS, another bastion of biased journalism, produced no stories of a positive nature on Republicans.
* CNN programming cast a negative light on Republican candidates by a margin of three-to-one. CNN's coverage of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was 63 percent negative while Mr. Obama's was only 8 percent negative.
* Liberal talk radio's stories on Rudy Giuliani (R-N.Y.), Mr. McCain and Mitt Romney (R- Mass.) were 100 percent negative, while those on Sen. Obama and John Edwards (D-N.C.) were 100 percent positive. No wonder liberal talk radio is failing; you'd find more honesty in Mafia commercials. No such wild bias showed up in conservative talk radio, which showed more signs of honest journalism than its liberal competitors. For example, the liberal Mr. Obama actually got more positive coverage than Mr. Giuliani, the Republican (27.8 percent vs. 25 percent) on conservative talk radio.
* NPR, a leader in bias even among the biased mainstream media outlets, produced stories that were more than seven times more positive than negative on Democrats (41 percent positive vs. 6 percent negative). Stories about Mr. Obama were 61 percent positive and none were negative (the rest were neutral). NPR does fewer stories on Republicans than Democrats, and stories on Republicans are also shorter than those on Democrats.
In other words, the mainstream media (which is the subject of most of the survey) not only gives out biased and distorted information but also gives out information of little help to the public trying to make intelligent decisions about candidates. Almost all the stories are about the game of politics - such matters as polling, advertising, tactics and fundraising. The important stories such as candidates' positions, background and record are downplayed or virtually ignored.
Editor & Publisher, the magazine of the newspaper industry, pointed out, "Researchers found that most voters are not getting the coverage they want, citing another survey that claims most citizens want more coverage of issues and candidates' history." Yet, only 1 percent of stories examined the candidate's past public performance, perhaps the most important consideration in deciding what candidate to vote for. Anybody can come up with a "vision for the future" and a "platform for reform and change." But you can't come up with a new background and experience and public record.
With only 1 percent of stories on records and past performance, consider the stories on the political game - 63 percent of all campaign stories. Here's another statistic indicating how the media misses the boat on what to cover and what the public wants and needs: Only 12 percent of the stories were framed in a way to show how the political subject under discussion might affect citizens. In contrast, 86 percent of the stories focused on matters that by and large impacted only the parties and the candidates.
During the period of the study, the campaign was the second-most covered story. The most-covered story was the war in Iraq. And if from this study you conclude the media screwed up campaign reporting, you haven't seen anything compared to how it botched and distorted reporting on the war in Iraq and the resulting national debate.
There are many other studies confirming the anti-Republican, anti-conservative, pro-Democratic, pro-liberal bias of mainstream media. Among them are Journalistic Fraud by Bob Kohn, The Media Elite by Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter and Bernard Goldberg's two books, Bias and Arrogance. An encouraging development is that the left-tilting newspapers are rapidly losing circulation, and the public is catching on to the fact that the mainstream media can simply no longer be trusted and should best be avoided.
When you throw in Hollywood, random "arts" groups, creepy "popular" culture (who's the ho"), it's flat out amazing that any Republican has ever been elected.