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As I said, one of Bias’s biggest problems is its selectivity. The book came out in December 2001. Now, maybe Bernie doesn’t follow politics, but there was a big election the previous year. Looking at the coverage of a presidential election might be a good way to test theories of media bias, don’t you think? Say, the media was liberal. Which candidate would it be nicer to? The Republican, George W. Bush? Or the Democrat, Albert Gore?

There’s not one word in Bias about the 2000 presidential election. In my next chapter, I will try to fill in this gaping hole with a scientific analysis of just how liberal—or, perhaps, how conservative—that coverage was.

______

You know, one of the joys of appearing on TV is going through the e-mail you get when you bitch-slap a Bernie Goldberg or a Bill O’Reilly. And boy, I got a lot of great e-mail from that Donahue appearance. Most of the comments were of the “way to get him” or “I liked your tie” variety, but quite a few were, shall we say, slightly negative.

One of my favorites:

Saw you on Donahue with your liberal shit. Blow it out your ass, dickhead!

I’ve composed a standard response to e-mail like that:

Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding my appearance on Donahue. As you can imagine, I’ve received so many positive responses that I cannot possibly answer them all personally. But, once again, thank you for your kind remarks.

The idea is to frustrate them. It’s especially gratifying when they respond to my response. Like the “blow-it-out-your-ass” guy did:

Hey, asshole. I know you read my e-mail, because you mentioned Donahue. Blow me.

So, I e-mailed him back again.

Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding my appearance on Donahue. As you can imagine, I’ve received so many positive responses that I cannot possibly answer them all personally. But, once again, thank you for your kind remarks.

Sure enough, a few hours later, another e-mail from my new friend.

Franken, you’re a joke!

So, I e-mailed him back.

Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding my jokes. As you can imagine, I receive so many positive e-mails regarding my jokes, that I cannot possibly answer them all. But once again, thank you for your kind remarks regarding my jokes.

Unfortunately, that was the last of our little correspondence.

7

The 2000 Presidential Election: How It Disproved the Hypothetical Liberal Media Paradigm Matrix

In order to examine more closely the conservative claims of liberal media bias, TeamFranken constructed a hypothetical model. Let’s say that during the 2000 presidential election, liberals controlled the media and used it in a biased manner.

In our hypothetical, we asked, how would this liberal media distort the news to ensure that the liberal candidate won the election over the conservative candidate?

At the risk of stating the obvious, one of our axioms was that negative press hurts a candidate running for election, while positive press helps. Ergo, if the liberal media wanted to help the Democratic candidate, it would run positive stories about him and negative stories about the Republican.

To illustrate our hypothetical paradigm, we commissioned this diagram:

HYPOTHETICAL LIBERAL MEDIA PARADIGM MATRIX

With this powerful new tool, the HLMP Matrix, developed here at Harvard with funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Social Justice, we were ready to evaluate in an analytical, unbiased way the media coverage of the 2000 campaign. Before we give you the results, let’s look at what some of our friends have to say about the political slant of the media.

Ann Coulter: “The public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda.”

Sean Hannity: “The evidence of bias is over whelming.”

Bernard Goldberg: “They have a liberal bias.”

Okay. Got it. Armed with both our Matrix and the reliable analysis of our friends, we knew what to expect. Lots and lots of negative stories about George W. Bush. And lots and lots of positive ones about Albert Gore.

So, you can