ping
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“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.
In most industries, if a new study came out proving a company had made false claims about their product that harmed the public, we know exactly what would happen. The company would immediately seek public exposure to defend itself vigorously, or announce they were investigating the charges, or apologize profusely while proclaiming that such a thing would never happen again. Yet, Investors Business Daily reports that newspapers and network TV news have been caught making false claims about their objectivity, prompting — nothing — no news industry reaction at all. A joint survey by two institutions revered by journalists, Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, proved that newspaper and network TV coverage of the current presidential race has been overwhelmingly sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans. In newspapers, the ratio of positive to negative stories about Democrats was more than 5-to-1, while for Republicans negative stories outnumbered positive ones by 50%. On network evening news, twice as many stories about Democrats were positive, while twice as many stories about Republicans were negative. Democrats also get more coverage overall.
The fact that not a single one of these news enterprises has stepped forward to defend its behavior, announce an investigation, or apologize speaks ill of their leadership, who can justifiably be accused of either lack of courage, lack of integrity, or both. Lack of courage, because they might fear business losses from admitting to the public that they have been misleading them about the quality of their news product. Lack of integrity, because they allow this deceit to continue and fail to insist that their newsrooms report on corruption within their own industry as they would on others. Journalism as a discipline has a crisis of leadership and it is contributing to its demise.