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Wednesday, November 07, 2012

The only way to counter Left-biased mainstream media is to create Right-biased mainstream media

Fox News has a great piece about how President Obama owes his reelection to the Left-biased mainstream media in the United States. They cite five ways in which the mainstream media tipped the scales in favor of Obama, and they back them up with statistics.
1. The Media’s Biased Gaffe Patrol Hammered Romney: The media unfairly jumped on  inconsequential mistakes — or even invented controversies — from Romney and hyped them in to multi-day media “earthquakes.” Case in point: the GOP candidate’s trip to Europe and Israel in late July. A Media Research Center analysis of all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney’s trip found that virtually all of them (18, or 86%) emphasized “diplomatic blunders,” “gaffes” or “missteps.”

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2. Pounding Romney With Partisan Fact Checking: There’s nothing wrong with holding politicians accountable for the honesty of their TV ads and stump speeches, but this year the self-appointed media fact-checkers attacked Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.

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3. Those Biased Debate Moderators: Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.
Such criticism may have encouraged the activist approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz in the vice presidential debate October 11, and by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the October 16 town hall debate, as both of those journalists repeatedly interrupted the Republican candidate and larded the discussion with a predominantly liberal agenda.
Crowley earns extra demerits for taking the media’s penchant for faulty fact-checking to new heights when she jumped into the October 16 town hall-style debate to validate President Obama’s claim that he called the attack in Benghazi, Libya, “an act of terror” the very next morning. Crowley endorsed Obama’s story, telling Romney: “He did, in fact, sir, call it an act of terror.”

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4. The Benghazi Blackout: Right after the September 11 attack in Libya, the networks proclaimed that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander stated on the September 14 edition of "Today." But as a cascade of leaked information erased the portrait of Obama as a heroic commander, the broadcast networks shunted the Benghazi story to the sidelines. 
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5. Burying the Bad Economy: Pundits agreed that Obama’s weakness was the failure of the US economy to revive after his expensive stimulus and four years of $1 trillion deficits. But the major networks failed to offer the sustained, aggressive coverage of the economy that incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush faced in 1992, or even that George W. Bush faced in 2004 — both years when the national economy was in better shape than it is now.
According to a study conducted that year by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, from January through September of 1992, the networks ran a whopping 1,289 stories on the economy, 88% of which painted it in a dismal, negative light. That fall, the unemployment rate was 7.6%, lower than today’s 7.9%, and economic growth in the third quarter was 2.7%, better than today’s 2.0%. Yet the media coverage hammered the idea of a terrible economy, and Bush lost re-election.
In 2004, the economy under George W. Bush was far better than it is today — higher growth, lower unemployment, smaller deficits and cheaper gasoline — yet network coverage that year was twice as hostile to Bush than it was towards Obama this year, according to a study by the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute.
When Republican presidents have faced reelection, network reporters made sure to spotlight economic “victims” — the homeless man, the woman without health insurance, the unemployed worker, the senior citizen who had to choose between medicine and food. But this year, with an economy as bad as any since the Great Depression, those sympathetic anecdotes have vanished from the airwaves — a huge favor to Obama and the Democrats.
Unfortunately, mainstream media bias is a fact of life. The days when - in the United States at least - facts were reported as unbiased facts while opinions were confined to the editorial pages of your daily newspaper, are long gone. The only answer to Left-biased media is to unashamedly create Right-biased media. 
 
That's why Sheldon Adelson's picture is at the top of this post. Most Israelis still get their news via newspapers (even if they're newspaper websites - the fact is that the newspapers dominate the media). Adelson went and created an unabashed Right-biased newspaper - Israel HaYom - which is handed out for free all over the streets here. In a matter of months, Israel HaYom became the largest circulation paper in Israel. 

Can it work in the US? Only if we stop apologizing for talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Howie Carr and Michael Savage as if they're supposed to be unbiased, and accept them as our news sources. Only if we accept Fox News as a conservative news source (okay, we'd have to turn it into one) and stop apologizing for the fact that it doesn't present the Left's point of view except on a token basis. Only if we are able to push free of charge media that will present the Right's point of view using top sources and columnists. 

Unbiased media has gone the way of the Model T and the typewriter. The Left is starting out with an advantage. We need to think about how to overcome it. Blogs obviously don't have enough readership to be the answer.
 

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1 Comments:

At 5:23 AM, Blogger Sunlight said...

Fox was evaluated one time with all the others and even Fox was something like 60-40 lib-conservative. It sounds ragingly conservative because it (not always, but sometimes) actually formulates the conservative positions and lets them on the air. But, for example, I can't think of the last time they covered rockets landing on civilians. Amazing that that subject is avoided as repetitive and irritating (isn't that what Carl I. Jerusalem said when it appeared on Israel Matzav?). I want a station that does rockets, gangbanger street wars, etc. Along with conservative storylines. Seriously, people who use the word "Constitution" in the U.S. are now considered extreme. I'd like to see Mr. Adelson take in Israel Matzav as a mirror site, and to have the management and commenter crew writing up even more - about Torah Economics, the U.S. Constitution and Market Capitalism as tzedakah in building prosperity for the many (Mark Levin!), successful charity operations, etc etc... A section (or more!) of Israel HaYom...

(BTW, I'd also like to see a bunch of conservative Israelis get trained in leadership by the Boy Scouts of America (or Tzofim, if in fact they are a conservative organization) to develop a worldwide leadership structure that draws in even the mongrel Jews and provides an intake that acknowledges and builds on what the far flung Jews have done before, rather than delegitimizing them. I really want this to heal the shattered streams.)

 

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