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Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why.

Discussion in 'New Orleans Saints Forum' started by Andouille, Oct 27, 2008.

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Andouille Guest

Cover your eyes Red.

I'm sure this guy is just another paranoid Republican. :rolleye33: :dis:

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6099188

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline
Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why

Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 24, 2008 —

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).
My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.
So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.
Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.
But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.
But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.
That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.
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Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.
Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.
But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.
I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.
And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.
Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.
But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.
I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.
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The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.
Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.
I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.
The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.
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.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
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Entire article

Andouille, Oct 27, 2008

#1
Rex_B Geaux Time

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Who cares....

Do you vote by what the media tells you?

Rex_B, Oct 27, 2008

#2
SabanFan The voice of reason

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Rex_B said: ↑

Who cares....

Do you vote by what the media tells you?
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80% (my arbitrary figure) of voters are idiots who blindly follow what the media spoon feeds them. I am convinced of that.

SabanFan, Oct 27, 2008

#3
Rex_B Geaux Time

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SabanFan said: ↑

80% (my arbitrary figure) of voters are idiots who blindly follow what the media spoon feeds them. I am convinced of that.
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Maybe yes, maybe no. But fearmongering is more like forced spoon feeding ehh?

Rex_B, Oct 27, 2008

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SabanFan The voice of reason

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Rex_B said: ↑

Maybe yes, maybe no. But fearmongering is more like forced spoon feeding ehh?
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It's not a lie...if you believe it. - George Costanza

SabanFan, Oct 27, 2008

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Rex_B Geaux Time

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SabanFan said: ↑

It's not a lie...if you believe it. - George Costanza
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But if I don't it is..

Rex_B, Oct 27, 2008

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Bengal Buddy Founding Member

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SabanFan said: ↑

80% (my arbitrary figure) of voters are idiots who blindly follow what the media spoon feeds them. I am convinced of that.
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I disagree that 80% of voters are idiots (arbitrary or not), but it is clear that the news media can have a significant influence over what opinions people hold.

Bengal Buddy, Oct 27, 2008

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SabanFan The voice of reason

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Bengal Buddy said: ↑

I disagree that 80% of voters are idiots (arbitrary or not), but it is clear that the news media can have a significant influence over what opinions people hold.
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I shouldn't say idiots. Ignorant would be more accurate

SabanFan, Oct 27, 2008

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tigerdro GEAUX TIGERS!

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in my experience, most of the people who do not do their own research and depend on main stream media for political information, key in on one or two soundbites which becomes the entire foundation for their political stance, especially in this election. entirely too many of the people i talk to say things like "obama doesn't believe in the american flag" or "mcain is too angry - do we really want him in control of nukes?". when i prod them further, they often have no clue how either candidate stands on key issues such as economy, health care, foreign relations, etc.

why? why don't people realize the choice they make on november 4 will affect their future and the future of this country? i don't understand how people can be so uninformed.

tigerdro, Oct 27, 2008

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Bengal Buddy Founding Member

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tigerdro said: ↑

in my experience, most of the people who do not do their own research and depend on main stream media for political information, key in on one or two soundbites which becomes the entire foundation for their political stance, especially in this election. entirely too many of the people i talk to say things like "obama doesn't believe in the american flag" or "mcain is too angry - do we really want him in control of nukes?". when i prod them further, they often have no clue how either candidate stands on key issues such as economy, health care, foreign relations, etc.

why? why don't people realize the choice they make on november 4 will affect their future and the future of this country? i don't understand how people can be so uninformed.
Click to expand...

I have always said people vote with their stomachs. In other words, economic issues that affect the voter in his pocketbook is often the deciding factor on how they vote. If the economy is good, the tend to vote for incumbent and when the economy is bad, they tend to vote for the challenger. If there is no incumbent running, they tend to vote for the candidate they have the most confidence in regarding the economy. If the economy had not tanked like it has, I think McCain would be in the drivers seat of this campaign. Of course I know there are valid arguments to the contrary.

Bengal Buddy, Oct 28, 2008

#10

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