Newsweek is biased like the rest of the media elite [Dick Morris]

The Newsweek magazine story falsely reporting desecration of the Koran by American military interrogators in Guantanamo, Cuba, where terror suspects are being held, is the fourth major false report printed or aired by a highly respected arm of the Anglo-American journalistic establishment in the past year.

Each of those inaccurate stories has roiled the political waters and threatened to inflict colossal damage on either President Bush or British Prime Minister Tony Blair and on American and British efforts to defeat terrorists and the regime of Saddam Hussein.

It is high time that the American people got the point: The organs of establishment journalism are slanted and biased toward the left and disregard the standards of fair and accurate reporting, with impunity, when an election is on the line.

• In the spring of 2004, the BBC reported that Blair had ordered his intelligence people to “sex up” reports of the Iraqi program to make weapons of mass destruction. For months, Blair was on the defensive because of the report, and the intelligence operative who was the alleged source of the story committed suicide.

It took a parliamentary commission to debunk the story and to force a BBC retraction. The ongoing damage to Blair’s credibility likely helped to account for his marginal showing in the most recent U.K. election.

• In September 2004, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” television program used forged and phony documents to try to besmirch Bush’s record in the Texas National Guard. It was only the careless error of the forger in printing the suffix “th” above the line that led to the truth.

• In the week before the election, The New York Times, the citadel of journalistic accuracy, ran a front-page story alleging that 370 tons of explosives had disappeared from an Iraqi storage site during the American occupation. The implication was that the carelessness of the Bush administration had put into the hands of the insurgent terrorists the very weapons now being used to kill our troops. But the Pentagon soon established that the weapons either had been removed early in the U.S. occupation or had never been there when our troops arrived. The Times story led John Kerry to change his TV ads and focus his endgame campaign on the allegation.

• And now Newsweek has published an inflammatory story that has led to massive anti-American demonstrations in Afghanistan — the first since the war — protesting the seeming defilement of sacred texts. Sixteen people are dead because Newsweek got the story wrong, and the image of the United States is damaged in the Islamic world. And Newsweek refuses to hold anyone to account for this outrageous error, least of all its own senior management.

Each of those “mistakes” was biased in favor of the left and was committed in the haste of liberal journalists to get some ammunition to discredit Bush and the Iraq war. But when the same reporter who wrote the current story filed the first disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair with his editors at Newsweek, the magazine piously refused to run the story.

In fact, in all the years of the Clinton presidency, I cannot recall a single instance of a similarly inaccurate high-profile story attacking the Democratic president.

Each of the scandal allegations ultimately proved to capture the Clintons in some sort of ethical violation. The sole exception that comes to mind is the FBI-file story, but, even there, the journalist reports that the files had been available to the White House staff were accurate.

But when a Republican president is waging a war of which the left does not approve, a different journalistic standard appears to apply.

The media need to examine their own bias and correct it, lest still more readers and viewers turn away in the face of their obvious manipulation of public opinion.

In this article Dick Morris reminds us that:

BBC maliciously, vociferously, and wrongly claimed that Blair "sexed up" prewar Iraq intel.
CBS maliciously used transparent forgeries to attack Bush's TANG record.
The NY Times launched an attack on the Bush Administration in the last week before the election, fraudulently claiming that the military had negligently allowed terrorists to steal 370 tons of explosives which it had control of.
Newsweek has published - and had to retract - its inflammatory Koran abuse story.

Morris correctly summarizes these as political attacks against Bush, and concludes that, notwithstanding the constant scandal reports on the Cli;ton Administration, there was no negative reporting on that Administration which was not substantively, or entirely, true. Indeed he points out that Monicagate was broken by Drudge only because Newsweek was spiking the story lest it harm Clinton.

Morris then proceeds to lamely call on the MSM to " examine their own bias and correct it" - as if it were possible that the MSM had some doubt as to the political tendency it projects.

Morris makes half of a fine analysis. The truth is not only that the above facts are indisputable, but they omit such jewels of "objectivity" as

wrongly calling of the Florida 2000 vote for Gore while Bush was ahead in the reported vote and polls in the panhandle were still open, and continuously insinuating afterward that Bush's win was tainted even after their own recounts showed otherwise.
continuously portraying the impeachment of Bill Clinton (for lying to a judge under oath in a case he could have honorably settled out of court) as hypocritical harassment of Clinton's "personal life."
And, worst of all IMHO, allowing FBI Filegate - between 900 and 2000 felony counts committed in the White House, and no Administration figure held politically or legally responsible - to fade away without even being an issue in the 1996 renomination and reelection of Bill Clinton.

That is not the behavior of an independent press, that is the behavior of a political party. "Objective Journalism" is an establishment which can get "Campaign Finance Reform" laws passed to eviscerate First Amendment freedom of the people for the enhancement of its own relative influence. The fact that it behaves as a coherent politically motivated entity is in plain sight. And anyone who is responsible for preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States had, and has, an affirmative duty to remove from our laws and precedents any trace of favor to any member of the MSM.

That is the only challenge which really matters. And, be it remembered, it was Ronald Reagan who killed the Fairness Doctrine which was suppressing all serious examination of the MSM from the airwaves.

Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

The media need to examine their own bias and correct it, lest still more readers and viewers turn away in the face of their obvious manipulation of public opinion.

This will never, ever, ever happen: it's up to us here, online, and in these internet communities, to "report" the truth by vetting it in public and in plain sight. Everyone who posts something on FR is, in effect, a reporter, and everyone who reads a post, is, in effect, a fact-checker.

However, sites/communities like this aren't immune from drinking the Kool-Aid themselves. When I first discovered Free Republic in 1997/1998, it was a lot more anti-government/anti-Establishment/pro-freedom than it is now that "our guys" are in power. We have to be careful that our principles remain as rock-solid as our commitment to the truth, or else we run the risk of committing the same errors as the mainstream press, and being equally as blind to our failings.

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