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.”
...
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.
...
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.”
...
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.
...
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.
Labels: mainstream media
1 Comments:
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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