Posted on Wednesday, September 05, 2012 - 03:58 pm:
This thread will prolly quickly drop off the QB due to apathy or downright disgust with the subject matter.
That's OK, perhaps someone will read the piece below and have an "Aha!" moment about who or what they get their news from, and how media bias can (and does) shape public opinion.
Bias comes from both sides of the aisle, of course. The trick is knowing that your source IS most assuredly biased; you're being told what you're being told for a specific reason, and that reason may not necessarily be the truth.
Once you know your news source is biased in one direction or the other, it's actually kinda fun looking for it, and gets easier and easier to spot as you hone your skills.
If nothing else, knowing the bias is there improves the odds that YOU are in charge of your views and opinions of current affairs, not someone else.
Do your due diligence; the truth IS out there. Some days it takes a pretty big filter to extract it, though.
I concur 100% with the author: The media needs to own up to their biases. Truth in advertising, if you will.
Thanks for your time.
FB
quote:
News Media Need to Own Their Biases By Jeff Jacoby, Sep 5, 2012
Wrapping up two years as public editor of The New York Times, veteran journalist Arthur Brisbane last week reflected on the liberal slant that often pervades the news coverage of what is still the most influential brand in American newspapers.
"The hive on Eighth Avenue," he wrote, referring to the headquarters of the New York Times Company (which owns the Boston Globe), "is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds -- a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within." He credited the papers' editors and reporters with trying to enforce "fairness and balance" in their presidential campaign coverage. But by and large, what appears in the Times "virtually bleeds" with "political and cultural progressivism." The result is that "developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in the Times ... more like causes than news subjects."
Brisbane isn't the first Times ombudsman to say so. A predecessor, Daniel Okrent, was even more forceful in 2004. "Is the Times a Liberal Newspaper?" asked the headline on his final column. "Of course it is." Listing some of the most controversial issues of the day, he lamented: "If you think the Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed."
Liberal media bias isn't merely in the eyes of conservative beholders. Large pluralities of the public routinely tell Gallup that the news media are too liberal. At least some journalists concede the point. There are so many left-leaning journalists, ABC's then-political director Mark Halperin observed in 2006, "that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction.... It's an endemic problem." On C-SPAN last March, Politico's executive editor Jim VandeHei said there was "no doubt" about the dominant mindset within the profession: "If you put all of the reporters that I've ever worked with on truth serum, most of them vote Democratic."
Posted on Wednesday, September 05, 2012 - 04:41 pm:
Look closely at these two successive Time covers. Can you guess the editorial slant of Time magazine as what is purportedly being presented as news? The interesting thing is that even the casual reader is starting to catch on to this media bias. NYT, CBSnews, ABCnews, NBCnews, CNN died for me for their unforgivable departure from journalism during the 2008 Obama campaign. Time magazine has been added to my list with this BS. If Time had made this to look like an editorial and not news (like Newsweek recently did), then I would forgive and forget.
