This week we’ve seen some fine examples of media bias in action.<\/p>\n
The left wing insists that liberal bias in the mainstream media is a myth, cooked up by those horrible people at Fox.\u00c2\u00a0 The right wing insists that Fox is as fair and balanced as talk radio.\u00c2\u00a0 Both opinions are idiotic.<\/p>\n
Bias, like pornography, can be hard to define, but smartenized people know it when they see it.\u00c2\u00a0 It can be the subtle selection of adverbs and adjectives.\u00c2\u00a0 It can be the placement of the story in a newspaper.\u00c2\u00a0 It can be how often the story is reported.\u00c2\u00a0 Or it can be something as obvious as completely ignoring a story that casts your side in a bad light.<\/p>\n
The mainstream media has very strong lefty bias which is invisible to lefties.\u00c2\u00a0 Fox and talk radio have a strong right wing bias.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyone who gets all their information from either the left or the right is going to be ill informed.\u00c2\u00a0 Not only will they be getting their news from skewed angles, they’ll completely miss some stories.<\/p>\n
We saw two great examples of bias this week.<\/p>\n
Both factions covered the Tea Party march on Washington very differently.\u00c2\u00a0 Fox celebrated it and gave it wall to wall coverage.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 They, along with other right wing news outlets, featured lots of bird’s eye view pictures which showed the size of the crowd.\u00c2\u00a0 The official estimate was 70,000 people, but some conservative news organizations put the number as high as 1.2 million.\u00c2\u00a0 (Most made corrections later.)<\/p>\n
The lefty media used very different tactics.\u00c2\u00a0 Virtually every picture\u00c2\u00a0 was from a low angle, concentrating on specific sign or two.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t see any that showed the size of the crowd.<\/p>\n
In any crowd of that size there are going to be some tasteless, trashy signs, and that’s what they showed.\u00c2\u00a0 About a dozen really sick ones were featured over and over in various media outlets.\u00c2\u00a0 And of course, the whining cry of “Racism<\/a>!” was spewed at every opportunity.<\/p>\n BTW, Lefties, the phrase “teabagging” is not only an indication of your bias and childishness, but it’s such an obvious pun it was an overused clich\u00c3\u00a9 within a day of it first being uttered.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t mind juvenile humor (in fact, sometimes I rather enjoy it) but I hate clich\u00c3\u00a9s.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’d like to get a little more respect, grow up.<\/p>\n I saw several reports that described the crowd as “thousands of people.”\u00c2\u00a0 Technically, that’s correct.\u00c2\u00a0 But when that phrase is used to describe tens <\/em>of thousands of people, it’s pretty hard to deny bias.<\/p>\n My local rag, the Times Union, didn’t even put it on the front page.<\/p>\n A better example, though, is the ACORN story.\u00c2\u00a0 ACORN is a very lefty advocacy group that receives government funding.\u00c2\u00a0 Their long history of voter fraud has been more or less ignored by the mainstream media.<\/p>\n This past week a couple, pretending to be a hooker and her pimp, took hidden cameras to ACORN and asked for advice on buying property to set up a brothel.\u00c2\u00a0 The ACORN advisors were eager to help.\u00c2\u00a0 They didn’t even flinch when the couple talked about bringing in 13 year old girls from El Salvador to work as hookers, or when asked how to break campaign contribution laws so the pimp could run for office.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead they gave them advice on how to cheat the IRS and avoid getting caught by the police.<\/p>\n ACORN insisted it was an anomaly and said they fired the two workers responsible.\u00c2\u00a0 The undercover agent’s responded by doing it again, in a different office, and getting the same results.\u00c2\u00a0 On their second try the advisor bragged about killing her husband.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 They were able to get ACORN advisors in five different offices, all over the country, to provide them with help.<\/p>\n This is a story that has it all \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a government funded agency, tax cheats, hookers, pimps and pedophilia.\u00c2\u00a0 Did you see the story on ABC, NBC, or CBS?\u00c2\u00a0 Nope.\u00c2\u00a0 They ignored it completely.\u00c2\u00a0 Was it a lead story in the New York Times?\u00c2\u00a0 I know, I’m being silly.\u00c2\u00a0 (You can find the original videos on biggovernment.com<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Fox, of course, was on it like a Pit Bull on a Pomeranian.\u00c2\u00a0 They played the videos over and over and provided hours of commentary.\u00c2\u00a0 Their excessive coverage of the story almost made up for the mainstream media ignoring it.<\/p>\n There was a brief mention of it on NPR, but they closed it with an excuse.\u00c2\u00a0 Those poor uneducated women were a product of a nasty environment and so they didn’t know any better.\u00c2\u00a0 Boo Hoo.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve known a lot of women who grew up in nasty environments and surprisingly, none of them were eager to help a pimp set up a brothel full of 13 year old prostitutes imported from Central America.<\/p>\n So when each side accuses the other of media bias, they’re both right.\u00c2\u00a0 There is no such thing as unbiased media.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t exist.\u00c2\u00a0 People who get all their news from The New York Times are just as ignorant as people who only watch Fox.\u00c2\u00a0 Watching and reading the news presented by both sides, and taking their biases into account, is the only way to be to have any idea of what’s really going on \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the only way to be smartenized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week we’ve seen some fine examples of media bias in action. The left wing insists that liberal bias in the mainstream media is a myth, cooked up by those horrible people at Fox.\u00c2\u00a0 The right wing insists that Fox is as fair and balanced as talk radio.\u00c2\u00a0 Both opinions are idiotic. Bias, like pornography, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":893,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}