How About a Fair and Balanced Doctrine for MSM?

There are those who are uninformed and then there are those who are misinformed. I blame the latter case on the mainstream media which even Mark Halperin of Time magazine readily admits.

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” [ed. failure to force the United States to run like cowards?] Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

Halperin, who maintains Time’s political site “The Page,” cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

WaPo admitted this the following week after the Election:

It’s like we’re living in a alternative universe. Now the MSM is admitting that they showed a complete and utter bias towards Obama…..NOW! When it’s too late to do anything about it. Just yesterday Mike posted on the Newsweek writers who hid the character concerns they had about the one. Now the WaPo has jumped into the act:

The [Washington] Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

My assistant, Jean Hwang, and I have been examining Post coverage since Nov. 11 last year on issues, voters, fundraising, the candidates’ backgrounds and horse-race stories on tactics, strategy and consultants. We also have looked at photos and Page 1 stories since Obama captured the nomination June 4. Numbers don’t tell you everything, but they give you a sense of The Post’s priorities.

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts’ views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

Why would this imbalance exist?

Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Post reporters, photographers and editors — like most of the national news media — found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

~~~

When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission.

Last week, John Zogby and filmmaker John Ziegler released the following poll:

Zogby Poll

512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points

97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates

Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)

81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet…..

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her “house,” even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!

Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.

Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we “gave” one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)

Watch the video at Flopping Aces. Is there ignorance equivalency on the conservative side? Sure. But when more voters- doesn't matter Republican or Democrat- know with knee-jerk speed the answer to "which candidate has the pregnant teenage daughter?" but don't know the details of William Ayers and his association to Barack Obama (it's the education reform, stupid), then I'd say the serious arm of the news media has failed to do its role in critical analysis for the sake of the people. When the media is in the tank for one party, we get Mexico.

Victor Davis Hanson:

The point is that somewhere around early to mid-2007 ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, Time, etc. chose to become — in the manner that they selected, emphasized, and presented their news stories — a quasi-official Obama media, or at least a quasi-official what-they-thought-Obama-was news media. Chris Matthews’ asinine statement about his investment in the success of the Obama administration was merely a crude summation of the creed of the more sober and judicious.

I don’t really think they can now pull off an Animal-Farm-like ‘two-legs were bad’, ‘now two-legs good’ complete turn-about just because they’ve taken over the manor. I do think that the media’s unprofessional lobbying for the cause of Obama — not now, but in a decade or two — will become a classic case study in any graduate class on journalistic ethics.

Amanda Carpenter:

John Ziegler didn’t know the kind of fury the left would unleash on him when he unveiled his web video “How Obama Got Elected.”

The ten-minute short featured 12 interviews he conducted with Obama supporters at Los Angeles polling stations on Election Day and the final product wasn’t flattering to liberals. His subjects couldn’t answer basic questions like “Who controls Congress” and “Who is Nancy Pelosi” or “Who is Harry Reid.” They could, however, correctly answer questions about GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter and wardrobe budget without any problem.

The web video spread like wildfire around the internet, getting more than 1.4 million views. Ziegler plans to include the interviews in a forthcoming film titled “Media Malpractice…How Obama Got Elected.”

See his website and video here.

What does it say about our culture that gets its information/opinions shaped by the likes of Jon Stewart and SNL? As latenight comedians put it, they couldn't find anything funny about Obama. He's the dignified, serious cerebral candidate with the halo.

John Harwood:

I don’t think they are hacks for the Democratic Party. People write about what’s funny to them. And the stuff that’s funny to them is, is the stuff that comes out of what they see that they want to make fun of from Republicans.

More than the claims of "the Republican Party strayed from conservatism, which is why we lost", what hurt us and what has hurt us for decades and continues to hurt us today, is the liberal control of our culture, from media, to professors, to judges:

for people on the left, all -- I repeat, (set ital) all (end ital) -- professions are a means to an end, not ends in themselves. That end is the social transformation of society, meaning the promoting of “social justice” as the left understands that term.

For most liberal news reporters, therefore, the purpose of news reporting is not to report news as objectively as possible. The purpose of the media in general and of reporting specifically is to promote social justice and the social transformation of society.

For most liberal judges, the primary purpose of being a judge is to promote social justice and transform society. That is why liberal judges are so much more likely to be judicial activists than conservative judges. Most liberal judges do not see their roles as merely adjudicating a dispute according to the law. They see their role primarily as using the law and their power to rule on the law to promote social justice.

For most university professors -- and many high school teachers, as well -- outside of the natural sciences and math, the same holds true. The task of a teacher is to teach, i.e., to convey the most important information as honestly as possible. But, again, this conflicts with the social justice goal of the left. History teachers who merely teach history are of little use to the left. History -- and English and political science, and sociology and other liberal arts -- teachers must use their classroom to produce young people who will wish to engage in society-transforming work for social justice.

For most liberals in the arts (there are very few conservatives in the arts) there is no denial of their having an agenda. They state quite candidly that the purpose of the arts is to challenge the (conservative) status quo, to raise political and social consciousness by advancing a “progressive” political and social agenda. The artist whose agenda is merely to produce beautiful art is looked upon as a reactionary buffoon, and is not likely to be taken seriously -- no matter how talented -- in the worlds of music, dance, painting, and sculpture.

Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research. There are the exaggerated secondhand smoke data popularized so as to decrease smoking and fight “Big Tobacco.” And now we have the scientifically questionable belief in man-made carbon emissions causing global warming leading to natural catastrophe – and recommended “solutions” many of which, if adopted, will serve the goal of undermining corporate capitalism.