[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If 15 stories ran on the REAL al Queda torture house, versus 6000+ fake stories on NON-EXISTENT Abu Gharib torture, then it is possible to come up with a precise calculation of Media Bias.

The formula is that (6000 - 15)/6000 x 100% of the Mainstream Media stories are faked or overtly biased. That works precisely out to 99.75% of Mainstream Media being fake or heavily biased.

You don't understand the simplest thing about journalistic objectivity. The rule of journalism is that you select your stories on the basis that they are too unusual and/or too scary to be ignored.

That is encapsulated in the famous dicta,

• "'Man Bites Dog,' not 'Dog Bites Man,'" and

• "If it bleeds, it leads."

Journalism makes no secret of these dicta; journalists will tell you that that is how they select their stories for reporting and for emphasis. Now here we have two different stories, Abu Graib and al Qaeda torture.

• Al Qaeda torture isn't at all surprising, everyone knows it happens all the time. And torture of foreigners, by other foreigners seven time zones from America, is not scary to Americans. So the al Qaeda torture story is strictly "Dog Bites Man," and not worthy of the attention of American Journalism.

• Abu Graib, OTOH, is just the opposite. It has:
  • behavior which is completely unexpected of American officials anywhere,

  • behavior which would be terrible if done by American officials anywhere, and

  • behavior which reflects discreditably on the people - Republicans - whom Americans who want things done count on to get things done, right (nobody who actually cares about the government's getting the government's job - control of the power of the sword - done right would ever vote Democratic. Democrats just don't care about the government's controlling the power of the sword; they take that for granted. Bread and circus is all that matters to them).

  So ever-parochial American journalism considers itself perfectly objective when, following its time-honored rules, it reacts with a "ho hum" to the discovery of an al Qaeda torture cell in Iraq, after having made a mountain out of a mole hill over Abu Graib. The reality is, of course, that their analysis of the case is profoundly contemptuous and dismissive of any interests other than their own.

NETS AND TOP PAPERS SILENT OVER AL-QAEDA TORTURE HOUSE
MRC ^ | 6/3/07

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Selecting stories “on the basis that they are too unusual and/or too scary to be ignored” is not “journalistic objectivity.”

Of course it is not objectivity. But it is journalistic "objectivity." It is what journalists put for objectivity.

I doubt the latter even exists.

The conceit that journalism is objective is laughably absurd. Journalism puts its own interest forward as if it were identical with the public interest. That is the very definition of self interestedness, and self interestedness is an antonym for objectivity.