In what has to be one of the most fabulous pieces of propaganda ever published with a straight face in the last, I don’t know, week, David Carr of THE NEW YORK TIMES says there’s no liberal-left media bias in how Obama and Romney are being covered by the mainstream media because Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are all right-wingers.
Well, when you think of mainstream journalism, naturally, these are the first folks who come to mind.
As opposed to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, et al. There’s FOX, of course, which is the one real antidote to the rest of what’s on television when it comes to political drift. And there’s the Wall Street Journal, which as Carr points out, has the largest circulation of any paper in the country. But here’s a list of the papers with the biggest circ numbers—how many have conservative editorial pages? (As for the political leanings of the reporters, anyone done a poll? Which way does it skew? Wanna take a guess?)
And by the way, the fact that there are conservative voices on radio and cable does not prove that the Times, CBS, NBC, and others are not favoring Obama. It simply means there are conservative voices on radio and cable. As for whether digital is surpassing print in how most people get their news — don’t all those outlets have an online presence? And doesn’t that work against the argument that Rush and Michael Savage are the real driving forces here?
Now the fact that a paper has a bias in its editorial pages, or even among its reporters, does not necessarily mean its coverage of events is cooked. It can be self-conscious about its tendencies and seek to provide balance. You know, like the New York T—sorry…couldn’t get that out…
Let me offer this as a final rebuttal to Mr. Carr:
When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects. [emphasis emphasized]
Who wrote that? Bill O’Reilly? Laura Ingraham? No, it was the ombudsman of…the New York Times, writing in August of 2012.
Note to Mr. Carr: I believe that you guys don’t huddle in a room every morning and conspire to put out a message. If you did, you wouldn’t sound this stupid.
