MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.
The case has already been made, here is more DNA evidence that the media is full of liberals. Even if they try to be balanced their internal bias rings through.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
How can the media be fair and balanced?
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38 comments:
game,
Jim and Think Progress do not believe in free press or free markets, especially wheh they can censor the opposition into silence.
The Democrats lately have been ironically talking about bringing fairness to the media. They certainly don't mean forcing Democrat organizations like CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, The New York Slimes, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, et cetera to give time to rightwing views.
Nope. By fairness, the left intends to crush little ol' Fox News, which allows a conservative perspective, and a few private radio programs conservatives enjoy. Silencing conservatives is their socialist idea of freedom of speech.
I hate the state-worshipping neo-communists!
I wouldn't comment here if I was liberal either
I'll comment.
The assertion that the left wing is "talking about bringing fairness to the media" is false. It's made up.
CAP has a study that shows that the "balance" tips significantly right on talk radio. You yourselves have touted this fact. So what's the problem with them proving it?
You guys can claim that the big media companies are biased left, and I'll admit that they are left of Fox. And there is no denying the right rules the radio waves.
However, you are actually going to have to provide proof that the left is trying to silence "a few radio programs conservatives enjoy". (What a laugh!)
Ready? Go!
Here's one, Jim:
http://www.breitbart.tv/html/2042.
html
And now from your favorite source for your posts:
http://thinkprogress.org/
2007/06/20/radio-report
Now, let's see how much lying and how stupid Jim is going to get if he even returns at all.
that was was too easy...
this isn't even hard now
Game,
Don't I get any extra points for kicking Jim with his own favorite mouthpiece site.
I just really read it now...you get many points for that bitch slap
I mean, really!, how can Jim be this dishonest??? I noticed the total silence by Jay.
Are there any HONEST Democrats left?
Of course there are, PCD. They generally believe most of what they say they believe. Thus, it isn't "lying" per se. This distinction is important. Though there are those who distort, it can't be said there are no such people on the right. The real deal concerns the philosophies, policies and positions of each side and how they can be persuasively articulated. I bring this up only to reign in the type of rhetoric that is more suitable for a lefty and unbecoming a conservative. Now, if you were just being snarky, belay the previous.
You people are either simpletons, delirious or both.
Nobody is trying to bring back the fairness doctrine.
Inhofe said that he overheard Clinton and Boxer "the other day" and he's also told Neil Cavuto, "Neil, I've told this story well over 100 times on the radio, on TV, in the last three years. I was going up the elevator with them, this is about three years ago, to vote. "
He's either senile or a liar and probably both.
Any suggested fairness would be to breakup the concentration of ownership of radio stations by a very small number of conglomerates. It would also give you a greater diversity of music beside what Clear Channel wants you to hear.
The simple-mindedness of your "arguments" are astounding.
Marshall, thanks for a sane comment.
Jim--
This isn't about diversity, or the children, or the common good, or about helping the poor. This is about The Right Wing Domination Of Talk Radio And How To End It, as Think Progress describes it. It is lost upon leftists that the only reason why talk radio exists is because the mainstream media is so far to the left. Air Hate-America couldn't get ratings not because of corporate power, but because their gloom and doom bullshit is redundant, even for liberals, who can easily find their rotten view of the world echoed everywhere.
And the socialist Democrats won't stop here. Their next target will be imposing fairness and diversity on the internet by imposing what they call net neutrality. Plus the Democrats have said over and over again they want to criminalize conservative speech as hate. I don't know how a rational person can defend this kind of doubletalk.
Nice try Jason, but as far as net neutrality is concerned, you have exposed your ignorance on the subject.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with the "fairness doctrine", right or left, or politics in general. It is about the infrastructure of the Internet itself, who owns the pipes and who controls what goes over the pipes.
Wikipedia defines "net neutrality" as providing a "broadband network free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment attached and the modes of communication allowed"
I urge you to read Wikipedia especially because it provides good arguments of both sides of the issue.
Learn something, Jason.
MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions
This is out of about 116,000 journalists. So you determine the leftward tilt of the media by the behavior of .1% of them? Look, when a study finds that LITERALLY 99.9% of journalists don't contribute to R or D, then I think any attempt to use that study one way or the other is just plain stupid.
(Not to mention that many of the people listed in the study are copy editors, sports writers, and so on, not political journalists.)
every survey and study ever done states the same thing...this is just another one...and when we determine what the public thinks about the next Presidential election, do we have to ask every single person to get a poll Jay?
Do you mean all those polls that survey about 1000 out of 300,000,000 are not worth a damn either?
Jim--
That is an insane form of doublespeak about net neutrality regulation. You and others are claiming that the government placing restrictions on free enterprise is the actual removal of restrictions.
And it is the same principle as the fairness doctrine-- even though there is no current problem as things stand today, the internet belongs to the Volk, ahem, the people, and must be regulated for the common good.
Did I mention I hate socialists?
:)
Isn't your false assumption, here, that journalists and editors determine editorial slant of the news?
I don't see how that could be true. It's abundantly obvious that in the corporate media it's the owners whose political slant is reflected, and most of those guys are pretty much Republican.
That there are liberals in the media is irrelevant to whether or not there is liberal bias in the media, really. The guys on the ground aren't the ones who determine editorial slant.
Welcome, Chet!
Jason, are you against Public Utilities Commissions?
Game, MSNBC isn't claiming to have sampled the media looking for contributions. (Sampling is a real statistyical technique and had this been a sample, I would not be complaining.) Instead, MSNBC attempted to search for as many journalists as they could find. The link is to their methodology, which includes the same caveat I made:
The final list represents a tiny percentage of the working journalists in the nation. Daily newspapers alone employ about 60,000 full-time journalists. Approximately 30,000 work in television news jobs and 10,000 in radio news.
Okay, that is reasonable Jay...
However, there is endless evidence that states that since the late 1960's over 70% of media personnel vote for Democrats...
And Chet, search through my blog, look at all the stories, and it seems clear to me a bias in the way the news is reported and even WHAT is reported...
and welcome
It's not the media owners that dictate how the headlines read. They also don't spend a whole lot of time reading every article before it goes to press to determine how objective it is. The editors and journalists decide how the news is presented. Just think back a bit to stories surrounding the "Domestic Surveilance" that wasn't intended in any way to "spy" on citizens. The media continued to use this term from start to finish and it cast a pall on the issue it didn't deserve. This is without a doubt an anti-Bush bias, particularly when they have the resources to more accurately assess the situation and report it in it's true form.
But it doesn't take something so blatant to sway public opinion. It can be far more subtle, such as whether or not a politician's party affiliation is mentioned, on what page a particular story is printed or whether or not it's a lead story on TV, etc. I don't think it's a stretch to understand that what passes for news is largely determined by those who run, not own, the media outlet. This isn't so alarming, in fact it's quite a natural occurrence. Denying it happens is another thing entirely.
I am quite amazed that these guys are still in denial, especially when the stories of liberal media bias as opposed to some sort of conservative bias are literally 100 to 1
Jim, Jay, and other liberals called in to save Jim and Jay's bacon,
Note the new thread Game started. Feinstein is calling for the return of the (Un)Fairness Doctrine. You are a liar if you deny that the Democrat Party and all their 527 mouthpieces are working for the return to their ability to silence the right on radio and elsewhere.
Oh, and I DO call Jim on being a liar, or Jim is either so mentally challenged that he can not distinguish truth from falsehood.
And Chet, search through my blog, look at all the stories, and it seems clear to me a bias in the way the news is reported and even WHAT is reported...
I actually find Media Matters a lot more instructive. The examples you have are just of the media refusing to cater to conservative biases. It's not "media bias" when they refuse to call them "Defeatocrats" or "the Democrat party" or whatever.
Just think back a bit to stories surrounding the "Domestic Surveilance" that wasn't intended in any way to "spy" on citizens.
You're proving my point. Don't you remember that the owners of the NYT suppressed that story for a whole year so that it wouldn't make Bush look bad during the election?
No? I guess you forgot about that. (Indeed, you're factually inaccurate to try to downplay the story; American citizens were spied on, and every constitutional scholar is in agreement that the NSA's program exceeded executive authority and violated civil liberties.)
Jim, Jay, and other liberals called in to save Jim and Jay's bacon,
Actually The Game invited me here, but thanks for the welcome.
Chet,
Media Matters?? That lying outfit funded by George Soros and headed up by that disgraced head case? That and Wikipedia are the worst for accuracy in the world.
You need to upgrade your information input. Remember, "Garbage In, Garbage Out", and you have been overfilling on garbage.
That lying outfit funded by George Soros and headed up by that disgraced head case?
You must be misinformed. Media Matters has never recieved any funding from George Soros, and "head case" isn't a refutation of their information or my arguments; it's an ad hominem attack.
That and Wikipedia are the worst for accuracy in the world.
If you're getting all your information from Conservapedia, I can see how you might get that impression. But I have yet to see any "misinformation" at Media Matters. On the other hand, a cursory examination of your posts here, PCD, indicate that you're among the most poorly-informed individuals I have ever conversed with. I suspect it's going to take a lot of work to properly inform you.
"...and every constitutional scholar is in agreement..."???
Shades of global warming!!! Care to list that lofty group? Perhaps you have a poll that supports your claim? I can concede that the NYT held up on that particular story, yet, my point stands. It was NOT a "domestic spying" program. The implications of that term do NOT coincide with the purpose of the program. The term was used for the purpose of fear-mongering and Bush-bashing. The weren't randomly selecting Chet's phone line to monitor in some fishing expedition.
I can concede that the NYT held up on that particular story, yet, my point stands.
Nothing stands on no evidence, which is exactly how much evidence you're back to now that you've conceded that the NSA eavesdropping issue supports my contention, not yours.
The implications of that term do NOT coincide with the purpose of the program.
We don't know what the purpose of the program was, because we don't know whose wires were tapped. Clearly they were intercepting calls that both began and originated within the US; given the demonstratable fact that every expanded enforcement tool given to government agencies since 9/11 has been misused for political gain, there's really no reason to think that the NSA program was any different. You may feel free to place your faith in the good intentions of the Bush Administration; I've been given significant reason not to do the same.
The weren't randomly selecting Chet's phone line to monitor in some fishing expedition.
You don't know they weren't, because you don't know who they tapped. If the Bush administration thought they could get away with tapping the phones of political opponents (for instance) for political gain, why do you believe they wouldn't?
The question is why do you believe he would? You seem for the most part a pretty sharp dude, but this crap reeks of BDS.
"...given the demonstratable fact that every expanded enforcement tool given to government agencies since 9/11 has been misused for political gain..."
Fine. Demonstrate. I'm going by what the administration claimed was it's intent and as there has been no proof that it has "been misused for political gain" as far as I'm aware, I see no reason to suspect otherwise.
"I've been given significant reason not to do the same." Let's hear it. Until then, however, let's assume that your worst nightmare is correct. Given that the admin publicly stated that it wasn't a domestic spying program, don't you believe the media's job is to call it by it's actual name, and not one they've made up to color it the way they want us to see it? They could still, within a story or article, explain how it might in fact BE a domestic spying program, but for the sake of objectivity, they definitely shouldn't be calling it one in the freakin' headline of the story. THAT'S BIAS. (didn't mean to shout) The media is supposed to report, nothing more.
The question is why do you believe he would?
Because he has before?
I mean, that's like asking why I think a thief would steal. Because that's what he's done before. Why do you think he would change?
Fine. Demonstrate.
You didn't hear about the FBI misusing National Security Letters? I don't understand why conservatives are always so ignorant about their own government.
I'm going by what the administration claimed was it's intent
Why would you believe them? Hasn't it been abundantly demonstrated by now that this administration is not comprised of honest people?
Given that the admin publicly stated that it wasn't a domestic spying program, don't you believe the media's job is to call it by it's actual name, and not one they've made up to color it the way they want us to see it?
No. I don't think it's the media's job to repeat the administration's spin on their own illegal activities. I think it's their job to call a spade a spade - and the NSA program was a program of warrantless, illegal wiretapping against US citizens.
THAT'S BIAS.
No, it's not. Calling it the "Terrorist Survellience Program" when it's not been made clear that any terrorists were surveilled under the program is bias. Calling it what it is - a domestic spying program - is never bias.
Chet, I conclude you are a dyed-in-the-wool far left wingnut. You can't confront a lie by Media Matters no matter how it was proven to you. I think you still believe that Gore won the 2000 election.
As for Wikipedia, take a stroll through the archives at Right Voices. Wiki has been debunked, destroyed, and even shown to have banned Politicians and their staffs from editing Wiki articles because of the number of Liberals caught editing lies into Wiki articles.
Chet, you've not brought anything here that I don't see in news reports from San Francisco.
I conclude you are a dyed-in-the-wool far left wingnut.
I conclude that you resort to ad hominem attacks when your arguments fall flat - the sign of an intellectually bankrupt position.
Anyway, I'm no wingnut. I voted for Bush in 2000. I'm just one more ex-Republican, ex-conservative who discovered how bereft of evidence and intelligence conservative views really are.
You can't confront a lie by Media Matters no matter how it was proven to you.
Oh, you didn't even try to prove it.
Chet, you've not brought anything here that I don't see in news reports from San Francisco.
I don't see how that's an argument. Facts are not automatically made false simply because they're true in San Francisco, too.
Chet, I don't believe you ever were a Republican other than a RINO at best, a Democrat who switched parties because he thought he could get a weak candidate on the GOP selected to go against the Democrat you really wanted to win.
Again, David Brock is a proven liar where ever he posted from. Try again, hack.
Chet, I don't believe you ever were a Republican other than a RINO at best, a Democrat who switched parties because he thought he could get a weak candidate on the GOP selected to go against the Democrat you really wanted to win.
You can believe whatever the hell you want, I guess. I'd be just like a conservative to dismiss facts that run counter to their ideology.
Again, David Brock is a proven liar where ever he posted from.
Says you, but you've lied about nearly everything else. Don't you get it yet that we're way beyond the point where I just take your word for things?
Chester,
Your link isn't the proof you think it is since the article doesn't confirm that they DID use the letters improperly, only that they've been accused of such. It speaks of the failure of the FBI to turn over the requested materials under the FOI act. This failure is not in and of itself proof of wrongdoing, as there can be legitimate reasons why they're dragging their feet. They speak of evidence as "reports of abuse". "Reports" are only evidence at best. Evidence can sometimes be explained. It doesn't say where the reports are coming from. I can report that the guy next door beats his wife, but that doesn't make it proof. You're jumping the gun here, and that's the type of stuff to which I referred. Wait it out, get the whole story, and THEN crucify him.
"Hasn't it been abundantly demonstrated by now that this administration is not comprised of honest people?"
No. It absolutely hasn't. What has been clear is the rush to accuse it of such. One also needs to consider that what you might view as dishonesty, might be more accurately described as a different point of view. I believe abortion is murder, while others don't believe an embryo is a person.
Regarding the FBI again, another consideration often overlooked is that they are cops, and like cops, the FBI, and CIA for that matter, have a far different set of criteria for determining guilt or suspicion. The Law requires a more narrow defintion, but in their work as cops, they are expereinced to know who qualifies for their scrutiny.
So the info the feds have that is causing such concern may have been collected as a result of their own set of red flags, some of which might be false alarms. Doesn't indicate wrongdoing. Now what they do with the intel is another story.
And this is the type of thing that has been at the core of all such accusations regarding the character of this president and his admin. Are there creeps on his staff? Likely no more or less than any other president. You have no idea. Neither do most of the media. Yet, they constantly portray him in this light and to date there has been no proof of his acting on self-interest. You're welcome to offer more examples, but I hope they're more solid than this last one.
And one more thing. For a news story to use the term "domestic spying program" is INDEED bias. You're right in expecting them to call a spade a spade, but if they call it a fucking shovel, they're adding their own personal biases. What you think you want is commentary and opinion, not straight news reporting. Anything goes in the former, just the facts as offered by the interviewed is the job of the latter.
Chester,
It's "Chet", please.
They speak of evidence as "reports of abuse". "Reports" are only evidence at best.
You can spin it, I guess, but reasonable people looking at this know what the deal is. The Justice department has concluded that NSL's were abused. Case closed.
Evidence can sometimes be explained.
Sure. In this case, the explanation is wrongdoing by the FBI.
One also needs to consider that what you might view as dishonesty, might be more accurately described as a different point of view.
I don't have the space here to detail every administration lie, and you'd just spin them away anyway, but this is just nonsense. "Different point of view?" I thought conservatives eschewed moral relativism. You're saying that what's false to everyone else is true to the Administration? My, how very postmodern of you. You've almost got me convinced that you have a philosophy degree.
What you think you want is commentary and opinion, not straight news reporting.
Straight news reporting is when you call a domestic spying program a "domestic spying program." You wouldn't be satisifed that the news was unbiased unless they called them "Defeatocrats" and appended "our Dear leader" to every mention of Bush.
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