Despite decades of evidence from
Walter Cronkite's offense at Tet and "
Bush lied about WMDs" to the contrary, today's liberal is fond of claiming there is not only zero lefty bias in today's mainstream media, but often a
conservative bias. The Nation's resident leftist provocateur, Eric Alterman, most recently
contended so last Fall, after he became enraged by the "lies in ABC's mini-series Path to 9/11" (the one the Clinton's had changed in a remarkable cover up). Others look to their perception of the media's "build up of the Iraq War" in 2003, or the Downing Street Memo that a professor in Florida once told me he "writes to the
Times (NY, of course) daily imploring them to publicize it more" and many others.
But, naturally, facts tell a different story, as evidence amounting to a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media is as deep as the Marianas Trench.
Led by their long time hero, Chris Matthews, today's media will mention any minor scandal from Scooter Libby to Tom Delay in order to market their erroneous claims, despite nearly a century of history showing the dangers in losing focus of the America's true enemies.
The next argument would state that talk radio and internet blogs are dominated by right-leaning folks. Well, that is true. But a closer examination makes clear why.
Air America Radio and left-leaning blogs like the
Huffington Post and
Daily Kos continuously fail or significantly lag behind their competitors due to lack of listeners and readers. There are two overarching reasons for this:
People, regardless of their political persuasions, are not interested in reading such naive commentary. Kos and Huffington, who rarely pen anything of their own, might also think that having guest writers (often Democrat politicians or celebrities like Laurie David, Bill Maher, Jim Lampley and Harry Shearer) throw out their conjectures makes a blog. This has never been true. The most successful blogs---conservative ones like
Michelle Malkin and
Little Green Footballs--have no editorialists, but rather are created via links, text, photos and an occasional salient editorial comment at the end or onset, often just a line or two.
Secondly, in a classroom, the NY Times newsroom or in the studios of CNN, CBS or Comedy Central, you need not back up your partisan stances. Make your case to nodding heads, type it up and go to lunch. But live on radio, Rush Limbaugh must back up his claims. Blogs must often do the same in their comment section or with the links to facts.
Truth be told, I'm not really concerned with the Washington Post or SF Chronicle's editorial pages being chock full of leftists; that's just the way it is and always will be. But it's the news stories where the subtle bias is real and disingenuous, since most folks admittedly only glance at the headline and first few lines of a "news" story on their way into work.
When she emailed the paper's ombudsman, he was concerned and informed her that the Star "does carry "conservatives" like Cal Thomas and George Will." He missed the point, naturally. Seems too many liberal media members do this everyday.
