"Unwilling and Often Unknowing"

Conservatives, oddly enough, aren’t the only ones stretching the truth to “prove” the existence of Liberal Bias, as Deborah Howell – ombudsman of the famously “liberal” Washington Post – aptly demonstrates, once again, in her November 12 column.

Addressing a reader’s complaint about the Post’s allegedly left-leaning “political bias,” Howell not only accepts (and thereby tacitly endorses) the baseless, right-wing canard that the personal opinions of journalists are the lone, significant factor in determining the overall slant of the media that employs them -- ignoring the demonstrably significant influence of economically conservative owners, advertisers, pundits and politicians entirely. In her apparent desperation to (further) validate her paper's perennially insatiable right-wing critics, Howell goes so far as to “misrepresent former Post political reporter Thomas Edsall's stated views on the purported liberalism of most journalists." As Media Matters for America reports:

While discussing recent instances of "Republicans claiming bias," Howell noted that, on the September 21 broadcast of The Hugh Hewitt Show, Edsall asserted that "most journalists he knew were liberal," in Howell's words.

What Howell conveniently fails to mention is Edsall's subsequent -- and enlightening -- clarification of these remarks, during an October 10th “online chat hosted by… washingtonpost.com." And, after reading Edsall’s online comment in its entirety, it’s not terribly hard to guess why.

“It seems to me,” an online Post reader had (astutely) observed, “that the builders of red-state America used the theory of objectivity in reporting to advance some of the less honest parts of their agenda.” Asked for his “take on that,” Edsall then responded, in full:

EDSALL (10/10/06): The conservative movement has been very effective attacking the media (broadcast and print) for its liberal biases. The refusal of the media to disclose and discuss the ideological leanings of reporters and editors, and the broader claim of objectivity, has made the press overly anxious, and inclined to lean over backwards not to offend critics from the right. In many respects, the campaign against the media has been more than a victory: it has turned the press into an unwilling, and often unknowing, ally of the right.

Yes, during his October 10th online appearance, Edsall said something remarkable -- something few of his Beltway-journalist colleagues would dare to say in public. While acknowledging “the ideological leanings of reporters and editors,” Edsall also noted a second (yet similarly “obvious”) fact of political life: that conservative critics in recent decades have been “very effective [at] attacking the media… for its liberal biases.” Indeed, movement conservatives have been so effective at "attacking the media," to Edsall’s mind, they’ve succeeded in turning it into "an unwilling, and often unknowing, ally of the right”!

Consider... well, Edsall's former Post colleague Deborah Howell, for instance, who concludes her pandering, November 12th treatise on "bias" thusly:

HOWELL: It's my job to be the watchdog, so you tell me if you see bias, and I will write more on this subject important to the credibility of The Post and all journalists.

Sadly, if the Post’s (not to mention Howell’s own) past handling of liberal critics offers any indication, they’ll only bother taking this “important” subject seriously when prompted to do so by the Right.

As Sean Hannity might say... “good liberal.”

The Great Excuse (Part 2)

The blame game continues – factual evidence still being damned – in Brent Bozell’s latest, nationally-syndicated column:

BOZELL (11/9/06): If we rigidly applied truth-in-advertising laws to the national media in their coverage of the 2006 campaign, we would have first declared that the stuff between the commercials wasn’t “news” as much as a boatload of free infomercial advertising for the Democrats. The news reports should have led with the sentence, “I’m Nancy Pelosi, and I approved this newscast.”

Yes, Bozell quickly acknowledges, “Republicans made a lot of mistakes, and caused themselves a pile of problems.” Then again, criticizing Republicans ain’t Bozell’s business. Railing against insufficiently compliant, “liberal” journalists on behalf of Republicans is, however, and the president of the hilariously self-proclaimed “Media Research Center” piles on the requisite superlatives...

BOZELL: In 25 years of looking at the national media, I have never seen a more one-sided, distorted, vicious presentation of news -- and non-news -- by the national media. They ought to be collectively ashamed. They have made a mockery out of the term "objective journalism" and a laughingstock of themselves at the idea that they should be considered objective journalists.

...followed by the requisite litany of sweeping-yet-wholly-unsupported generalizations about who, in Bozell’s eminently non-biased opinion, should have covered more of what, and when, during Campaign ’06:

BOZELL (continuing directly): They distorted the record time and again with a blame-everything-on-Republican misrule formula. When gas prices approached historic highs over the summer, the media couldn’t stop talking about the inept Republicans and failed Bush administration policies. Then gas prices plummeted. Celebratory coverage? Nah. Any credit to the Republican party or this administration? None whatsoever. Instead, they -- yes, you CNN; and you, NBC, and you, CBS -- shamelessly advanced Lyndon LaRouche-style conspiracy theories about how Republicans somehow were manipulating gas prices downward in order to get themselves elected.

How, exactly, had the so-called “objective journalists” of the MSM “distorted the record time and again with a blame-everything-on-Republican misrule formula”? Bozell, of course, doesn’t say.

And who among these so-called “objective” reporters, “couldn’t stop talking about the inept Republicans and failed Bush administration policies” toward gas prices? Bozell conveniently fails to mention that, too.

And how, pray tell, had CNN and its gratuitously left-leaning comrades at NBC and CBS “shamelessly advanced Lyndon LaRouche-style conspiracy theories about” Republicans “manipulating gas prices... in order to get themselves elected”? Bozell, once again, doesn’t say.

But let’s give Brent Bozell the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that the tireless, non-partisan professionals at his Media Research Center have, over the course of the last campaign season, meticulously documented each of the sweeping claims above. Let’s assume, furthermore – as Bozell apparently does – that, as conservative advocates, he and his MRC colleagues are uniquely exempt from the need to cite such documentary evidence (much less link to it from online versions of Bozell’s column)...

In fact, while we’re at it, lets assume that Bozell is barely scraping the surface with the paragraph's worth of non-evidence his column presents – and that his MRC archives for 2006 are chock full of verifiable anecdotes illustrating similarly “biased” coverage of other, major, non-energy-related campaign issues. Hell, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the number of sound, "biased" anecdotes collected by the MRC during Campaign '06 runs in the hundreds -- no, thousands.

Now, let's ask ourselves: even if the statements above were true, would it in any way justify the smug, self-satisfied and self-righteous tone in which Bozell asserts – for the 98,369th time – that corporate mass-media's political coverage is, on the whole, gratuitously and obviously "biased" against his beloved Republicans?

It certainly would. It would, that is, if – like Bozell himself – one willfully ignores, or simply refuses to consider, any and all evidence to the contrary.

Yes, if Bozell’s Media Research Center were the world’s one and only credible, English-language source of information about media bias, the U.S. mass media’s leftward tilt would indeed – as so many red-baiting, mass-media megastars so often, and so baselessly, insist – be painfully “obvious” to every last, sentient person on Earth. Alas, in keeping with its self-proclaimed, political “mission” of “set[ting] out to… prove… that liberal bias… does exist and undermines traditional American values,” the MRC prefers to paint a willfully skewed and incomplete portrait of reality in service of a transparently partisan and self-serving cause.

Indeed, simply by visiting the internet homepage of the MRC’s younger (and, strangely enough, more "research"-oriented) liberal counterpart, Media Matters for America, one can find boatloads of "evidence" to suggest, not only that the grand myth of “Liberal Media Bias” is just that – a myth, and nothing more – but that the so-called “Liberal Media” is itself, with mind-boggling regularity, gratuitously and unrepentantly biased against… well, liberals.

Bozell, of course, doesn’t want his readers to think about that – nor, I suspect, would many of his loyal readers want to think about it. After all, as Bozell himself puts it:

BOZELL: If I believed a fraction of what I heard from the national news media, I'd vote against Republicans too.

Indeed...

The Great Excuse (Part 1)

"[T]he midterm elections are over," USA Today press-basher-in-residence Jonah Goldberg (rightly) observes, "and the GOP has lost the House and possibly the Senate." Not that it's their fault, of course. As Goldberg happily explains:

GOLDBERG (11/8/06): Republicans will have a tougher time winning the spin war, not because they have the worse argument, but because they have a worse environment to make it in.

Of course. And who, pray tell, is responsible for creating this toxic "environment," in which Republicans and their flawless "argument[s]" are so unjustly maligned?

GOLDBERG: The GOP got thrown out of office because it got fat and lazy and because Democrats - with the help of a transmission-belt media - convinced a lot of voters that they could simply change the channel on the war by voting for "change."

[groan]

And so it begins...

GOP Spin Dies Hard...

... even, it seems, on ultra-mega-liberal National Public Radio. From Wednesday's edition of NPR's All Things Considered (via Media Matters):

SIEGEL: Mara, it sounds like the Republicans have been in need of a good issue and they thought they found one in Senator Kerry.

LIASSON: They certainly think so. This is something they are trying to use to fire up their base. They need to in the remaining days before Election Day. Even at the expense of returning voters' focus to Iraq.

Now, this is a little bit of déjà vu all over again because that windsurfing flip-flopper has provided the Republicans with ammunition again, just like he did in the campaign of 2004. And Vice President Dick Cheney was out on the campaign trail saying John Kerry was for the joke before he was against the joke.

Ah, memories...

Spoiling the Myth:The "Biased" Lies of a Culture Warrior

Corporate media's journalist-driven "Liberal Bias" -- as so many right-leaning, corporate-media megastars are so keen to remind us -- is transparently "obvious" to anyone with half a brain and a fourth-grade education.

Curious, then, that virtually any time these press-bashing, celebrity bloviators bother to present actual, supporting evidence for this supposedly self-evident "truth," they turn out to be... well, brazenly lying to our faces.

Witness Fox's press-bashing pundit-mascot Bill O'Reilly, whose just-released book, Culture Warrior, is not only filled with the name-calling, red-baiting, and sweeping-yet-unsupported generalizations about "secular progressives" that made the Factor famous (O'Reilly's relentless, on-air attribution of these very tactics to any and all critics of his own work notwithstanding). As O'Reilly's fact-checking archnemeses at Media Matters for America point out in their exhaustive (as ever) critique of Culture Warrior, O'Reilly (as ever) devotes page after breathless page of his latest New York Times bestseller berating the "biased," Liberal Media for its crippling lack of Fox-style Fairness and Balance -- further justifying his own, morally unjustifiable, mass-media presence in the process. And what do you know? Bill-O repeatedly lies through his teeth in doing so, distorting, or just plain inventing facts wherever reality fails to support his (and his audience's) pleasingly pre-determined conclusion.

Tellingly, Media Matters reports, "O'Reilly recently claimed to have thwarted [our] attempt... to review Culture Warrior prior to its release" (clip here):

On the September 21 edition of... The O'Reilly Factor, he noted that his publisher had refused a request to provide an advance copy to "a guy who writes for the left-wing smear site Media Matters." "Nice try," O'Reilly said, "no book."

Reading the list of brazen whoppers the ever-resourceful, "left-wing smear site" culled from O'Reilly's latest, book-length temper tantrum, it's easy to see why.

For instance...

On pages 20-21 of Culture Warrior, O'Reilly writes:

"There is no question that the vast preponderance of America's newspapers have a liberal editorial philosophy... Locally, liberal papers outnumber conservative sheets about ten to one.

O'Reilly, of course, "offers no evidence" to support this sweeping claim. Indeed, Media Matters reports, "this 'statistic' appears to have been plucked from thin air":

[I]n his list of newspapers that supposedly have "a liberal editorial philosophy," [O'Reilly] includes the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Houston Chronicle, and The Denver Post even though all three endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000, 2004, or both.

How dangerously "liberal" were the "editorial philosoph[ies]" of the Times-Picayune, the Chronicle, and the Post? So liberal they've endorsed uber-conservative George W. Bush for president -- twice, in at least one case!

Assuming, of course, that what qualifies these publications as too "liberal" isn't the fact that they carry "liberal" voices at all...

A mere three pages later, O'Reilly offers more, dubious "evidence" for the existence of Liberal Media Bias. Invoking Jesus Christ -- or, more precisely, Mel Gibson's Passion thereof -- "O'Reilly writes that reviews of Gibson's film revealed the deep 'S-P' [secular-progressive] bias of the mainstream media":

Citing NewsMax columnist James Hirsen's book, Hollywood Nation (Crown Forum, 2005), he writes that New York Times film critic A.O. Scott "found that Gibson had 'exploited' the death of Jesus" (Page 24).

Oh, those Christ-hating liberals journalists... When will they ever learn?!

Unfortunately for O'Reilly, and his presumably outrage-starved readers, by simply retrieving and reading Scott's column, Media Matters discovers -- surprise! -- that Scott had, in fact, written merely that Gibson had "exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end" [my emphasis].

The Times' reviewer had, in other words, "comment[ed] on the film's violence" -- "not its spirituality," as O'Reilly's prose explicitly claims.

And the hits just keep on coming...

According to Media Matters:

[On page 20 of Culture Warrior] O'Reilly baselessly claims that [all emphasis as it appears in book] "[i]t is fair to say that the print press desperately wanted Air America [Radio] to succeed," and as proof, asserts that "conservative talk radio is a huge success" but "[c]hances are" "you have seen" no "newspaper articles" about conservative talk radio "lately."

Surely, you say, this "truthy" tidbit about the biased, Liberal Media isn't bogus, too? Read, my friends, and be amazed:

[A] "News, all" search of the Nexis database from June 1 to September 16 found that while Air America Radio has been mentioned 76 times in various news outlets, Rush Limbaugh, the most prominent conservative radio talk show host, has been mentioned more than 1,000 times during the same time period. Even Al Franken, arguably Air America's best-known host, has been mentioned only 301 times, about a third as frequently as Limbaugh.

Oops!----

P.S. Worried the "biased," liberal folks at Media Matters might be the ones making stuff up about O'Reilly, and not vice versa? Determined to preserve the self-delusion that it's media liberals -- and not ultra-conservative pundit-superstars like O'Reilly -- who corrupt democratic discourse by polluting our precious, public airwaves with deliberate, partisan disinformation? By all means, feel free. Visit your local university library, access the Lexis Nexis database, and see for yourself. Go on, try it. It's free.

Unless, of course, you're chicken...

"Balance" in Action:"Lunatics" v. "Hypocrites"

"[P]resumably representing the 'You Decide' half of the network's specious 'We Report. You Decide' slogan," in its saturation-level, Thursday coverage of Hugo Chavez' recent, O'Reillyesque attacks on President Bush, Faux News offered the following, fair-and-balanced, question-headlines (via Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting):

7:16pm: "Pres Chavez: Narcissistic personality disorder?"

10:54am: "How dare Hugo Chavez blast the United States?"

11:02am: "Should we stop buying Chavez's gas from Citgo stations?"

11:59am: "Chavez insults U.S.: Where is the outrage?"

12:29pm: "Should U.S. continue to fund U.N. after applause for Chavez?"

12:54pm: "Will leaders pay the price for supporting Chavez?"

1:26pm: "Is President Chavez becoming a threat to U.S. national security?"

4:06pm: "Taking cheap oil from Hugo Chavez: Act of treason?"

5:34pm: "NY audience gives Chavez standing ovation... Why?"

"But my absolute favorite question of the day," TVNewswer writes, "came from DaySide," where -- "on the show's second-to-last day" -- viewers were asked to respond, by e-mail, to the following "question":

"Lunatics or Hypocrites? Where is the logic behind the U.S. bashing at the U.N.?"

Presumably, for Fox (and its loyal, show-me-no-evil viewers), the responses of those who choose hypocrites will provide sufficient "balance" for the views of those who prefer lunatics...

Test

Kindly ignore...