[anniegetyourgun]

"Another way liberal bias hurts liberals is that it causes reporters to underplay, overlook, and often completely ignore important political trends."

There's a whole lotta misunderestimatin' going on out there.....

[Inyokern]

One way media bias hurts liberals is by giving them a false sense of security.

Excellent analysis!

I think a great example of this was the 1988 election. I have always felt that the liberal press killed Michael Dukakis with kindness. He never realized how unpopular his stand on the Pledge of Allegiance and the release of Willy Horton would prove to be because the liberal press never told him.

[Free the USA]

fyi

[ODDITHER]

The writer could have boiled this down into one paragraph.

The media has become a group of elitists. They believe that the voters are too stupid to understand the issues without them withholding half of the story. Being part of the elite they have enormous egos and appetites. They party with those that they should be writing stories about. The story has become about them rather than those they cover. They truly believe that without them, the masses would be misled and brain washed.

[FollowingTheGrace]

The result is a blind spot for the media. They miss a lot of what is going on in society because they just don't see it. Newsrooms today are echo chambers, where reporters and editors hear the same liberal conventional wisdom over and over again.

Just this week a local, relatively conservative radio talk show did a program on media bias. One of the guests was a professor from the journalism department of the university here in town. She was genuinely puzzled about the whole issue of media bias. She kept saying that no professional journalist would ever go after a story deliberately intending to present a biased view.

While I would disagree that no professional journalist would do that--I think they often do--but most often I believe the problem is exactly this 'blind spot'. Journalists simply cannot imagine that there is another viewpoint.

[Cicero]

It cuts both ways. And, I'm afraid, mostly the other way. Clinton could never have been elected to office, gotten re-elected, or escaped impeachment if the news media had been honest.

Worse the news media's habit of twisting and distorting the news is its habit of suppressing the news. Many of the crimes that Dems commit simply never get reported.

So, sure, maybe the media pimps make the Dems overconfident. But for the most part, they have good reason to be confident. Because they can commit any kind of election fraud, raise money from the Chinese by selling them nuclear secrets, even kill off inconvenient White House aides and cabinet secretaries, and no one will ever call them to account.

[Lancey Howard]

"Newsrooms today are echo chambers, where reporters and editors hear the same liberal conventional wisdom over and over again."

All of this hurts Democrats far more than they know. To the extent that they pay attention to their media coverage, they are cut off from the mainstream of society without even realizing it, implicitly believing that Peoria thinks like the New York Times. Indeed, since the Times has become a virtual newsletter for the Democratic party, it surely deserves some of the blame for the Democrats' 25-year trend from dominant political party to what looks like long-term minority status.

Excellent column. Good post.

[Paleo Conservative]

Also, Bruce Bartlett forgot to mention the concentration of news organizations in large cities on the East and West coasts. In the past news organizations could shape perceptions of the news due to the asymmetry in the information. News could be quickly distributed from New York or Washington to the rest of the country, but news from Kansas would not be covered nationally unless it fit the agendas of the New York press. Now with the internet it is possible for anyone to follow news from just about any location in the world without the fitering of large east coast news agencies.

[yoe]

But if the media share the lawmaker's political philosophy, then there is a danger that he may be misled. He may think he is popular with voters, when in fact they are not happy with him at all. He is only getting positive press coverage because the media like what he stands for.

Or the media tries to smooze the public with Joe Conason type hype; propaganda foisted upon the public like Nancy Pelosi, hardly a ‘he’. However like all shes in good standing with the socialist press, we are inundated with media drivel. Bias from any quarter will always worry me!

[rdb3]

In a minute.

No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.

[cgbg]

This is a very interesting and provocative article. I feel like a book could be written discussing the issues it raises.

The liberal media wants everyone to believe what they believe. They want what they believe to be true. Then on some election nights they hear that little voice say: "I don't think we are in Manhattan anymore."

I had an interesting experience at work this week. A very liberal lifelong Democrat middle aged woman and I were discussing a work related matter which involved some individuals who were obviously lying to us. Then out of her mouth popped these amazing words: "Yeah what they are proposing is just like Social Security--it is a Ponzi scheme." I am still in shock. This woman had just uttered a thought the media had tried to hide from her from the day she was born--for more than forty years. Yet somehow in her middle age she had seen through the con of FDR liberalism.

It was a crook in real life that gave her the glimpse behind the curtain.

So every liberal out there could become a conservative at any moment, and it is their life experience that will teach them about those Network Anchors who lie whenever their lips move.

[Interesting Times]

Leftist media bias only hurts the leftists if people have access to other sources of information.

A recent NYT editorial on the election remarked bitterly that Fox News and talk radio "let the hard right get its message out." The Internet -- the most lethal threat to the old media -- was carefully not mentioned. The leftists must control the flow of information to win, and are no longer in a position to do so.

The failure of the leftist media to identify trends among conservatives isn't as important as this article suggests, since they weren't going to report on those things anyway...

[Temple Owl]

The result is a blind spot for the media. They miss a lot of what is going on in society because they just don't see it. Newsrooms today are echo chambers, where reporters and editors hear the same liberal conventional wisdom over and over again.

And the circulation of the so-called mainstream press keeps dropping. More people are finding out that Rush is right.

[SunkenCiv]

Consequently, press bias is a two-edged sword. It irritates the heck out of conservatives, but at the same time induces a sense of complacency among liberals that can be exploited. The latter are, in effect, urged farther to the left by the media than is politically prudent, setting the stage for conservative upsets.

I've never been upset by conservative election gains. ;')

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

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