Conservatives have been yelling “Foul” for years about the liberal bias that infects the mainstream media. Liberal newspapers such as the New York Times the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and others, are the leading purveyors of this bias. Long ago, they abandoned the objective, time-honored journalistic style of simply reporting who, what, when, where, and how, in their news articles, and have introduced their own shallow, often uncomprehending opinions instead of confining their views to the editorial or op-ed pages. They've sacrificed journalistic integrity to liberal opinion, and they seek to impose their own world view on us; a Socialistic, Communistic world view, which has been rejected almost everywhere else in America.
Broadcast journalism has done likewise. ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and PBS come into our living rooms every evening, ignoring their primary mission: objective, disinterested reporting, while slanting the news to the left of the political spectrum.
Emmy Award winning CBS broadcast journalist, Bernard Goldberg, who was once highly regarded in the television news business, for years appealed to reporters, producers, and network executives for more balanced reporting. But even after publication of his books, Bias (Regnery Publishing Company An Eagle Publishing Company, Washington, DC. 2002), and a year later, Arrogance (Warner Books, Inc., New York, NY 2003),which broke the code of silence pervading the news business and effectively blew the whistle on his own industry, this liberal bias continues unabated. In fact, it's actually increased, as the media become even more brazen.
Liberal bias doesn't simply mean going hard on Republicans and easy on Democrats, although that's exactly what is done. Instead, it is the result of how these media see the world. John Leo, formerly a contributor to U.S. News & World Report, but now the editor of the Manhattan Institute's mindingthecampus.com, says this: “The astonishing distrust of the news media is rooted in the daily clash of worldviews between reporters and their readers and viewers.”
And their worldview IS different from us. A new Gallup Poll confirms that about 82% of Americans are Christians, and more than 80% of Americans attend church at least occasionally and 44% attend church every week or almost every week. These facts are frequently swept under the rug in the mainstream media. That's because most members of the mainstream media are not churchgoers, do not belong to any religion, and are mostly atheists or agnostics. Some are homosexuals.
Is it any wonder then that on issues ranging from homelessness to AIDS, reporters simply regurgitate the propaganda of pressure groups they favor, to the detriment of honest reporting?
And what about the game of Identity Politics? As practiced today, the media pointedly identifies Conservatives as conservative, but don't identify Liberals as liberal. Many examples abound. Here are just a few:
- On the media, the Christian Coalition is always identified as a conservative organization. But they never identify the National Organization for Women as a liberal organization, which, of course, it is.
- Rush Limbaugh is always identified as a conservative talk show host. But Rosie O'Donnell, who while hosting a fundraiser during the Democrat primary for Hillary Rodham Clinton, described Mayor Rudy Giuliani as New York's “village idiot,” is never described as a liberal TV talk show host.
- During the Senate impeachment trial of Bill Clinton (yes, he WAS impeached by the House, but the Senate failed to remove him from office), each Senator signed his name in the oath book, swearing that he'd be fair and impartial. Peter Jennings, now deceased, was anchoring ABC's live coverage. He made sure that his audience knew which Senators were conservative, but made not a single mention of which ones were liberal. As the Senators signed the book, Jennings identified several Democrats, including Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy, two of the more prominent members of the Senate, without mentioning that they were liberal. But later, when Senators John McCain and Mitch McConnell signed, Jennings described them as very determined “conservative members of the Republican Party.”
During Clinton's trial, sophisticated Canadian anchorman, Jennings, identified the conservative Senators because he felt it mattered; that his audience needed to know. But he didn't identify the liberals because he didn't think it mattered. Why?
That's an easy one. In the world of media anchorpersons, conservatives are considered out of the mainstream and need to be described as such. But liberals are the mainstream and don't need to be identified. To put it another way: for the media, print and broadcast, anything or anyone to the right of center is conservative. But anything or anybody to the left of center is considered mainstream.
The reason the media don't identify NOW as a liberal group, or Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, and Harry Reid as liberal Senators, and even left-wing Democrats as left-wing, is that for the most part, the media elites don't see them that way. Liberals in the newsroom see liberal views as just plain reasonable, while they see conservative views as, well . . . right-wing, out of the mainstream, unreasonable. No wonder they can't recognize their own bias.
Nowhere has this media closed-mindedness been more evident than in the 2008 presidential campaign, where the Liberal left champions the cause of Barack Hussein Obama over John McCain. In the case of Sarah Palin, Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, the media, especially the TV media, have attacked her unmercifully since her nomination was announced, and will continue to do so, whether or not she trounces Democrat Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) in their only debate on October 2, 2008.
And why not attack her? After all, she's against abortion rights, against affirmative action and quotas, against homosexuality, advocates teaching both Creationism and Evolution in public schools, is a member of the Assemblies of God Christian denomination and goes to church regularly, has five children, did not counsel her 17-year old pregnant daughter to have an abortion, and had the effrontery to give birth to a Downs syndrome child instead of “terminating the pregnancy.”
To the media, these views don't make sense. They're unreasonable, unorthodox, illiberal, and Heaven forbid that a person who holds them should be elected to a position only a heartbeat away from the Presidency of the United States.
