And Yet No One Believes Me…
When I say that many folks in the media want the US to fail in Iraq. Between the way Reuters (the Al-Reuters thing, admittedly, is hyperbole) spins a sarin gas shell and refusal of most of the media to show anything related to Nick Berg for more than a day– not to mention their blatant denial that those images are just as news-worthy as Abu Ghraib– it seems pretty clear that a lot of folks really are on the other side. Call me a jingoist, go ahead, but that doesn’t change the reality of bad reporting. Hell, I don’t even care that the media are overwhelmingly liberal, I just care that they won’t admit that fact and their true motivations.
“It’s a rare condition, this day and age,
to read any good news on the newspaper page.”
-Family Matters
“What ever happened to predictibility?
The milkman, the paperboy, evening TV”
-Full House
Both are written and performed by someone named Jesse Frederick. Gosh, I’m so glad I looked that up.
See also here
Assuming we were using my metric for right, I’d give credit where credit is due. For instance, the ASUO Senate recently decided to use some of this year’s over-realized to lower next year’s fee. I gave them credit for that both on our blog and in my elections wrap-up piece. Nilda and Joy reccomended cuts to OSPIRG and we said positive things about that, we were shocked, but we did give them credit.
BTW: The earlier lyric is from the Family Matters theme, not Full House. Hard to keep all those old-school TGIF shows straight, I understand.
Every journalist has their own political views, biases and goals that will inevitably leak through and taint their work, no matter how hard they try to be neutral. How do editors choose what winds up as a top news story or on the front page of their publication? How do journalists choose what stories to pursue? Is an impartial outlet even possible or just a pipe dream?
If you really want to get depressed, look at the Goldschmidt story that Willy Week ran. Did they break that story because they wanted to shed light on a grave injustice? Not really. They wanted to take down Neil because was a prominent opponent of the proposed PUD, which they staunchly support.
To harp about a left-wing bias in the media is to oversimplify things. It would seem that there’s a several biases all competing with each other. Left, right, business, personal bias, business bias – sometimes all fighting within the confines of a single publication.
Now the biggest question of all: if those kids in suite four ever did something right, would you actually report on it or just find something snotty to say?
But you have to admit that the one-two punch of the Full House theme song, and the assumption that Suite Four actually does any good is a powerful combination…
When was the last time the OC ran a positive story about the good folks down in suite four? I rest my case and totally call media bias on you!
The difference is that our bias is well known, and we admit it. We’re conservatives, says so right on our cover every issue. Says so on the inside cover too: we do not claim to be objective arbiters of truth. That’s the difference, and that’s my major beef with major media.
Good points all around! I don’t think the “censorship” of the Nick Berg story is a conspiracy, but it’s certainly par for the mainstream media course. Don’t expect Dan Rather to connect the dots for you. Then again, I’m sure if FOX could get away with it, they’d have the Berg video clip streaming on their website 24/7 and images of the decapitated head popping up periodically on the ticker.
The prison abuse story is getting a lot of coverage in part because it backs up a prevailing perception of the US held by the upper echelons of the media, but mostly, I think, because this kind of story is a godsend to the press. Certainly it’s abhorrent, but with new pictures popping up every day, it’s also as juicy and tantalizing as the Kobe Bryant fiasco. And, like SFS said, it is *developing*, while the only new details to emerge from the Nick Berg story are the anti-Bush sentiments of his father.
It would certainly be nice to see a new school building or a recently up and running hospital, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
To quote the “Full House” theme song: “There’s never any good news on the newspaper page.”
How often does the media show the brighter side of any situation? Even on the local news in Eugene, what do you see? The top news stories aren’t about well the kids at the local high school are doing on their SATs. It’s all car accidents and grizzly details about the serial killer of the week. Blood and guts sell papers and get eyes focused on tv screens. When was the last time the OC ran a positive story about the good folks down in suite four? I rest my case and totally call media bias on you!
When the US was bombing the Iraqis, the media reported on that and, because things were going well, the liberals whined about the media leaning to the left. Now that the Iraqis are killing our civilians and soldiers, the media is reporting on that and…you get the idea.
The reporter you quoted is one person from NYC, which, if I’m not mistaken, is a pretty liberal town. If the author had tracked down someone from Fox News, he would have been led to assume all reporters are cigar-chompin’ hawks.
If there is a bias in media, it shifts back and forth between the left and right. They’re going to be whatever their viewers want them to be.
The point is that things like this:
But then she came to the point. Not only had she known the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the evil George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out. Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.
She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerrys poll numbers. Well, thats different that would be Americans, she said, haltingly. I guess Im a bit of an isolationist. Thats one way of putting it.
Might be indicative of a certain attitude in the press corps. Further, if you think I don’t dislike that FoxNews won’t admit its open bias, you’re quite mistaken.
The other major point, of course, is that there’s all sorts of unreported (some good, some bad) news from Iraq. Try any of these links. There’s good news, there’s bad news, and it seems to me that “the media” presuming, of course, that construction makes sense have a tendancy to underreport the good and emphasize the bad. Maybe it sells papers, maybe it’s a bunch of liberals…I’ve got a feeling it’s some from column A, some from column B, with folk like Peter Arnett and Eson Jordan making up a fifth column somewhere off to the left there.
In March 2003, we were mostly talking about the war. But I seem to recall that by April or May all the news as “X US Soldiers Killed Today.”
If you prefer the taste of right-wing propaganda to left, switch back to Fox News. Bah, I don’t believe in this liberal conspiracy mumbo-jumbo. Media outlets cater to their audience. Since public opinion is now going against the Iraq War, they’re beginning to reflect it. Two years ago, everything from CNN to local papers was adrift in blind-faith, right-wing patriotism. Why weren’t you harping about media bias back then?
Also: as callous as it might sound, the pics are a bigger story than Nick Berg. One guy getting his head cut off vs. hundreds of prisoners getting tortured in Saddam’s old digs? More and more pictures are being released every day. It’s an ongoing story. What more is there to report about Berg? “When we come back from a commercial break, the Nick Berg tragedy, day 7. Yup, he’s still dead.”
I don’t think the media wants the war to fail. But it *is* failing. Regardless of bias, it’s hard to report that things are going super-duper when they clearly aren’t. When it was going well back around 3/03 what did we see on the nightly news? CNN and all the others were blowing nothing but sunshine.