Media Bias

... is the first step to fixing it.  But what about the damage that has already been done?

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

A thousand mea-culpas won't make any difference after the election.  And the mainstream media sits on videos of Barack Obama toasting PLO terrorists.

Looks like the famous left-wing answer to right-wing talk radio got a little bit of help from the government, at the expense of other government programs to help inner-city youth.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that a left-wing radio program found a way to siphon off federal goverment money, but the details are pretty interesting.

Only a few days after his original editorial calling for a truce between gun-rights and free-speech activists, John Bogert has struck out.  His first strike was injecting anti-gun editorial comments into his printed version of my emailed response to his editorial.  His second strike was printing this editorial calling for more attention to be paid to freeway shootings.  While he didn't call for gun control in response, his piece used all the usual emotive tricks.  His readers have no problem reading between the lines.  And his third strike?  Since that first editorial, has hasn't posted a single thing supporting gun rights.  (Look for yourself at his latest editorials)

In that same period of time, I, a humble blogger, have written about:

• A bill to stop RFID identification in California.
• A chance to protect free speech from the over-broad interpertations of the DMCA.
• The Drug War teaching our children to make meth
• Big-Brother citizen monitoring and assassination devices.
• A ban on .50 and semiautomatic firearms in Maine... complete with confiscation.
• Not to mention a similar attempt in Illinois...
• An opportunity by the Center for Democracy and Technology to file a comment with the FEC about regulating political discussion on the Internet
  
• And quite a bit more.

Is one article supporting the right to keep and bear arms too much to ask?  Come on, John.  If you think he needs to fulfill his pledge, let him know.

Well, well, well, well.  ABC has admitted they know nothing about the Terry Schiavo memo's real origin.  CNN discredited itself with the Saddam revelation, EasonGate, and their deceptive reporting on firearms.  CBS, of course, has RaTHerGate and more deceptive reporting on firearms. 

That leaves Fox News and NBC News on the list of major television news outlets that haven't shot themselves in the foot.  Of course, I'm sure they have too, just in less obviously visible ways. 

UPDATE: A commented remarks that NBC faked a vehicle explosion for their news program some time ago.  Still nothing that Fox has faked.  Any left-wing types want to chime in?  (Actual faked evidence or claims unsupported by any evidence, please -- we all know O'Reilly is an ass and the slant is relatively conservative, but livestock and bias doesn't cut it).

Clayton Cramer links to (and The Geek with a .45 is aghast at) this newspaper story reporting on a poll which produced somewhat shocking results about free speech rights: 36% said that the press should be required to obtain government approval before publication.

He's right that it's not a terribly encouraging sign, but I don't think that the end of the world -- or even the end of democracy in America -- is coming as a result. Why aren't I more worried? Simple: the pollster manipulated the results in order to produce a good headline. How? Read the extended entry to find out...

On the other hand... well, it's definitely not encouraging even with the manipulation.

The poll presented the following options (paraphrased, since the exact wording is not available):

1. The press should be required to get government approval before publishing.
2. The press should be able to publish freely.
3. No opinion.

This trick is called "creating a false dichotomy", and it works by forcing a complex problem into one of two simple answers, neither one of which is actually correct. Respondents end up choosing the response which is closer to their view, or with which they disagree least, even though they may have reservations. The results of the poll are then reported as if all the respondents agreed with the question as stated, as happened in this case.

The results of such a poll can be further skewed by careful selection of the questions. You have one question designed to be broad in scope -- honestly representating about half of the respondents. Your other question is much narrower, representing perhaps 10% of the respondents in an honest poll. But because it's the only alternative, it receives a significant boost from the remaining 40% whose opinions are not honestly represented. Some of those 40% will choose "No opinion", but the rest will select the option into which they have been funnelled.

So how many people approve of our present free speech restrictions -- specifically, laws which punish libel and slander (eg, publication of knowingly false statements)? Is that "publish freely"? Not really. It's not really government approval before publication, either, but it is government approval of a sort, after the fact. How about the FCC? It's not 'publish freely", but it's not prior government approval either. And so on.

The result is that respondents are funnelled into a more extreme position than they actually meant. The poll could have been fixed by adding one or two additional options to more finely capture the distinction:

1. The press should be able to publish freely.
2. The press should be able to publish freely, excepting libel and slander regulations.
3. The press should be able to publish freely, excepting libel and slander regulations, and subject to community standards.
4. The press should be required to get government approval before publishing.
5. No opinion.

See how the additional options change the situation?

CBS has been pushing Kerry and attacking Bush about as hard as a network can in an election year. Here's a way to push back.

There's a saying... "Once is an accident, twice is bad luck, but three times is enemy action."

I'd say CBS is disturbingly close to the threshold for enemy action. And I encourage MoveOn.org to pressure CBS to run their story. If they run it, it will be the death knell for any pretense of objectivity at CBS specifically and the mainstream media generally.

Not that I think they are actually objective at present -- but the average man on the street may not be aware of how bad the problem is.

We've compiled all the public emails for CBS affiliates around the country. (Many thanks to Fraters Libertas, who first put this together) Just write your message and fill out the form below, and an email will be sent FROM you to every CBS affiliate in the country. If you get any responses, please forward them to contact ((at)) rathergate ((dot)) com.

I haven't been posting much on the CBS forged-documents scandal, because it's a little outside my brief; it doesn't pose a threat to any of our Constitutional rights. But when there's an opportunity to speak up and make your voice heard, that's something worth mentioning.

Following the link will take you to a page that will allow you to send a customized message to all the CBS affiliates (ie, the local stations that carry CBS programming). The idea is to express your disappointment concerning the forged documents scandal and to demand that Dan Rather either resign or be fired for his part in it.

If you're not familiar with the situation, read up on it at powerline.

My scorecard has John F. Kerry ahead on points, although his opponents have landed some solid blows. The anti-Kerry veterans who have banded together as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth may be sincere in their version of what happened in 1969, but the weight of evidence still supports Kerry's original story. They have caught him in only one, relatively inconsequential untruth ? Kerry's claim that he was in Cambodia on Christmas Day 1968. (He now admits that something that didn't happen was "seared" into his memory.) But Kerry has been slow to respond to the allegations, and he's paying a political price. The University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey found last week that 57% of respondents were aware of the Swift boaters' allegations and 46% of those found them believable.

It's hardly unexpected for the media to be covering for Kerry's ... um... creative record in Vietnam. Although this article isn't exactly positive, it's still trying to minimize the damage. So far, the Kerry campaign has admitted:

1. Kerry was not in Cambodia for Christmas 1968 as he claimed.
2. Kerry's first purple heart was awarded for a self-inflicted wound, confirmed by his own diary and by another crewmember in the boat.
3. At least one of the Swift Boat Vets served on the same boat with Kerry.

Count 'em. That's more than "one" untruth, and the Cambodian Question is far from inconsequential; it strikes to the heart of Kerry's credibility, because it's a story he has used repeatedly to support his Vietnam-era claims about war crimes. This kind of coverage is just embarassing.

While we've talked a lot about how journalists self-identify with respect to politics, not much has been said about donations to political campaigns. This chart contains the political donations from the top 25 media companies in 2000 and 2002, broken up by political party. Look at who is making the most donations, and where those donations are going.

Remember U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame? In 2003, Wilson made himself a national celebrity by announcing that the CIA had sent him to Niger to see if Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium there.

It used to be a very big story. The News ran 19 articles on it, most recently on June 25. The Post had nine articles including a glowing review of Wilson's book, A Defense of Truth, on May 16, and an excerpt from Wilson's book on May 23.

So given all this attention to Wilson and his claims, it would seem responsible for the Denver papers to let readers know that the U.S. Senate has determined that Wilson is not exactly a guy who always acts "in defense of truth," as detailed recently by The Washington Post.

Without getting too far into this debate, I think the truth is a vital element of foreign policy. If we can't trust people to report the truth -- if they insist on lying and misleading the public for political gain -- then we will inevitably make poor decisions; in this case, poor decisions about national security matters.

I can understand that this story would be big news when it broke. A President lying to make the case for war is certainly an important story. But when the person making that charge is himself exposed as a liar, that is just as big a story... except few of the mainstream media outlets decided to publish it.

I call that media bias, folks: reporting the accusation but not the vindication.

I have another word for what it seems Joe Wilson did. It's an ugly word. It's a word that requires an overt act of aid and comfort to the enemy, and two witnesses to same.

So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.

But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.

So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?

There are some excellent examples of media bias in this editorial. What's always bugged me about the nearly-ever-present bias isn't so much that it exists (after all, everyone has an opinion), it's the fact the the journalists so blatantly guilty of it spend so much time denying it exists! I can understand why; they are really trying to be balanced, but they live in in a profession that is extremely liberal and their measure of moderate politics is skewed far to the left of what the rest of us think. But that excuse only lasts as long as it takes for someone to stand up and point it out: at that point you have to abandon the pretense of non-partisanship or admit that the views of the media aren't representative of mainstream America.

I wonder if I could get a bunch of newsfolks to take a survey, and compare the results with "mainstream America". I'll have to work on that one.

This bit of wisdom, by the way, was brought to you by Orson Scott Card, who happens to have written some great novels:

• Ender's Game
• Speaker for the Dead

I've had it out with the Detroit News before over their firearms bias. It's not exactly an uncommon sentiment in the media, but few papers are willing to spend almost a week doing a "special report" on firearms liability without putting it in the editorial section. So it didn't surprise me when I ran across this account on the snopes website.

The "painted cows" story has made it past fact checkers and into the news on a few occasions. In 1985 Michigan farmer Tom Guthrie became a media celebrity after a photograph showing one of his heifers with the word 'COW' spray-painted in orange on its side was ingested without the requisite grain of salt, and the photo was taken by the Detroit News and run under the headline "Truth in Packaging." From there the picture was picked up by the wire services, leading many readers to believe the labeling of cows to deter hunters was on the up-and-up. Yet the photo had been staged, as Guthrie freely admitted. He was not experiencing problems with errant hunters, nor had any of his livestock been harmed ? he'd merely been obliging someone who'd asked for a favor.

No doubt mistakes are made occasionally, but this is going a step or two beyond "reporting" the news and into "creating" it instead. And since the story is dated from 1985, it's clear that the media's problems with bias and fact-checking are not a new phenomenon. The only thing that's new is the ability of the people who actually DO know what they are talking about to find the truth and get the word out.