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Are you high? For one, editors and journalsts are overwhelmingly liberal in their personal views. There have been jillions of polls on this one. If only people who worked in the MSM were allowed to vote, we'd have a one party system. Its 80 % at least.
And being human, some of their own beliefs leak into the stories they run, or just as important, choose not to run.
Just because they're not as liberal as you are, doesn't mean they don't have a recognizable POV.
For cryin' out loud, Little Lord Pinch even kind of allowed his omsbudman to "admit" as much in print. You don't get any more
MSM than the Times. The MSM leans left. Only absolute, doctrinaire, kicking and screaming orthodox libs will deny that it's fairly obvious.
I suppose you also think that the typical humanitites prof is a centrist?
The real issue is how narrow the MSM is in its diversity of opinion. What it is is an incredible propaganda system serving power in DC/NYC. One shouldnt confuse urbane with liberal.
Oh and I was not putting on the back of anyone, I thought the whole thing was no ones fault. That even with the perfect response we would have saw pretty much the same thing. I am pointing out the difference in the coverage.
This is a freaking hallucination. Reagan was portrayed as the President of the United States, which a damned sight more deference than FOX News has ever accorded to Clinton or Obama.
If he did what he did in his bed or in a hotel or almost anywhere I would not have cared in the least bit.
########. If you really care about what is going on with the POTUS' pecker only because said pecker should be perfectly flaccid whenever a decision might need to be made, then it doesn't make a damned bit of difference where the guy is getting blown. He isn't always making momentous decisions while in the Oval Office, and he isn't off the clock just because he leaves that room.
Obama is a hack machine politician who has never held a real job in his life and couldn't order at McDonald's without a teleprompter, and he is treated as the second coming.
Gosh, it sure is hard to argue with that kind of reasoning...
In any event, what's frustrating about this debate (and we've had it many times on this site) is that the conservatives just assert over and over again that OF COURSE the media has a liberal bias. And the main proof is always the same thing -- the poll numbers showing that most members of the media vote Democratic. It's like someone speaking louder and slower to someone who doesn't understand their language in the hope that THIS TIME they'll get the message. But, as I noted earlier, there's rarely any effort to put those numbers in context or try to determine the nature and extent of the bias in any systematic way. Just saying over and over again that the media has a liberal bias isn't persuasive.
I basically agree with Dan, although I'd go back a little further. I think 20-30 years ago there was a pretty clear liberal bias. Rightwing voices were much less common in the MSM in the 60's and 70's and even in the 80's to some extent. But that's certainly no longer true today, both because the media itself has shifted further right and because of the vast number of media outlets, as Dan notes. I do think the media can show a systematic bias at times, but it cuts in both directions -- e.g., the treatment of Clinton and Gore and the support for the invasion of Iraq to me were obvious examples of conservative bias, while the favorable coverage of Obama during the 2008 campaign was an example of liberal bias. But in all of these cases the media is basically trying to follow the ratings. The Clinton scandals were a good story, so they went after him hard. They felt they needed to get behind the invasion of Iraq because that's what the public wanted. Bush was incredibly unpopular by 2008 and Obama was an attractive and dynamic young candidate.
That's a very good point.
I liken viewing the presentation of the news by the various media outlets to being a juror watching a courtroom drama play out. As with opposing counsel, there's no pretense of either side being impartial or unbiased; instead, the networks (most notably MSNBC and FOX News) report on current events with their own signature spin, leaving it up to the individual viewer to determine for themselves where the truth actually lies.
DB
No, you're wrong. You said you don't care if he's getting his knob polished as long as it isn't in the Oval Office. But the decision-making powers and duties of the President are not physically limited to that space. So if your problem is with the guy getting his rocks off when he's supposed to be doing his job, then the room really doesn't have anything to do with it. If you assume that pretty much every President has cheated on his wife, then you have to realize that they've all done it while making decisions, because this one really is a 24/7 job.
In many ways, this was the central point of Bernard Goldberg's first book. His chief complaint was not that the media was doing anything intentionally wrong- in fact he specifically refutes that charge- but that the narrow slice of experience (in the cultural sense) that was represented in most news rooms prevented those newsrooms from providing a truly diverse viewpoint.
Daniel Okrent, the NYT's former Public Editor, makes a similar point here. Unfortunately, Okrent uses the term "liberal bias" in his article which I think is unhelpful. It's more of a cultural than a political issue, in my view.
EDIT- I also think Dan's point is key- more and more, it just doesn't matter. With the set of options available, you can find any type of source you like.
Just to clarify something:
Democrat(ic) =! liberal
Republican =! conservative
Well, gee, I didn't expect you to agree, Steve.
My summary of Obama in this area:
He speaks very well, but if one actually listens to what he says in interviews it's nonsense. He ranges from saying stupid things to deceitful things to irrelevant things, with, yes, sometimes saying something intelligent. Telling us that we can cover more people for less cost at the same level of quality is either dishonest or stupid.
And he doesn't know when to directly refuse to answer a question. He had no business commenting on Tiger Woods's personal behavior. It's not presidential.
Speaking of unbiased journalists, whatever happened to Dan Rather? ;)
The blame for the response gets split between the local, state, and federal governments. All three handled the situation piss poorly. Liberals are idiots for blaming only Bush (and for accusing him of racism). Conservatives are idiots for blaming only the local and state governments. It's really that simple.
The liberal New York Times was pimping Whitewater for years before it turned its attention to Lewinsky. Mike Isikoff at Newsweek was leading the charge on the Lewinsky story. Michael Kelly from the liberal New Republic consistently killed Clinton on whatever story he could. Chris Matthews was vigorously anti-Clinton. David Broder "He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place" hated Clinton. And it was all ########. None of the alleged scandals amounted to a thing of consequence, other than a blowjob. Seriously, name one major news organization or ostensible objective reporter that had Clinton's back. There wasn't one.
Well he did have the National Guard kill all those poor people and hide their bodies in the swamps ...
/Cynthia McKinney
If there have been jillions of polls on this, then why does everyone always refer to the same poll from roughly 8 years ago when claiming this? As someone who grew up with a mom and step-dad who were newspaper editors (albeit in Alabama where even the Dems are conservative), my experience is that most reporters get into the field because they want to change society (in other words, they're liberals) but by the time they reach editor positions they have become more conservative. And the corporations and executives who pay the bills and make the big decisions tend to be overwhelmingly status quo and conservative. So it's a mixed bag, not some evil liberal hive mind.
Amazing how simple it is to boil something down so that everyone other than you is an idiot.
This. Most people don't get too worked up about the stuff the media does that they agree with. That's not bias, but simply fair reporting. The other stuff? That's clear evidence that there's a left/right agenda.
Any broad category that contains all of Time Magazine, Rush Limbaugh, the NY Times, and FOX News doesn't have a clear uni-directional bias, and if one side is represented more than another, it is meaningless since practically everyone has plenty of opportunity to listen to the opinionated ramblings of twelve different fringe-monkeys that agree with them should they be so inclined.
The one thing you rarely see from the media is a serious effort to be without bias, because a biased story provokes more of a response from both sides of the fence. Good for you, noble champion of truth! Shame on you, distorter of facts! (There is nothing new about this either. The American media has been full of bias since people were disagreeing about whether or not to revolt against the British, so why expect today to be any different?)
The media is loyal to one color above all others: green.
The issue of media bias has nothing to do with people like Rush Limbaugh. Or Keith Olbermann. It's about hard news reporting, not about opinion commentary.
Way to utterly avoid dealing with the content of the issue.
Same thing, I guess.
And you have zero evidence to support your assertions about this. Zero. None. Zip. Nada.
Big time.
Or maybe i feel like I almost stepped on a snake.
You didn't even mention the most outrageous example of this, which was the feature article in the Style section of the Post that was published on the eve of the 1998 election, which essentially told the Clintons that We Who Really Matter have decided that you must go, and that's that, because you've soiled "our" Washington.
And one glance at their stable of op-ed columnists is all it takes to see just how crazy that charge of "liberal" bias is when it applies to that paper. Out of 25 non-Metro writers, exactly 4 (Dionne, Meyerson, King and Klein) are predictably liberal, whereas 9 of them (Will, Krauthammer, Gerson, Samuelson, Hiatt, Charles Lane [who's not listed but shows up there frequently], Broder, Kristol and Kagan) trash Obama and / or his policies every chance they get. The rest of them are either local writers, reporters, center/left kvetchers (Cohen, Marcus and Appelbaum) or conservatives who are fairly evenhanded (Parker) and will give credit to Obama where it's due. And their "Washington Forum" Friday page is usually packed with former Bush officials or corporate lobbyists.
---------------
The one thing you rarely see from the media is a serious effort to be without bias,
The News Hour makes a pretty strong effort to present every viewpoint from about H to R, if not A to G or S to Z.
What "hard news reporting"? There are fewer than half a dozen American newspapers, one public TV network, and one cable network that even attempt any in depth national reporting any more, let alone international. The rest of them mostly mooch their stories from the Big Three newspapers and add their partisan spin. That's probably an exaggeration, but not much of one.
The problem isn't the slant of 95% of the media outlets in this country, it's their complete lack of any original reporting other than crime stories, scandals and celebrity profiles. Fortunately there are websites to make up for this, but you have to know where to look for them, and having to navigate half a dozen websites to get a coherent picture of the world is no substitute for having a first rate paper delivered on your doorstep in the morning.
There is no such thing. Practically nothing which is newsworthy is a simple collection of easily discoverable and reportable facts. Even if you are really trying not to produce a slanted product, you have a 90-second clip or a 250-word article to deliver a message, which means you're selectively reporting, and that selection causes bias.
Any story that can be reasonably relayed within even a long news segment or multi-page article is a trivial set of facts, and not something that any agency can realistically bias. "Remember to set your clocks ahead this Sunday; it's Daylight Savings Time."
thislast Sunday; it's Daylight Savings Time."Hello there, BTF honchos! He's talking to you!
How otherwise smart people like Ray and David (with whom I disagree on any number of political issues, but whose basic intelligence I highly respect) can continually and eagerly drink this Kool-Aid amazes me.
Yeah, no ####### ####. Just as there's no reason for the media to have it out for any politician. But the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC, etc. all had it out for Clinton.
But thanks for trying to make a facile point over imprecise phrasing when any imbecile knew exactly what was the intended meaning. But it seems you're a conservative, so this should have been expected.
Funny, I didn't see a teleprompter when Obama was eviscerating the congressional republicans at their Q&A;session at their retreat a few weeks back.
The point? None. Just a slice of life from the naked city.
It's actually very easy: Get rid of insurance companies and strip the layer of cost represented by the profit margin of insurance companies out of the system. But I guess I forget that having insurance companies make decisions about our health care is the thin line between us and socialism and death panels.
If you're not going to go single payer, then bringing the uninsured into the system through a health exchange isn't a bad start. The uninsured skew younger and generally pay more for health insurance than the cost of the health care they receive (this is also true for illegal immigrants, so bringing them into the system would also save money, but all illegal aliens should be burned at the stake, so obviously we can't help them get health insurance). Of course, individuals can't get health care individually at a decent rate because the extreme outcomes are so costly. Additionally, catastrophic care is very expensive. The only medical treatment most uninsured people get is catastrophic care because they don't go to the hospital until they are very sick. The government already pays for this catastrophic care. If these people had insurance, they would seek treatment before their situation became dire, and the cost of their care would be less.
I'm sure that there are a few other items I'm missing as well.
Edit: It also should be noted that most western nations provide universal health care for their citizens at a lower cost per citizen than the U.S. and score better than the U.S. on basic measures of public health. The only way you shouldn't believe that we can cover more people for less money at the same level of quality is if you think the U.S. has an optimal health care system.
Oh and for the 2nd time in this thread I am not a conservative though I know anyone who does not agree with you on any point has to be "on the other side" don't they?
Though I must say, you claim anyone should have know what your meaning was but if this is how you saw things, that everyone in the major media outlets hated Bill Clinton then I am still left with what your definition of "had Clinton's back" is. Because I always felt he was a fairly popular president and that the media treated him as such. Not that they kissed his ass but that they (not everyone but a good number of reporters) wrote nearly as many "I can't believe he did that" articles as there were "why do we care that he did that" articles.
I will be awaiting your next insult and degrading comment with as much anxiousness as this imbecile can muster.
I think in the long term it would be cheaper but for the next, I don't know 10 years, it would be a lot more expensive.
I have thought that this was the biggest hurdle to universal health care more than anything else.
Edit: Another question I have wondered about the comparative health care cost is Americans tend to be a hell of a lot fatter on average than other countries which would also lead to higher health care costs. Is that something that has been taken into account when comparing our health care with other countries?
That came off as angrier than it should have. I apologize. The nuc-u-lar thing is obviously a non-issue, but I don't think the press made an issue with it so much as SNL did. Basically, I think process stories are stupid, horse race stories are stupid and attempts at psychoanalyzing politicians are stupid. Way too little attention is paid to the actual substance of policies, which is what matters. How much ink has been wasted over reconciliation and deem and pass in the past couple weeks? Is it any coincidence that almost everybody who agrees with the health care plan in substance has no issues with the process and vice versa? They're simply non-issues. But the mainstream media has been duped to covering them by the right wing noise machine.
Assuming this is true (and I don't know that it is), what is the alternative? We can't allow health care costs to continue to grow at the current rate, and I do believe we have an obligation to provide a basic level of health are to all citizens. Whatever the transaction costs are, they won't decrease by delay. I would actually assume that you save the most money in the long run by fixing the system as soon as possible.
I have thought if it were schools that were mostly private for the last 80 years and there was a push to have public schools put in for kids that couldn't afford school if the responses would be the same or if they would fall under the "won't somebody think of the children".
Wait. Ray. Hold the freakin' phone here.
Are you telling me we elected a politician as POTUS???
Why would anyone, ever, listen to what a politicians says?? THEY ARE LYING TO YOU.
The difference between a good politician (good here, meaning "good for me") is what they DO, not what they say.
Presidents who are good at telling their story are popular, presidents who aren't are not.
If that's the big honeypot of cost reduction, then you're not going to sell many skeptics - the profit margins of insurance companies are microscopic scraps among overall health expenses. It's fairly dependable given that people aren't going to get tired of health services, but you're not going to fund much.
And even if you claim those small profits, you have nasty secondary effects. Health insurance profits don't go into a big Scrooge McDuck vault that CEOs swim in - pension funds, for example are huge investors in health insurance companies because of their small but safe return.
Cocaine use was simply an inefficiency to take advantage of!
Too bad the attitudes surrounding drugs kinda forced Washington to not say "I used cocaine. So what? I work hard, take care of my family, pay my taxes, and have never hurt anyone. Get a life, puritan dipshits."
Narrow? The wicked hippie MSM considers *Creationism* to be a valid viewpoint to be worthy of respect. People who assert the reality of fairies, leprechauns, or Cthulhu are clearly nuts, and of course nobody would grant credibility to a politician who claimed bulbous-headed aliens were anal-probing Americans, but a 10,000 year old earth where humans co-mingle with dinosaurs, all created out of the whims of a sky pixie? Well you can state that without fear of mockery by our ultra-leftist media clowns. Why, James Inhofe is actually cited as a scientific authority.
Puritan dipshits buy jerseys, too.
Well, I can't agrue with that kind of a Mt. Olympus swoop-down, can I?
Sure I can. Its easy. I'd say when 85-90% of your work force votes a for a particular party, its up to your side to demonstrate the MSM is down the middle.
Again, the NY Times more or less admitted they were a liberal news organization. They were typically weasly, but they did. IIRC, the soup bone quote was something like, "Of course we are--look at our city, our readership!"
The newspapers that "matter",the NY Times, the Washington Post, maybe the LA Times all endorse Dems, and then there's the WSJ. The clear majority of the secondary papers show the same general pattern, perhaps not as pronounced. If you're telling me that you believe these people are so thoroughly professional that they'd "they never have ever and at all" let this kind of personal bias ooze onto the news page, well then, you're beyond the realm of common sense.
Planet Bizarro strikes again.
Let me try this another way: what's the deal with Rush, Fox News, etc.? If the MSM isn't treating conservatives unfairly, then why do conservatives all turns to these overtly (even if Fox News formally denies it) conservative outlets? Are all conservatives and libertarians deluded (no snarky response) on this subject? If liberals aren't, generally, satisfied with MSM coverage, why are the counterparts to Rush/FNC (Air America/MSNBC) so much less successful? Are liberals all fair-minded and looking for unbiased news, while conservatives are all evil and intolerant and only will accept people who agree with them?
(By the way: please note that my claim is about liberal/conservative, not Democratic/Republican per se.)
The media didn't cover for his crimes by implying or stating that even if he lied, it's okay because the questions shouldn't have been asked? Barely mentioning that he wad accused of sexual harassment, which the media normally takes to be quite serious?
Okay, Andy. Whatever you say.
I don't think Newt Gingrich would have been nearly as outraged if it wasn't.
See, this didn't happen. To the extent it did, most placed the blame on deregulation which happened during the Clinton years. Which, in any case, I think is a misguided criticism to some degree.
As for the whole lib/con dem/rep brouhaha, it's SO meaningless. Primarily because that false dichotomy obscures how both 'sides' support a corporate capitalist system that makes those terms meaningless. And when I say narrow, I mean on substantive economic and foreign policy issues and 90+ percent of how society should be organized..amongst the people who have power to do something about it. There are real differences on important cultural/social issues, but economics drives the actual decision-making. If the media gives credence to creationism and other substanceless topics, it's only to draw the sizable audience who are drawn to the subject.
There's nothing 'conservative' about capitalism.
By an independent counsel appointed by Clinton to investigate a real estate deal. Clinton was the only president who has ever had a government office specifically appointed with the task of taking him down for his entire presidency. I don't recall much ink being spilled on the question of if this was appropriate.
Well, if my experience with more than a few Rush fans (including my business partner) is any indication, there is a large group of people who simply aren't interested in any source of information other than those which confirm and reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. I'm talking about the sort of people who fire off random e-mails several times a day that warn us about how Obama and "the government" (not to mention illegal immigrants) are out to bankrupt and enslave us. The fact that there are many millions of people like that out there doesn't make them any less divorced from reality. And obviously a paper like the Times, which covers the real world and not the fantasy world of their paranoid worldview, is going to make their blood boil.
Not that this is an exclusively conservative phenomenon---there's a entire class of liberals who have the same character trait. And during the Bush years you saw a lot of the same paranoia and claims of bias that you see now from the right.
But I'll say it again: The problem with the MSM isn't "bias." It's that with a tiny handful of honorable exceptions, it spends nearly all of its resources covering trivia.
Huh. Had no idea you'd gone to Mississippi College, or for that matter that it's a private school (not to mention Southern Baptist -- the church I was brought up in before backsliding like a mother******) ... though I did know it was small (my alma mater, Southern Arkansas U., used to play y'all in sports & for all I know still does) & in Clinton (I see the school referred to on exit signs while driving from Montgomery to SW Arkansas & back again), where unfortunately I no longer have a reason to stop because the Fazoli's there closed down a few years back, dammit.
I'd put Harding U., a few dozen miles from Little Rock, pretty high on any list of reactionary schools. Particularly in the '50s, that place was pretty notorious for grooming the future DiPernas & Nieporents of the region. (Only time I've ever set foot on the kkkampus was about 10 years ago for, oddly enough, a free They Might be Giants show.)
The whole 'get Willie' campaign was destructive not mainly to Clinton, but to the country. While we fooled around about Bill's penis for a year, our government's attention was distracted from dealing with things like the growing threat of Al Qaeda.
####, it still pisses the hell outta me 12 years later.
I've got a soft spot in my heart for that school (if it's the one I'm thinking of, in the town of Searcy), since while I was on the waiting list at Duke (this was in 1962), they got my name on some list and sent me all kinds of scholarship offers. I had no idea until later what their reputation was.
No doubt my perception was & remains skewed by the fact that most of that time was spent at the daily paper in Little Rock, which makes the Wall Street Journal look like The Daily Worker, but from my (admittedly ultraleftist) perspective to say that the major media as liberal requires ignoring all sorts of evidence to the contrary, most of which has mentioned here (see also: Whitewater, Judith "Mrs. Dick Cheney" Miller making the NYTimes into a Bush fanzine, Washington Post op/ed types happily giving aid & comfort to war criminals while aiding & abetting their crimes, various TV people reporting on Bush's surreally hysterical "Mission Accomplished" landing with one hand while rubbing one off with the other, etc.).
That's the one. It's a Church of Christ school. I have little experience with that particular sect (though a friend of mine went to the local church, & I accompanied him at least once), but I gather that it's not noted for any leftward leanings.
Even stipulating that everything you assume here is in fact completely true about Ron Washington, and at this time we have no reason to believe that it isn't, the fact that some people can do hard drugs like cocaine and remain functional, law-abiding citizens doesn't mean that everyone, or even most people can. I'm sure everyone here is more than familiar with the sad stories of Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, and many others.
On a side note Dan, a couple of weeks ago you shut down one of these political threads, and when you were asked why you said that they were making the site look bad in the eyes of the community, or something to that effect. I'm curious as to exactly what criteria you use to decide when to allow these threads and when to shut them down.
Well, at least the fairy-/leprechaun-/Cthulhu-cultists aren't a front, y'know, for a worldwide child-molesting ring.
OK. Maybe the leprechaun guys ...
Any savings from this would amount to a pimple on an elephant's ass.
Insurance companies simply aren't raking in the profits.
Planet Bizarro strikes again.
Really? So the media didn't try to convince people that it was about sex? They didn't falsely claim - and this is objectively false - that Clinton was impeached for an affair? The media didn't discuss extensively the issue of blow-jobs and whether kids considered them sex, or on the motives of Paula Jones, while barely mentioning that a federal judge found that a sitting president had lied under oath, and while a sitting president gave up his law license rather than contest these charges against him?
The media didn't cover for his crimes by implying or stating that even if he lied, it's okay because the questions shouldn't have been asked? Barely mentioning that he wad accused of sexual harassment, which the media normally takes to be quite serious?
Okay, Andy. Whatever you say.
Once again the selective nature of what you call "the media" is somewhere between amusing and pathetic, as if there's a serious case to be made for impeaching a president over lying about a blow job. And as if you didn't have a huge part of that same "media" screaming for blood and calling for his impeachment. As if you didn't have big chunks of the venerated "liberal" opinionators (Broder, Quinn, Michael Kelly, etc.) and the entire corps of the op-ed crews like Will, Krauthammer, & co. going after him.
All your charge boils down to is that there was a heated argument about the propriety of wasting so much time on what was at bottom such a trivial matter, and that some of the MSM actually had the nerve not to frame the issue exactly as you would have wished---the narrow issue of perjury---and instead saw it for exactly what it was, a partisan effort to bring down Clinton by any means necessary. All you're saying is that the MSM was "biased" for not merely parroting the talking points of Kenneth Starr and Robert Bartley, which is your idea of "evenhandedness."
I didn't expect anything else out of him. My point is that his supporters rarely acknowledge, or even seem to realize, that he quite often says a lot of dumb things. Yes, he's intelligent. That doesn't mean that his BS is any smarter than Bush's was, even though Obama speaks much better.
Yes, why don't we leave alone those poor, misunderstood insurance companies?
I'm well aware that the profits of insurance companies are not the main issue with health care costs. But that's not really the point. You're contention was that "Telling us that we can cover more people for less cost at the same level of quality is either dishonest or stupid." That's clearly not true. If we removed the costs imposed on the system by the insurance companies need for profits, we could cover more people for less money with no decline in quality of care.
Andy, what does that story have to do with the profit margins of insurance companies? Nothing. Nothing at all. I don't know why you get so emotional in these discussions, to the point where you can't follow along with a simple conversation.
(True, the media was distracted by the Lewinsky story and thus didn't focus on Al Qaeda, but one assumes that the CIA doesn't need Dan Rather to cover a story for them to focus on it. If that were the case, then can we also blame the OJ story, which got even more play than Lewinsky, for distracting people from dealing with foreign threats?)
You're absolutely right, but it's an article that's worth reading for other reasons, which I'm sure you'll agree with.
And here are two more interesting tidbits that a few people also might find relevant to the potential savings of a true overhaul of our health care system:
------------------------------
**11/19/2008
So you're saying that if we increase demand and hold supply constant, prices will decrease?
It has been pointed out many times how "overhead" comparisons are not comparing like-to-like. But even taking it at face value, it's obvious that the government can't just magically "streamline to Canadian levels," and the empirical proof of that is Medicare.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Anything Clinton said or didn't say was going to feed the shitstorm. That's what happens when you have billionaires spending tens of millions to destroy your reputation. There is no right answer. I really don't like Clinton and don't want to have to defend him, but pretending the right-wing campaign against him would have gone away with an honest press conference is outrageously wrong.
I was a pseudojournalist, also known as a sportswriter/editor, for a few years in the 90's at the bottom of the food chain in NC. The only liberal I came into contact with the whole time was the sports editor who hired me. Staff was pretty neutral politically besides one raging conservative, but the publishers were stereotypical owners only interested in the paper as a moneymaking operation.
Maybe. Hard to tell. Millions of customers have to face monopolies or near-monopolies, distorting the price signals the market gives off. This isn't the only example of the pricing mechanism breaking down; it's essentially broken system-wide. Without it, free market ideas/solutions are senseless.
I see little benefit -- and a lot of harm -- from making private industry the de facto payment committee for health care service. The conflict of interest alone -- they don't pay, they make money -- is enough to render the model unworkable in my eyes.
In late 1982 and early 1983, Indiana University journalism professors David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit surveyed more than 1,000 journalists, and reported the results in their 1986 book, The American Journalist. Their poll included more than just top reporters, and, overall, they detected only a modest skew towards the liberal side of the spectrum — 22 percent of those interviewed called themselves liberal, compared with 19 percent who said they were conservative. But among 136 executives and staffers at “prominent news organizations” — the three weekly newsmagazines, the AP and UPI wire services and the Boston Globe — the liberal tilt was much more pronounced, with liberals outnumbering conservatives by a more than two-to-one margin (32 to 12 percent). Only six percent of this group identified themselves as Republican, compared with seven times as many (43 percent) who said they were Democrats
and:
In 1985, the Los Angeles Times conducted one of the most extensive surveys of journalists in history. Using the same questionnaire they had used to poll the public, the Times polled 2,700 journalists at 621 newspapers across the country. By a two-to-one margin, reporters had a negative view of then-President Ronald Reagan and voted by the same margin for Walter Mondale in 1984. The survey also asked 16 questions involving foreign affairs, social and economic issues. On 15 of 16 questions, the journalists gave answers to the left of those given by the public.
KEY FINDINGS:
•When asked how they voted in the 1984 election, more than twice as many newspaper journalists chose liberal Walter Mondale (58 percent) over the conservative incumbent Ronald Reagan (26 percent), even as the country picked Reagan in a 59 to 41 percent landslide.
•Self-identified liberals outnumbered conservatives in the newsroom by more than three-to-one, 55 to 17 percent. This compares to only one-fourth of the public (23 percent) that identified themselves as liberal.
•“Sometimes the readers and journalists take diametrically opposed positions — as on the question: ‘Are you in favor of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as President?’ Journalists say ‘No’ by a 2-1 margin; readers say ‘Yes’ by about the same margin,” Times media reporter David Shaw wrote.
•84 percent of reporters and editors supported the so-called “nuclear freeze” to ban all future nuclear missile deployment; 80 percent were against increased defense spending; and 76 percent opposed aid to the Nicaraguan contras.
•82 percent of reporters and editors favored allowing women to have abortions; 81 percent backed affirmative action; and 78 percent wanted stricter gun control.
•Two-thirds (67 percent) of journalists opposed prayer in public schools; three-fourths of the general public (74 percent) supported prayer in public schools.
Steve--please produce a survey that shows that this has lessened in the last 20-25 years. in fairness, I must admit that these two show less of a spread than I had expected, which was 75% at the least.
I would like to second this. Also, this may be the only time Joey and I agree on a political thread.
As to bias: Szymborski and CBird said pretty much what I and others have said. I think there was some systemic bias in the past, probably. But now, with the way the media have changed, I don't buy it nearly as much, and I think even to the degree it is still there and was there , it matters very little if at all in determining actual political outcomes.
For example:
•“Sometimes the readers and journalists take diametrically opposed positions — as on the question: ‘Are you in favor of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as President?’ Journalists say ‘No’ by a 2-1 margin; readers say ‘Yes’ by about the same margin,” Times media reporter David Shaw wrote.
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A lot of this stuff goes back to certain kinds/ages of righties still being pissed off about Watergate and Woodstein, IMO.
But OTOH, snapper went off on how Reagan was treated in the media, but even if that had been true, IMO it helped him more than it hurt him.
I also disagree with Ray when he says that Limbaugh and Olbermann aren't "hard news." I know what Ray means by this, but I do think that a lot of folks see those guys as the ones "telling the real story."
I'd put Harding U., a few dozen miles from Little Rock, pretty high on any list of reactionary schools. Particularly in the '50s, that place was pretty notorious for grooming the future DiPernas & Nieporents of the region. (Only time I've ever set foot on the kkkampus was about 10 years ago for, oddly enough, a free They Might be Giants show.)
Harding is indeed in the discussion (although my MC would never have countenanced a They Might Be Giants show on campus). I also had a few friends who went to Ouachita (sp?), which is of a similar vein. Good times, good times ...
recent polls that show people have caught onto MSM bias. Public admiration, belief in the media's accurateness & credibilty are on the serious wane.
Let somebody else find some newer journalsit surveys--if they exist. Perhaps the MSM has really has stopped answering such surveys for real, like I mused.
But the populace hasn't, these polls are easy to dig-up via Google, and the data shows they aint buying the idea that the NY Times and the 6 o'clock news is down the middle anymore, like Steve still does.
The "I'm talking about hard news" dodge is exactly that - a dodge. It allows partisans of "conservative media" to pretend that their massive media mechanisms - from Fox News to the WSJ and WaPo op-ed pages to the Drudges, Breitbarts, etc of the world - don't "really count." It's complete horseshit, and the people making those arguments are well aware of their own intellectual dishonesty. These are the same sorts who imply that Wikipedia has a "liberal bias," more or less.
CBird's analysis was simply incorrect, since he included Limbaugh in it.
I never claimed it affected political outcomes.
You're simply incorrect. Nobody who is serious treats Limbaugh as dispensing hard news. I doubt even he pretends that he is. I don't care whether "a lot of folks" (not that you've cited any such folks) think that he is. Yes, they see him as "telling the real story." That is not at all the same as seeing him as reporting hard news. And even if they do, it's irrelevant to the issue.
You're telling me that people see no difference between Limbaugh's show and the ABC news reports at the top of the hour when he goes to commercial?
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