Several years ago I read David Brock's damning manuscript Blinded By The Right in which he comes clean as a dirty insider who shaped and shaded the truth in order to achieve conservative objectives. He was a central player during the Clarence Thomas hearings, a chapter of his life for which he is ashamed. Afterwards I began subscribing to the weekly update for Media Matters for America, which I believe he founded. Their mission: "A non-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation..." They are a media watchdog.Here is the intro to today's Media Matters for America update.
Even while carrying John McCain's water, media worry they aren't doing enough for him.
John McCain’s complaining about media coverage is a little like an oil company complaining about profit margins: hard to believe, and even harder to feel much sympathy.
This is, after all, a politician who has referred to the press as his "base," and a politician about whom MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has said "every last one of them [reporters] would move to Massachusetts and marry John McCain if they could." As Eric Alterman and George Zornick recently explained in The Nation, "no candidate since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps none since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has enjoyed such cozy relations with the press."
But the coziness of that relationship has become increasingly one-sided in recent months, as McCain and his campaign lash out at the media, who then redouble their efforts to please the Arizona senator.
There are also conservative media watchdogs barking toward the left as well, with many of their own eNewsletters. I read the Media Research Center's almost daily CyberAlert, which monitors media for left leaning coverage. The current presidential campaign keeps both sides amply supplied with ammo. On the other side of the aisle we read:
CBS tried to bring some balance Tuesday night to Barack Obama's Magical Media Tour by having Katie Couric interview both Barack Obama and John McCain, and though she pressed Obama repeatedly on the success of the surge, Obama still came out ahead since CBS devoted more than seven minutes (over two excerpts) to Couric's questions and Obama's answers as the two sat together in a foreign setting compared to barely three minutes allocated to Couric and McCain by satellite. Couric touted at the top of the CBS Evening News: "We spoke exclusively and separately with both presidential candidates today and what emerged was a kind of a long distance debate. And their differences on the wars have never been sharper or clearer." At the end of the newscast, Couric wondered: "Will this summer of love last" for Obama? And she conceded the media are part of the infatuation: "It has been an Obamathon ever since the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee touched down in Afghanistan. At today's press conference in Amman, a throng of reporters recorded his every move. In total, 200 journalists requested seats on 'Air Obama' -- 40 of them were accepted. The bill for the trip? About $20,000 each."
This was followed by a story about journalist George Stephanapoulos and ABC's Diane Sawyer rhapsodizing over Barack Obama's Middle East trip.
Pollsters now are taking America's pulse on the matter of media bias, and whether true or not, a recent Rasmussen Reports survey revealed that Americans certainly believe the media is biased in favor of Obama. The RR survey indicated three times as many American believe "that most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage" as the reverse.
Fox News (conservative) followed up with its own poll of 900 registered voters and discovered six times as many think “most members of the media” want Obama to win than wish for a McCain victory. On Thursday's Special Report, FNC's Brit Hume relayed: “67 percent of the respondents think most media members want Obama to win. Just 11 percent think most in the media are for McCain.”
We've all heard the phrase, "follow the money." Source: Deep Throat, Watergate scandal. Here's an Investors Business Daily stat regarding where journalists are sending their campaign contributions. IBD is conservative, for what it's worth.Oh well, the slugfest, left and right, will go on for many more rounds, I am sure. There will be no knockouts any time soon.
7 comments:
I'd really like to see some more info on that graphic, "Money Trail", like a link to the article in which it appeared, telling how those figures were compiled.
Like I said before, when I see the MSM devote even half as much attention to the impeachment charges against Bush (for murder, war crimes, torture, illegal spying on Americans, etc.,) as it did to the impeachment charges against Clinton (for lying about Monica), then I'll begin to believe that they're left-leaning.
Here's the source for the Money Trail graphic.
There's no question the media has been complicit in beating the drums for war, both this one and Wilson's and FDR's and Viet Nam initially, and Spanish-American war in whcih they may have even been the primary cause.
The media also helped stir hatreds in our own slaughters of Native Americans in some Minnesota incidents post-Civil War.
anyways... link is here: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=301702713742569
I just emailed this to the editor of Investor's Business Daily:
Editor:
I'm writing for more information about facts printed in the editorial, "Putting Money Where Mouths Are: Media Donations Favor Dems 100 to 1", by Richard Tate, posted July 23, 2008.
From the article: "An analysis of federal records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 ratio over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans."
Mr. Tate doesn't tell what records, whose analysis, doesn't tell how he or someone else accessed those records, doesn't name any names, and doesn't provide any links to help the reader verify his claims.
Would Mr. Tate kindly provide me (and other readers) this information?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Lloyd Wagner
This kind of unproven claim reminds me of Joe McCarthy waving a sheaf of papers around in the Senate, and claiming it was a list of names of "card-carrying Communists" working in the US State Department. But he never gave the names.
But, some people believed him, even without proof.
Well, proof for THESE claims oughtta be on its way, soon. I'm sure IBD values its reputation for good solid journalism.
From IBD:
"Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours."
I'm excited! Mr. Tate even claimed that the contributors he didn't name were breaking newsroom policies, and could lose their jobs. I'm partisan, myself, so I'm only going to inform on those who donated to Republicans. ;>)
Tomorrow.
On the bottom is a link to Kucinich's short speech to the House Judiciary Committee, last Friday. (It's a video, but real fast-loading, as the video quality is just "adequate". The audio is fine, though.)
If Kucinich is right, Bush will attack Iran between September 15 and the election, if Congress doesn't stop him by beginning impeachment hearings immediately.
I'm not sure, but I don't think this hearing was covered at all in the "liberal" MSM. It's possible it was there, and I missed it. I just did a Google search, though, and the ONLY place I could see this mentioned at all, was on blogs.
Well, we'll see what happens, I guess. I'm afraid you're going to have full-blown fascism there, and the whole world uniting against the GOP-ers, PDQ.
Also, I read today that GOP Senators successfully blocked a proposal by Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vermont) to increase heating aid for the poor. The argument was that "winter is already over." So I'm also afraid there are also going to be freezing and starving people in Northern Minnesota and elsewhere this coming winter.
I hope I'm wrong on both counts.
Anyway, here's the link to the video of Kucinich's short speech. The whole thing is only 8 minutes long, and the speech is much shorter than that. There's absolutely no excuse that the "liberal" media didn't broadcast it.
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=1967
Well, 26 hours after their email, nothing more from IBD.
It's a case of "take our statistics on faith", I guess. And, some people will.
While I was waiting for IBD to not answer, I checked out Media Matters. I found that their articles DO link to original sources. I also found out that articles on that website DO have a comments section, in which both sides have a chance to debate.
IBD has no comments section whatsoever. Everything posted there is filtered through their editorial staff first. And, questions for clarification go unaddressed, even when they post unproven "statistics".
There are big and obvious differences between journalism and propaganda, and the above-mentioned two websites are good examples of those differences. Thanks for pointing them out.
As noted earlier in my post, Media Matters was founded by a journalist.
Brock was the one who wrote damning Anita Hill smears for the American Spectator during the Clarence Thomas nomination heaarings. Brock does not smear all conservatives with the same brush... In the book he cites the higher standards of The National Review (Buckley's publication) which refused to publish his articles for lack of corraborative sources.
The IBD may be a soap box, rather than dialogue based, but there are other conservative sites with source references and dialogue, I'm sure.
Usually I reference sources, or assume it is public domain.. or so easy to find on Google that it seems public domain.
Post a Comment