My Worried Musings on Media Bias

From personal experience and from conversations with others, it's clear that if you want to write for major publications, you are wise to conform to The Narrative: "Women good; men bad. Minorities good; men bad---More redistribution needed " 

Dare you stray from The Narrative, the iron curtain of censorship will likely slam down on your fingers. Here is a recent example of today's McCarthyism from the Left: The author, a Harvard graduate and former Wall Street Journal editor, dared question the value of the Black Studies major. She got fired Monday.

Not only writers believe the media is biased. A The Hill poll of 1,000 likely voters found that 68% consider the news media biased, with more than twice as many respondents believing the bias is leftward. Worse, 57%  believe the news media is somewhat or very unethical while only 39 percent see them as somewhat or very ethical.  In a Gallup poll, only 26% rated journalists' ethics high or very high. 27% rated them as low or very low.

And UCLA, no bastion of conservative thought, conducted a rigorous study that found that the media indeed is clearly leftist-biased.

The media exerts its liberal bias in ways other than censorship, for example, a double-standard. Recall, for instance, how the media destroyed Newt Gingrich by relentlessly reminding us of an old affair and by making exaggerated claims of his pomposity while giving Obama a free pass on his hubristic certitude that massive debt increases and redistributive "justice" is wise.  When George Bush decided  "No New Taxes"was unwise, the media excoriated him as a flip-flopper. Yet when Obama changed from being against gay marriage to for it, the media extolled him.

The media also gives Obama free passes on Big Lies. For example, he forced taxpayers to spend $60 billion to bail out GM, a company that makes inferior cars, and he now claims that has paid off. In fact, GM's stock price has plummeted from 34 before the bailout to 22 as of this writing. The breakeven point is 53.  

A broader example: Obama claims he's bringing the economy back.  Well, see this chart. (Do note that the chart does not provide sources.) Obama bragged relentlessly about millions of shovel-ready jobs that weren't, yet the media has pretty much ignored that inconvenient fiction. Articles calling Obama to account are relegated to little-read conservative websites. For example, this article by a Pulitzer Prize nominee points out that the taxpayer will have spent $1 million for EACH job created by Obama's "stimulus" spending.

The media gave Obama a free pass for saying the U.S. has 57 states while destroying Dan Quayle for misspelling "potato." The media endlessly trumpets Rush Limbaugh's drug problem but when Edward Kennedy admitted to being an alcoholic and womanizer, it was downplayed, now brushed aside as ancient history.

The media exerts its bias in infinite other ways, including the subtle. For example, when George Bush was president, the media so often called him "Bush," whereas they mainly call Obama "The President."  The media has adopted the Left's focus-group-tested self-descriptor "progressive" rather than "liberal." After all, "liberal" implies (correctly) a tendency to overspend, whereas "progressive" has a positive connotation. Who could be against progress? Regressives?

The Left has appropriated the lion's share of society's mind-molding vehicles: the schools, colleges, and media. Fox News and conservative talk radio have but a sliver of society's mindshare, especially among the intelligentsia.  

Not all wisdom resides left of center but, because the media relentlessly swings its censorship scythe, I cannot envision a plausible scenario that would bring the public to question The Narrative.  

And The Narrative so warrants questioning.

Five years after writing this, in Feb. 2017, I created a little video presenting my current views on media bias. HERE is the link.