Category Archives: Media Bias

The Occupiers Can Stop Crying About Their Media Coverage: Early Media Portrayal of the Tea Party

I posted this in a reply to a comment made over at Reflections of a Rational Republican.

One of the matters being discussed was the media coverage of the Tea Party vs. the media coverage of Occupy. I did a quick Google search and these are a few clips that I found:

1) CNN’s coverage of the Tax Protest: “Right wing, not kid friendly”

2) Cenk Ugyur criticizing the Tea Party for being “convinced that radicalism is the answer”. Same criticism of Occupy? Also, check out 4:14 where his guest offers something that no one in Occupy has been able to offer: an explanation of their raison d’etre and their goal.

3) Greg Gutfeld and crew on Fox News’ “Red Eye” criticizing the media’s (over)use of the phrase “Tea Bagging” and then, in a move that the left never seems to do, actually criticizing a movement that ideologically, Fox News would surely support. The panel starts to make fun of the Tea Partiers themselves, even questioning their validity as a movement. This never happens in the left’s “can do no wrong” bubble.

4) Probably the worst example of “race bait” reporting EVER, here’s the infamous clip from MSNBC where they deliberately cropped a shot of a black man with an AR-15 rifle at the President’s rally just so they could make it a piece on racism:

5) Finally, here’s a video of where Ed Schultz’s rants of his Tea Party perception are contradicted to much of the reality that had occurred within the Tea Party’s protests.

I have to say that I had forgotten how bad some of the coverage of the Tea Party was. The CNN piece was ridiculous, and MSNBC’s coverage from many of their commentators was, in my opinion, despicable.

The left has been crying over how poorly and unfairly the Occupiers have been covered by the media. Well they can cry me a river, and as they do, I’ll be even more reminded of how accurately the term “Occupussies” applies to them and their thin, “I live by a b.s. double-standard” skin. These videos show the fact that unless one considers being called a “flea bagging hippie” is worse than being called a racist or likened to a Timothy McVeigh, The Tea Party has had it worse by the media than any Occupiers have, so it’s time they just put their diapers back on.

CNBC: “150 Economists Back US Republicans in Debt Fight”

Read this this morning on CNBC’s website, and thinking that to the far left this just won’t matter. Why?

Because to them there’s only one economist in the world, and that’s Paul Krugman. Ask them to name one other, and they’ll say, “well… Paul Krugman.”

I have no personal beef against Paul Krugman. I’m only annoyed by those who think he is a God among men and can say no wrong; that anything anyone says to challenge him is automatically “spin”.

Yet his challenges are many, including here, here, and here, and are made by people with far more letters behind their names than any of us common folk have.

I don’t know who these 150 economists are or whether I even agree with them, but I do know one thing – the left will dismiss them automatically and that’s not doing this country any good.

Baby Joseph Story Exposes Fox’s Deliberate Spin

I just watched the “exclusive” Fox News had with Baby Joseph’s father, talking about his child’s case.

The Fox version:
Baby Joseph required a tracheotomy, a Canadian hospital (and system) refused because he was terminal, so a St. Louis charity “rescued” the child and got him the procedure he needs in the U.S.. Fox asked the Canadian hospital for comment, but they refused.

Here’s what Fox didn’t say:
1) The child didn’t need to be “rescued”. The hospital accepted all requests for the child to be released to the parents.
2) The reason the doctors refused the tracheotomy wasn’t because they wanted the child to die. The doctors had legitimate and serious concerns over whether the child could survive the surgery and survive the risk of pneumonia.
3) The child is breathing off a ventilator. Also, I haven’t seen one picture or clip since the surgery where his eyes are open or he’s responsive. According to his doctors, his brain function was diminishing which was another reason why they didn’t want to do the surgery.

There’s more here:

http://mediamatters.org/research/201103150011?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d82fe2e6eef8c12,0

Fox is against a Canadian-style health care system. Its system deserves its criticisms, but overall, the Canadian system works. I don’t believe people should be wiped out financially due to illness, or that primary care or preventative care should be denied. I have direct experience on both sides of the border and I can honestly say that the ignorance and misconception regarding one system vs. the other lies mostly with the U.S., and this story only feeds that misconception. It should not be used as an example of Canadian vs. U.S. care because it isn’t one. Rather, it is an example of what lobbyists and news agencies will do to spin news to fit their own agenda.

Now, let’s see how MSNBC and the others cover it.

****UPDATE****
His father is saying that the child is breathing on his own without a ventilator. However, you also see in the pictures that the child’s breathing looks terribly labored and again, he hasn’t opened his eyes once. The child’s father also said that the Canadian hospital accepted the child back for treatment (again, at no cost to the family). The father’s only issue seems to by why the Canadian doctors wouldn’t operate when the U.S. doctors were willing to.

Soros/Media Matters vs. Fox News – A War Will Be Good

Just reading how George Soros and Media Matters have declared “war” against Fox News. I say let them go at it. I’m not going to be like either side and whine about unfair this or unfair that, slanted this or slanted that. Both sides have their rich guys, and both organizations have their obviously biased perspective. Who cares. As long as they’re using fact to fight with, it should raise the bar on both organizations and we should (hopefully) get a better quality product out of either side as a result. I like the fact that we’re already seeing leaked emails out of Fox News – I just hope we can see leaked emails from the other side as well.

On a side note, although this is being declared a “war” by Media Matters, how can it be anything more than just a strategic stalemate where Fox is concerned as no one can be expecting a victory on either side? I mean really, what’s their expected outcome, to bring Fox’s viewership over to more left-leaning news organizations? It’ll never happen, like expecting Yankees fans to become Red Sox fans or Vikings fans to now cheer for Green Bay.

Therefore, I have a different theory about who this “war” is actually with. Considering the pre-election run timing of the announcement and the futility of trying to defeat Fox News from the left, I think that the “war” they’re declaring is actually between Media Matters and other left-leaning organizations and that Media Matters is just using Fox News as the justification for it in the same way we say we invade other countries for “humanitarian reasons”. What, people actually think that Media Matters is going after Fox News in the name of humanity, or “responsible journalism” as well? If so, keep dreaming. Media Matters wants visibility and ratings, and Soros wants to become richer and more powerful – just like Murdoch does. I think Media Matters simply wants to position itself as THE champion voice of the left (vs. MSNBC, HuffPo, etc.)

So I say let there be war. Let the sheep on both sides get all wrapped up in the Left vs. Right/Good vs. Evil debate as they continue to let their media outlet of choice be part of what they consider to be their identity. It will be fun to watch.

How Ideology Comes Before Truth in Media, And We Don’t Care

David Frum wrote an excellent article today on his blog regarding Huffington Post reporter Dan Froomkin and his piece on Paul Craig Roberts. Froomkin was very quick to point out that Roberts is “profoundly alienated from the modern GOP, particularly when it comes to civil liberties — and wars.”

What Froomkin neglects to say, however, and it turns out that he and his editor(s?) never bothered to check, was the fact that Roberts has been exposed as a bigot, a 9/11 Truther, and an anti-Semite. Was any of that important? Nah. All that was important was a headline that said “A Reagan Republican Makes a Case Against War – and His Party”

This situation is an example of yet another glaring and sad truth that Frum points out in his article: that a media organization can make a lot more money by putting ideology ahead of truth. Enter Fox, enter Breitbart, enter HuffPo, enter MSNBC, or, in my opinion, any so-called “news” organization that we have today.

Frum continues: “Everyone can see that a media enterprise gets more clicks and better ratings from confirming preconceived opinions than from challenging them. And the consequences of a horrible mistake? Very low. It didn’t hurt Andrew Breitbart to circulate a deceptively edited tape of Shirley Sherrod. And I doubt it will matter very much that Dan Froomkin celebrated a 9/11 denialist as a lonely heroic defender of civil liberties.”

Why won’t it matter? Because we, the people, simply don’t care. Let apathy rein.

Is the GOP’s Connection to Wall Street, or Just Business in General?

Paul Krugan writes about the housing crisis in his NY Times Op-Ed titled, “Wall Street Whitewash”:

It’s not as if the story of the crisis is particularly obscure… It’s a straightforward story, but a story that the Republican members of the commission don’t want told. Literally.

Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”

Reading this gets me frustrated on two fronts. First, that we’re in this economic mess in the first place. Second, the misdirection the GOP is trying to create – but this is just as bad as the misdirection that Krugman and the Democrats are trying to create as well. I don’t agree with the Republicans trying to go so far as they are to paint Wall Street in a good light, but Krugman or anybody trying to tell me that the Democrats are truly against the “fat cats” is _____ing down my back and trying to tell me its raining.

I was going to just comment on the “Linking GOP with Wall Street” thing, but Krugman’s points can’t go uncontested. (Brace yourselves, this is a long one.) Krugman’s points:

  • “First, there was a widely spread housing bubble, not just in the United States, but in Ireland, Spain, and other countries as well. …The housing bubble was international — and Fannie and Freddie weren’t guaranteeing mortgages in Latvia.” True. They were, however, following the U.S.’s lead. Canada didn’t, and look at them.
  • “Nor were they guaranteeing loans in commercial real estate, which also experienced a huge bubble.” No, but easy money helped cause this bubble as well, and who exactly caused that, the private sector? No, government did. As individual disposable incomes drop, stores close, vacancies go up and rents go down. When that happens, the value of commercial property goes down, too. On the other side, small business credit to secure commercial real estate or refinance becomes harder to get (often times secured with the owners personal assets), and here we go again.
  • “This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks,” which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks.” Yes, the bubble was INFLATED because of this, and Wall Street definitely deserves their full share of blame. However, Krugman ignores again one of the bubble’s main CAUSES which occurred before the irresponsible lending – the easy access to credit – which was what made the irresponsible lending possible.
  • “…the timing shows that private players weren’t suckered into a government-created bubble. It was the other way around. During the peak years of housing inflation, Fannie and Freddie were pushed to the sidelines; they only got into dubious lending late in the game, as they tried to regain market share.” Krugman tries to suggest that this is when the government got involved. How convenient for him.
  • In my opinion, I see the problem in three stages, each with their own assignment of blame:
    Mid-Bubble:

    Government – 100%. Fannie and Freddie stating that “nothing’s wrong”. The Bush Administration tried 17 times to reign in Fannie and Freddie (Note: I tried to quote the original White House posting, but it’s been (conveniently?) taken down. All it takes is someone with two eyes and a brain watching the YouTube clips of the Congressional hearings, or read an excellent collection of the whitewashing here to see that the public was totally being snowed over.

    “Community Organizers” – 100%. Using their political pressure and threatening to publicly call banks “racist” if they didn’t give more unqualified lenders homes was sickening (and yes, it did happen).

    I would normally assign some blame to the general public here, but then again they could have gotten out of the market while the market was high. I realize this is unlikely and almost irrational – who would sell their house in a rising market only to not be able to afford their new house and have to move to something smaller or less? It wasn’t wrong at the time to think your house would hold greater value than you owed.

    Pre-Collapse:
    50% Government, 50% Wall Street, 50% General Public
    50% of the blame here falls on government. They were trying to put people who couldn’t afford homes into homes they couldn’t afford for nothing but political reasons, which was incredibly short-sighted on government’s behalf. The fact remains that had their ultimately not been the protection of government bailout, free market capitalism would have otherwise stopped the bad lending before it got really bad.

    The second 50% falls upon Wall Street. Too much deregulation, too much shadow banking. All the things Krugman talks about are valid, yet it’s like giving candy to a kid and then blaming him for eating it because it’s unhealthy, or giving an inexperienced teenager the keys to a Ferrari and then blaming him for crashing it. The deal government handed Wall Street was too tempting, too sweet, and too much of a thrill for them to pass up. Same with the deal this gave otherwise unqualified borrowers.

    The third 50% is a variable that falls upon the general public that reduces the %age of ownership that government and Wall Street takes. Many people let their greed overtake their rationality. I’m not saying everyone who got in over their head was greedy, though. You have a family that can only afford a 2 bedroom apartment, and now you can get a house for the same as your rent payment? Of course you’re going to be compelled to own instead of rent. And who actually reads what they sign? The thinking may have been, “This has to be OK, otherwise the government would be shutting it down.” Naive, but understandable. Those who were stupid and greedy take full 50%, those who weren’t take less, but to let the general public completely off the hook here is convenient naivety.

    Post-Collapse:
    Wall Street 90%, Government 10%.
    Christopher Dodd removed the accountability in TARP, and we all stood by and let him do it. Wall Street was able to socialize its losses, and privatize its profits. Wonder how that’s able to happen when you’ve got all ex AIG and “Government Sachs” guys in the White House.

    Now this brings me to the point of my post. Krugman and Liberals constantly whine about how tied to Wall Street the GOP is, and with Krugman’s comments re: Republicans trying to remove the “bad language” from the bill, I think he’s right. But why does Krugman, and other Liberal Democrats continue to dodge and hide the fact that this current Democrat Administration is FULL of former Wall Street, now Government, Wall Street cronies and their buddies? OK, we know why – but it’s ridiculous.

    Further proof of the extent of Wall Street and Democrat cozying is below:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aWSz2kUxdTiU
    “During the height of the financial crisis in late September, some of Barack Obama’s campaign advisers pushed him in a conference call to distance himself from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive officer, they warned, was too close to President George W. Bush and Wall Street. Obama, 47, rejected the idea. At one point, he talked to Paulson every day for two weeks.”

    http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKNOA53525520080605
    “Overall, Democrats garnered 57 percent of the contributions from the securities and investment industry. If that trend continued through November, it would mark the first time since 1994 that they have drawn more Wall Street cash than Republicans in a presidential election year, according to the data complied by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/government-sachs-strikes_b_232800.html
    “Government Sachs Strikes Gold – Again – Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?”

    “Democratic senators had wanted to impose even stricter conditions. The Senate bill would have required bonuses already handed out to executives at TARP firms to be paid back, cap all executive compensation at TARP firms at $400,000 and ban any bonus for the top 25 employees at all TARP firms. None of this language appeared in the final legislation.”

    http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/539038/201006301903/Covering-Their-Fannie.aspx
    “We can’t think of two entities more deserving of overhaul. Yet the Dodd-Frank Act doesn’t even try to reform them. This means nothing will change except the size of government’s hand in the economy. By not addressing Fannie and Freddie, economist Brian Wesbury noted “the government is taking no blame for the subprime crisis and is demanding more power over the U.S. financial system.”

    One thing is crystal clear – Politicians on both sides are bedfellows of Wall Street. It’s understandable – they need their money to get elected. Krugman’s Op-Ed also makes another thing clear: that once they do get elected, it seems like Republicans continue to back them while Democrats conveniently turn on them once in power to try and score political points with the public.

    Face it people – no matter who Krugman tries to cozy up to, or how polarized the debate becomes between Republicans and Democrats regarding financial reform, the fact is that we got played through this financial crisis by both sides, and we’re still being played.

    There’s a lot of talk by Krugman and others about who should be held accountable, but no one actually making anyone accountable, we can only brace ourselves for more financial woes to come.

    The Right Can Be Just As Guilty of Media Bias

    A great post by David Frum on his blog talks about the Shirley Sherrod alleged reverse-racism case regarding her position at the USDA.

    In his post, Frum makes the point that a) the JournoList posts “protecting” Obama were overblown, and that the Sherrod video was a slanted hack job. Although there seems to be a lot of instances where the media shows a left-leaning bias, I was happy to see Frum showing a case of bias from the right as well.

    One can attack either the right or the left for the bias, however I think the blame falls on the media once again. Yes, that’s the same drum I’ve been beating now for months, but have we honestly seen anything change? I’ll hail the day where the bulk of journalists out there will actually start fact-checking and investigate for their stories again.

    Ratigan vs. Brady, Part II – “Connecting the Dots”

    In this clip, Ratigan says that those people who watch his show have “already connected the dots”. I’m hoping he (or someone) can connect the dots for me.

    He opens with the statement that America will be better if we “end the corruption in government” that appears to have allowed Wall Street to “steal” money from taxpayers and allows it to continue to be a “giant vacuum” sucking capital out of the economy. How he seems to propose to end the corruption, however, is to tax the $145B in bonuses Wall Street received and somehow turn it around “to create jobs in this country”. So, the enemy is government AND Wall Street, but use the government to TAX Wall Street and get our money back so it can be the one to create jobs? I’m confused.

    How does this money actually come back to private industry? Government programs? Ratigan avoids having to answer this question. Even if Ratigan answered it, he still hasn’t addressed his topic of the government corruption that we apparently need to end.

    Within his circular arguments, I’m wondering who Ratigan is actually blaming here? What solution is he actually proposing? I don’t know Congressman Brady, I don’t live in Texas, therefore I have no opinion or bias for or against him. Yet after watching the clip, it seemed very much to me like Ratigan baited Congressman Brady into being a guest through submitting his opening remarks to Brady in advance, just to make him (i.e. his party) a target a la typical NBC fashion.

    It seems also that Ratigan had his closing remarks (i.e. “you’re a Republican coming on to repeat Republican talking points and slam this government”) well-prepared in advance and intended to use them no matter what Republican he had on as a guest, or what that guest might in fact have said. Maybe that’s why Ratigan was pushing so hard to stay on script, and maybe that’s why his ratings are so crap overall.

    While The Media Slept in 2008… New Evidence of Voter Intimidation?

    Politics is a nasty business, and quite often nasty things are happening in the background that we don’t find out about until “expose” books years later. Granted, the media image politicians project to the public is humanly impossible to be true, but that’s supposed to be what the media is for – finding where the bodies are buried, pulling the skeletons out of the closet, shining light into the dark corners and showing these people for who they really are.

    Often, however, this light needs to go out farther than the politicians and expose wrongdoings towards people that are happening in the name of politics. Gigi Gaston, a longtime Democratic supporter, has made a documentary called “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008″, is one such example. Her documentary exposes a number of occasions where people were blocked from voting for Hillary, either through hard manipulation (ex: questionable counts, or Black Panthers standing with batons in front of a polling station) or through soft intimidation (misdirection at the voting stations), and the clips I’ve seen so far are pretty disturbing.

    To be clear – they are not disturbing to me in an anti-Obama way or a pro-Hillary way, but in a pro-American way, a pro-First Amendment way, and in a pro media-do-your-frigging-job! way.

    I don’t care what network you are – a black civil rights activist being told she cannot vote for a non-black candidate of her choosing during the first election where a black man is actually running for President is NEWS. If not, then perhaps these sort of stories are ignored so as to not disturb the “chill” people (or the networks) have running down their legs, or their slobbering love affair with a more media-worthy candidate. Voters are allowed to be enamored by a candidate – the media should not be. Let’s see how they cover this documentary, if at all.

    The clips I’ve seen so far are from Fox News here and here at the documentary’s website. I look forward to watching the complete film.

    UPDATE:
    Also on the web today, I find this re: Al Franken and perhaps illegal felon voting.

    BP’s Internal Spin Job – Unbelievable!

    Watched this clip from the Colbert Report. I can’t believe (then again, I can) that a company would have the gall to try to put the largest ecological disaster in US history in a “positive” light. The practice is despicable, and it pains me to think of how much these spinsters are getting paid.