Clinton and Media Bias

“"Has tarbubble always spelled her name with an 'I'?

I assume whoever this is would expect ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR to proclaim they are "liberal and in your face about it."

bacpac my darling, that was me, not a troll. the reason i say FOX is in your face is because they make no attempt to disguise it. most of their high-profile programming consists of news opinions. very little of it seemed to be purely a reporting of facts.

i don't watch ABC, CBS or NBC. i don't really watch televsion at all, since rabbit ears result in a lousy picture. before we got rid of cable, i watched FOX and CNN on occasion. FOX turned me off immensely with its smug commentators and their contempt for those who dared disagree with them. CNN is downright bland in comparison, and their bias is much more subtle. i watched them both because i'm fairly confident in
my ability to sift facts from the jumble of information i'm given.

NPR liberal? yes, but in more of a world-view kind of way. we have a fair bit of local programming on NPR out here, and i occasionally disagree with what some of the guests have to say, but it just never repels me the way the shouting heads on FOX do. i am disgusted with closed-minded knee-jerk reactionaries, and i see them on both sides. i'm pretty good at seeing through their crap. yes, NPR sometimes gives them a voice, and they tend to be liberals rather than conservatives.

just so everybody knows where i'm coming from, let me clarify my views on American media bias, from my American viewpoint. i do believe that OVERALL, there is a slant to media coverage. i don't believe it's a conspiracy. i believe it mostly comes from the type of people who decide to become journalists. in the endless wake of Woodward & Bernstein, there's a popular mth that journalists are people who make a difference. some journalists do, but most of them end up covering tedious things. being human, they want to imbue their work with meaning, and being the crusading type they generally lean left. they may try to be objective, but how many of us can be truly 100% objective?

when you toss around terms like "the media," you set yourself up to look like a fool. i can subscribe to 2 newspapers in my area, the LA Times and the Orange County Register. both of them run the same AP stories, and both provide their own content as well. the Times is obviously a liberal paper. i've been reading it for years and can see that, from the columns to the letters to the editor. the Register is a much more conservative paper., although as a smaller paper they don't have anything close to the roster of writers that the Times has. i have a friend, liberal to the core and very proud of it, who thinks that anyone who subscribes to the Register is a Nazi. her own words!

but i'm getting off track. every individual journalist has their own slant. i don't think any of us, writing a news story, could keep our feelings out of it 100%. if you made a big graph out of it, i believe the numbers would skew to the left (although with the surge in hardcore conservative journalism, perhaps not). from this, i cannot abide by a blanket statement that says "the media" is liberally biased. and so endeth my pointless opinion piece.”

“There is an interesting contrast between Charlie Reina’s story of FOX News using the term "homicide bombings" apparently at the suggestion of the White House and the LA Times memo to its reporters to stop using the words "resistance fighters" to describe the Iraqi opposition.”

“Essay on the Media and Democracy
by Bill Moyers

I am often asked why, as a journalist, I keep coming back to the story of media and democracy - how newspapers, radio stations, television and cable are being swallowed up by huge conglomerates. One answer comes from the former Yankee pitching star, Jim Bouton, who told me in an interview this week exactly what can happen when there's only one newspaper in a town and it's owned by a media conglomerate far from home.

Bouton, you may remember, jolted the baseball world back in 1970 with his truth-telling diary of a season in the big leagues. Lo and behold, as Ball Four revealed to a shocked - shocked! - America, the "boys of summer" were just that - adolescents with overstuffed hormones who, when they weren't making double plays, home runs, and leaping catches, liked to drink, smoke, and run around with, ahem, "girls who do." Ball Four may well be the best baseball book ever, but it's more than that: the New York Public Library recently chose it as one of the 100 "Books of the Century." Whatever is meant by the word "classic," Ball Four fits.

Now Bouton is back with another truth-teller that deserves to be a bestseller. Media conglomeration, like baseball after Bouton, will never be the same. Turns out the newspaper in the town near where Bouton lives - Pittsfield, Massachusetts - wanted to use $18.5 million dollars of taxpayer money to build a new baseball stadium on property it owns. Turns out the property is polluted, although the newspaper didn't bother to disclose the fact, and that the new stadium was a way of passing off the liability to the public even while enhancing the value of the newspaper's property. Turns out the newspaper, which Bouton thought was locally owned, is owned by MediaNews Group, based in Denver, Colorado, which counts among its 100 "media properties" The Salt Lake Tribune and the Denver Post. When Bouton and his partner went to the local publisher with a proposal to renovate the existing - and historic stadium - at no expense to the taxpayer, they were told: Out of our hands; check it with Dean (Dean Singleton is the mogul who runs MediaNews). They tried; Singleton didn't bother to answer, even when Bouton sent him a signed copy of Ball Four. Turns out the conglomerate wanted its own stadium, on its own property, at public expense, despite the fact that the public voted down the proposal - three times! But, hey, what's a little democracy when the only daily newspaper and the largest law firm in town, and - hold on to your hat - General Electric (yes, that GE, which has title to its own media universe) want the indulgence of taxpayers for their little profit-making schemes. The local newspaper publisher, Bouton tells me, "was being controlled by his boss in Denver. And the local politicians were being controlled by the local publisher. So there was a sort of puppeteer controlling the decisions that were made by the local government."

I'm not going any further to give away a crackling good story except to say that when his book publisher received a call from somebody close to GE, the big league publisher caved and wouldn't publish the book. Bouton says he was told he could keep half the advance if he remained silent about the whole affair; he refused and published Foul Ball himself. Rush out and buy a copy (http://www.jimbouton.com/foulball.html) and read for yourself how every monopoly is a tyranny lying in wait. The only daily paper in Bouton's town didn't want the public to know what was going on, and there was no competitor to throw a light on the shenanigans taking place between its publisher and the politicians. As the old saying goes, freedom of the press belongs to the fellow who owns one.

What happened in Bouton's town happens all over the country, alas; two thirds of the newspaper markets in America are monopolies. Oh, by the way: When their side of the story was distorted by the paper, Bouton and his partner got their story out through the radio stations in town. If Dean Singleton and the FCC have their way, such insubordination by mere citizens won't happen again. Singleton was last seen in Washington making the case for the FCC decision to enable him to own more media properties - broadcasting and print - in one town. Talk about silencing the lambs! Truth is, when the big broadcasters and publishers lobby Congress, the FCC, and the White House for the green light to merge, consolidate, and eliminate the competition, they don't bother to report to their readers or viewers what they're up to. They prefer to keep us in the dark.

John Leonard gives us another insight into why it's important to keep coming back to this story of media conglomeration. John Leonard may be our most prolific social critic. He's everywhere - Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, "CBS Sunday Morning." Most recently he has edited a wonderful array of writers who have produced for Nation Books (www.nationbooks.org) a reminder of just how much we need our maverick voices. These United States is a series of essays, articles, reports - they fit no neat description - by some wondrously talented writers and journalists commissioned to describe the sights, smells, and politics of America in each of the 50 states. But I bring John Leonard up here because in preparing to interview him this week, I re-read a brilliant essay he wrote some years ago about what happens when reporters, editors and critics become caged birds singing the company tune in the information-commodities racket. When they begin to have more in common with the chairman of the board than with the working stiffs who read and watch, journalism turns to slush; pretty soon they figure out it doesn't pay to cover the working stiffs standing out there with their noses pressed against the window.

So, yes, I keep coming back to the subject of media conglomeration because it can take the oxygen out of democracy. The founders of this country believed a free and rambunctious press was essential to the protection of our freedoms. They couldn't envision the rise of giant megamedia conglomerates whose interests converge with state power to produce a conspiracy against the people. I think they would be aghast at how this union of media and government has produced the very kind of imperial power against which they rebelled. So, yes, media conglomeration has become a beat for my colleagues and me. We think this is the most important story of all, the one that determines what other stories get told - and how.

This is an expanded version of an essay that will air on a special edition of NOW with Bill Moyers airing on Friday, November 28, 2003 at 9pm on PBS devoted to media issues. Tune in to watch the complete interviews with Jim Bouton and John Leonard.
”

“Good essay!”

“That is a good article. It is something that should concern us all.

I once watched Bill Moyers on NOW. They were discussing the show, The Reagan's. He had one guest journalist who was from a "liberal" publication. They discussed the issue censorship as it concerned this program. The journalist was very upset that The Reagan’s would be canceled due to some "minor inaccuracies."

As much as I hate censorship, I sure would have liked to see another point of view. Especially where it concerned the issue of "minor inaccuracies." Bill Moyers sat there seemingly engrossed in one point of view. He never questioned the validity of this journalists’ point of view. Objective journalism? Hardly.

Here’s another point of view.


Science & Society 11/24/03
By John Leo
A surprising jog to the right


"We're not losing" isn't much of a battle cry, but an article in the policy magazine City Journal with that modest message is attracting a lot of attention. The article, "We're Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore" by senior editor Brian Anderson, argues that the left's near monopoly in the entertainment and news media is "skidding to a startlingly swift halt."

Much of Anderson's evidence--the rise of Fox News, talk radio, and conservative bloggers--is familiar, but the article argues that a corner has been turned and the culture war is a far more even struggle now. This news may come as a shock to conservatives. It's certainly a shock to Tim Noah, a liberal commentator at Slate. Noah read Anderson's article, watched as the Reagan miniseries was pulled, then wrote glumly that the right has won the culture wars.

Hardly. The liberal worldview still dominates the news business, the arts, the entertainment world, publishing, the campuses, and all levels of schooling. It's the media and educational status quo. But five years ago, CBS probably could have gotten away with a cheap-shot miniseries on the Reagans. Now it can't. This is partly because of market forces, as conservative columnist Robert Bartley and liberal columnist Richard Reeves both pointed out. Reeves called the miniseries "commercially insane." Large conservative audiences no longer accept many liberal products, so those products are adapted or abandoned. The other reason for the ditching of the Reagan miniseries is that the conservative media world is now good at gang tackling. From Matt Drudge's Drudge Report (which framed the issue of the miniseries) to Fox, the bloggers, talk radio hosts, and the columnists, everybody piled on. New York Times columnist David Brooks touched on this point some time ago, writing that the new conservative media have "cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out." For liberals, this is an ominous development.

The unfamiliar part of Anderson's article is the rising conservative impact on pop culture. In comedy, it's not just Dennis Miller, the first major comedian fully identified with the right. On cable, conservative humor--or at least, antiliberal humor--pops up all the time. Colin Quinn, like Miller a veteran of Saturday Night Live, skewers liberal pieties regularly on Comedy Central's popular Tough Crowd. I once asked a thoughtful liberal friend: "Why does the message of the left seem to penetrate the whole of pop culture?" His answer--"We make the culture; you don't"--doesn't seem so obvious now.

New paradigm. The showpiece of antiliberal humor is one that appalls a good many conservatives: South Park, Comedy Central's wildly popular cartoon saga of four crude and incredibly foul-mouthed little boys. The show mocks mindless lefty celebrities and takes swipes at the gay lobby and the abortion lobby. Some examples: Getting Gay With Kids is a homosexual choir that descends on the school. And the mother of one South Parker decides she wants to abort him ("It's my body"), despite the fact that he's 8 years old. The weekly disclaimer on the show says it is so offensive "it should not be viewed by anyone." This is a new paradigm in pop culture: Conventional liberalism is the old, rigid establishment. The antiliberals are brash, funny, and cool. Who would have thought?


Some of the new conservative success is due to the rise of a large crop of commentators the left has not been able to match. Mostly young and often very funny, they include Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, and Jeff Jacoby. But most of the conservative gains have been in new media. Fox News's large audience skews young, and half its viewers are either liberal or centrist. So Fox isn't just preaching to the choir. It's exposing nonconservatives to conservative ideas.
As mentioned here several times, the "blogosphere"--the world of Internet commentators--tilts strongly to the right. Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, and Glenn Reynolds of instaPundit have a heavy impact. No excess of the liberal media seems to escape their attention. Among other things, they have mercilessly attacked Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and idol of America's angriest liberals. It has been an amazing and, I think, largely successful campaign of informed detraction.
It was obvious that the democratization of the media would bring new voices into the field, but who knew that so many of those voices would be conservative, libertarian, or just cantankerously opposed to entrenched liberal doctrine? The conservative side is far from winning the culture wars, but the debate is broader and fairer now. The near monopoly is over.”

“Good piece, Arclite! The writer does, however, miss one key point:

The showpiece of antiliberal humor is one that appalls a good many conservatives: South Park, Comedy Central's wildly popular cartoon saga of four crude and incredibly foul-mouthed little boys. The show mocks mindless lefty celebrities and takes swipes at the gay lobby and the abortion lobby. Some examples: Getting Gay With Kids is a homosexual choir that descends on the school. And the mother of one South Parker decides she wants to abort him ("It's my body"), despite the fact that he's 8 years old. The weekly disclaimer on the show says it is so offensive "it should not be viewed by anyone." This is a new paradigm in pop culture: Conventional liberalism is the old, rigid establishment. The antiliberals are brash, funny, and cool. Who would have thought?

HA! I've never seen anyone so completely miss the point!

Southpark actually was making fun of conservative views by proxy. In both episodes mentioned here, southpark was taking the conservative nightmare and making it come true, showing the ridiculousness of the fear! Gay recruiting drives in public schools and trying to abort an 8 year old are not things that liberals espouse. They are mutations of a slippery-slope theme that is actually poking fun at the alarmists that believe these are the legitimate consequences of gay rights and abortion rights.

Anyway, the theme of the article is more or less sound, and I believe more conservatives and liberals alike are coming to see that bias in the media is not just a liberal trait, and each person must filter the news and media he takes in.”

“

Bill Clinton’s post–White House escapades
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/07/clinton200807

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What the media giveth, the media taketh away, about ten years behind the curve.”