The Media's Graveyard Spin
One of the best pieces of advice I ever gave myself was, "Klavan, my boy, never be shocked by the same thing twice. And stop talking to yourself. It's weird." What I think I meant by this is that sometimes it's difficult to believe what's right in front of your own eyes--and yet, if you don't believe it, you never learn anything.
A case in point: I continue to find myself startled by the depth of the ideological corruption of the mainstream media; their determination to lie and obscure the truth in order to insure the triumph of their left wing point of view. I know this is happening. I see it happening. And yet, this story today in The Daily Caller made my jaw drop as if it came as some kind of surprise:
According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate [Obama]. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
Some of these people, I know, are openly leftist as, say, Andrew Breitbart is openly rightist. But Breitbart, notice, is always trying to get MORE information to the public, not obscure or block information the other side is getting out. Breitbart, in his own way, is a journalist. These idiots are the opposite of journalists. They should be fired to a one.
This comes on top of Bob Schieffer's shameful and unbelievable excuse for not asking the Attorney General about the New Black Panther scandal--the exact same excuse Charlie Gibson used for not reporting the ACORN scandal.
I can't believe I still find myself shocked by this. And yet... I am.
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Comments:
Jul '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Isn't this stuff known to everyone, Andrew? Yes, it is interesting to have it confirmed from time to time, but shocking? To be intellectually corrupt and ideologically engaged is now a condition of employment. Paul Greenberg, the Pultizer Prize winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had an interesting column on Sunday. That newspaper served in the past as a kind of good minor league club where journalists could get some seasoning before moving up. (Tucker Carlson is an example.) Greenberg related a conversation he had years ago with a new kid from Oberlin College who was well-mannered except in a casual conversation about some political subject where he had views (liberal of course; Oberlin indoctrinates them well). "We must crush that mindset," he said. That conversation has stuck with Greenberg since. The problem is systemic and endemic. FOX only manages to keep the oddly-named mainstream media only partially honest part of the time.
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Noooooooooo! Andrew, I was just about to post that! I'd already written about it!
I'm totally demoralized now.
I'm going home and I'm taking all my toys with me.
Jun '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
The predilection of the MSM, or One-Party Press (whatever it will be called) to lean and conspire with the left no longer shocks me; what does shock me is the willingness of people to continue to accept at face value what the MSM tells them. I don't remember the last poll results asking about trust in media, but I seem to recall that trust level being pretty low. People know that the MSM is slanted, yet they continue to accept the incomplete and/or biased reporting anyway. Perhaps it is because it takes a proactive effort to seek out information, versus the passive reception of whatever is being broadcast or printed by institutional media.
That's what scares me: a critical mass that knows they are receiving bogus or biased coverage, yet remain apathetic to seeking out additional facts.
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Ah, I knew I was racing someone for that post, Claire. Had I known it was you, I would have stepped aside like a gentleman. Maybe. I think.
Jun '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
A simple comparison of the MSM media coverage of the '00 campaign v. the '08 campaign is enough to completely discredit them with any fair minded observer. It is simply indefensible. (though I look forward to Conor's dissent)
In '08 the media deemed the 20 year relationship of Obama and Jeremiah Wright an irrelevant distraction in which the republicans were trying to 'swift boat' the Obama campaign.
A George W. Bush speech at Bob Jones University was deemed newsworthy enough in the '00 campaign to mentioned numerous times in every medium of media from February through the election in November.
When Bernie Goldberg's first book on media bias came out he repeatedly said that there was no conspiracy in how the media covered the right, they were just out of touch with where the center was. I disagreed with him then. I wonder what he thinks now?
May '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
This is not even so much about ideology, as it is about the complete abandonment of standards. In my soft-focus nostalgic view of the vanished land in which I grew up, liberals (though not out-and-out Marxists) felt at least somewhat constrained by larger moral, patriotic, and professional traditions. Now there are no standards, and they feel free to pursue their squalid passions with all the élan of Eliot Spitzer.
We really, really need new elites. Can't we just fire the ones we have?
May '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Journalism 101: Journalists are the gatekeepers, the arbiters of what's worthy for dissemination.
Except when you're caught lying and/or cheating.Like Stephen Glass (TNR), Janet Cooke (WaPost), Dan Rather and Mary Mapes (CBS), Jason Blair (NYT), Mitch Albom (The First 5 Plagerists you Meet in Hell), Mike Barnicle (rehabilitated by MSNBC?), Rick "Talented Interns" Bragg (NYT),....
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Leave it to media liberals to bring together everyone who ever called themselves a conservative. Andrew Sullivan is right:
I can't vouch for as many JournoListers as Andrew seems able to do. I know at least some are good, decent, fair-minded writers. But what went on on JournoList was, far too often, neither good, decent, nor fair-minded. And I mean less the salty language or passionate rhetoric than the -- shall we say -- epistemic closure. Formalized. Ritualized. Coordinated. Mobilized. And entirely secret by design. Anyone who lives and works in DC in the journobiz for any length of time knows well that an above-board culture of collegial cross-pollination and an off-the-record system of ad-hoc chat power almost everything that's written and said. As Andrew said: JournoList is different. JournoList is corrupt. And JournoList is wrong.
May '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
This particular Journolist incident seems to be the playing out of two phenomena. First, the default tendency towards the Left, of the educated. [Best summarized by Solzhenitsyn: "Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such a way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles...so do all forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left. Their sympathies always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments - but they feel disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right."]
Second, the principle that any group will forward the most radical position of any part of that group. Whereas these journalists - we all knew were leftists from the outset - might have individually run stories against various Republican ideas or candidates, under the sway of the 'List they decide, albeit informally, to destroy any random Obama critic with an explicitly un-evidenced charge of racism. It's a wonderful illustration of Establishment Opinion Journalism in action.
May '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Journo-list revelations are the equivalent to the climategate scandal. Persons that are supposedly working seperately,are found to be covertly meeting via the internet and fixing the information to manipulate the publics perception of the truth!
Just think of all the times you have wondered at the similarity of the press' views.I have a feeling this has been going on a long time in many forms.They just got caught this time!
New tech is cool!
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
Drew, I had never thought of it like that. But it's exactly right: what the Left hates about Breitbart is that he's always revealing things. He's always publicizing these awful and embarrassing moments. That's a crucial distinction: Breitbart is opening things up. The Journo-List gang were trying to shut things up.
May '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
"I'm glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun. I know many of its members are good and decent and fair-minded writers. But socialized groupthink is not the answer to what's wrong with the media. It's what's already wrong with the media."
...But has it disbanded or has it just run for another dark corner to hide what they are doing? There are many stories in the media that have the flavor of this same thing.No one can look at the healthcare vote coverage and not see that there was a strategy meeting between the democrat leadership and the press to start the attack on the tea party. They started the narrative that the tea party is racist to make us spend our time defending ourselves instead of attacking them.
Claire, you should still post your post on this. It should be the biggest story out there, plus I love reading everything write.
May '10
Re: The Media's Graveyard Spin
JournoList 2: the TownHouse Listserv? http://is.gd/dMD9C
How many of these things are there out there?