Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [3]
There’s the Get-It-First bias. Remember the 2000 election? I believe there were some problems there associated with that one.
Pack Mentality. Negativity. Soft News. The Don’t-Offend-the-Conglomerate-That-Owns-Us bias. And, of course, the ever-present bias of Hoping There’s a War to Cover.
Does the mainstream media have a liberal bias? On a couple of things, maybe. Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of their enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.
By the same token, I’ll bet the media were biased during the Scopes monkey trial. But they were professionals and gave the Noah’s Ark side a fair shake.
But to believe there is a liberal political bias in the mainstream media, you’d have to either not be paying attention or just be very susceptible to repetition. Yes, we’ve heard it over and over and over again. For decades. The media elite is an arm of the Democratic National Committee.
Anyone notice the mainstream media’s coverage of Clinton? For eighteen months, it was all Monica, all the time. There were just a few news organizations that did not succumb to this temptation, and I like to cite them whenever I can: Sailing magazine, American Grocer Monthly, Juggs, and Big Butt (which is ironic, because I think Big Butt had a story).
How about the 2000 presidential campaign? Remember in the first debate, Al Gore said he had gone down to a disaster site in Texas with Federal Emergency Management Agency director James Lee Witt? Actually, it turned out that he had gone to that disaster with a deputy of James Lee Witt. As vice president, Gore had gone to seventeen other disasters with James Lee Witt, but not that one. The press jumped all over him. There were scores of stories written about how Gore had lied about James Lee Witt. It was as if James Lee Witt had been the most popular man in the United States of America and Gore was lying to get some of that James Lee Witt magic to rub off on him.
Contrast that with the media’s reaction to this Bush description of his tax cut in the very same debate. Bush said, “I also dropped the bottom rate from fifteen percent to ten percent, because, by far, the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.”
“By far, the vast majority . . . goes to the people at the bottom.” That is what George W. Bush told America. The truth is that the bottom 60 percent got 14.7 percent. Gee, that’s a pretty significant misstatement, don’t you think? More important than whether a Texas fire was one of the seventeen disasters you went to with American icon James Lee Witt. So what was the reaction of the liberal mainstream press?
Nothing.
Do I believe that this was because the mainstream media has a conservative bias? No. I just think the attitude of the press was “He doesn’t know! He doesn’t know! Leave the man alone! He doesn’t know!”
But, of course, he did. Which is why George W. Bush said he doesn’t mind being “misunderestimated.” Because by “misunderestimated,” Bush means being underestimated for the wrong reason. The media thought he was kind of stupid. He isn’t. He’s just shamelessly dishonest.
The mainstream media does not have a liberal bias. And for all their other biases mentioned above, the mainstream media—ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the rest—at least try to be fair.
There is, however, a right-wing media. You know who they are. Fox News. The Washington Times. The New York Post. The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Talk radio. They are biased. And they have an agenda.
The members of the right-wing media are not interested in conveying the truth. That’s not what they’re for. They are an indispensable component of the right-wing machine