Since I don't watch cable news, LR, and get nearly all my dope from the internet, I couldn't say just how biased CNN and MSNBC broadcasts are these days. I do get a good bit of news from MSNBC.com, but MSNBC.com also functions as an aggregator (i.e. a good number of the stories are credited to AP, Reuters, or various newspapers and magazines like the NYT and Newsweek).
For that matter, in all honesty I can't say if Fox News has cleaned up their act, but the clips I've seen and the odd items I've read on their website suggests the answer is a resounding "no."
I've frankly found that most right-wing complaints about MSM bias tend to be unfounded and sometimes even bizarre. If you want to see what left-wing bias looks like, I suggest you read Salon or Mother Jones or even a center-left web publication like Slate. Typical complaints about liberalism in the MSM almost inevitably seem to come up when a news outlet declines to accept an offical party line from a Republican White House or catches a Republican engaging in malfeasance (somehow the accusations of bias don't seem to crop up when a Democrat is under scrutiny for corruption; instead the right-wingers forget it ever happened, since coverage of Jane Harman or Jesse Jackson, Jr. or William Jefferson or William Clinton, or criticisms of then-Senator Hillary Clinton by Chris Matthews et al. obviously flies in the face of the "victim narrative" adopted by many upon the American right).
And I'll even say something else that will probably piss some people off: I suspect that truth spins left. As an example: it was largely the right that favored the former Pentagon policy of not displaying soldiers' coffins, and mostly the left that felt that soldiers' coffins were news (or at the very least, not a secret); the coffins coming home are themselves a fact, as is the fact that American soldiers are dying abroad. Whatever conclusions (if any) one draws from these facts, they are what they are, and so one has to wonder why there were those on the right who appeared to be embarrassed by the facts. Maybe I should put it another way, then: perhaps it's not that truth spins left, but that the American right has had a strong and baffling tendency to be anti-fact over much of the past several decades.
One more point on the partisan issue, LR: there is at keast one area in which you are right that the MSM media has definitely been biased. The MSM has often been so desperate to appear non-partisan that they've left themselves open to exploitation by unscrupulous men like Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer and Karl Rove. What happens is that the MSM frequently feels obligated to offer "both points of view" in situations where, in fact, there actually aren't two points of view. So the MSM gives space to somebody to present an "alternative" point-of-view that results in credulous reporting of unfounded or even bizarre assertions as if they're matters of fact.
The MSM doesn't just do this in their political coverage: they're especially prone to doing this in "science" stories, e.g. offering anti-vaccination proponents a platform for blatheration in the interest of "fairness."
That's not to say that their aren't subjects that are debatable: abortion, for instance, invites a multitude of opinions (all of which may be right to varying degrees, unfortunately).
But, for instance, there is really no room for debating whether or not waterboarding is torture--people might disagree on the effectiveness of torture, the morality of torture, the legality of torture, the politics of torture--but putting on a Bush Administration apologist to give "equal time" to the proposition that waterboarding isn't what it's been described as since at least the Spanish Inquisition is a kind of inverted partisanship. The people who agree waterboarding is torture are liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians, centrists, neo-conservatives, et al.; the only people who say it isn't are partisan flacks, many of whom are directly tied to those who authorized the acts being discussed.
(Ack--I hate homonym errors. Stupid lack of an editing function in Blogger. Currrrses.)
Leanright said…
You didn't upset me stating that the "truth spins left"; I would completely expect that opinion for you, as you would probably expect the opposite of me.
It's not "THE" truth, it's "YOUR" truth (or MY truth for that matter) that we are ultimately talking about. You are a very intelligent, and well-read and educated person, but the left doesn't have a monopoly on wisdom; there is plenty on both sides to go around.
Comments
I like your call on Fox News...They could totally be committed to unbiased, non-partisan "reporting" like CNN or MSNBC.
Come on Eric.. Be honest about it. CNN and MSNBC are as partisan on the left as Fox is on the right.
For that matter, in all honesty I can't say if Fox News has cleaned up their act, but the clips I've seen and the odd items I've read on their website suggests the answer is a resounding "no."
I've frankly found that most right-wing complaints about MSM bias tend to be unfounded and sometimes even bizarre. If you want to see what left-wing bias looks like, I suggest you read Salon or Mother Jones or even a center-left web publication like Slate. Typical complaints about liberalism in the MSM almost inevitably seem to come up when a news outlet declines to accept an offical party line from a Republican White House or catches a Republican engaging in malfeasance (somehow the accusations of bias don't seem to crop up when a Democrat is under scrutiny for corruption; instead the right-wingers forget it ever happened, since coverage of Jane Harman or Jesse Jackson, Jr. or William Jefferson or William Clinton, or criticisms of then-Senator Hillary Clinton by Chris Matthews et al. obviously flies in the face of the "victim narrative" adopted by many upon the American right).
And I'll even say something else that will probably piss some people off: I suspect that truth spins left. As an example: it was largely the right that favored the former Pentagon policy of not displaying soldiers' coffins, and mostly the left that felt that soldiers' coffins were news (or at the very least, not a secret); the coffins coming home are themselves a fact, as is the fact that American soldiers are dying abroad. Whatever conclusions (if any) one draws from these facts, they are what they are, and so one has to wonder why there were those on the right who appeared to be embarrassed by the facts. Maybe I should put it another way, then: perhaps it's not that truth spins left, but that the American right has had a strong and baffling tendency to be anti-fact over much of the past several decades.
One more point on the partisan issue, LR: there is at keast one area in which you are right that the MSM media has definitely been biased. The MSM has often been so desperate to appear non-partisan that they've left themselves open to exploitation by unscrupulous men like Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer and Karl Rove. What happens is that the MSM frequently feels obligated to offer "both points of view" in situations where, in fact, there actually aren't two points of view. So the MSM gives space to somebody to present an "alternative" point-of-view that results in credulous reporting of unfounded or even bizarre assertions as if they're matters of fact.
The MSM doesn't just do this in their political coverage: they're especially prone to doing this in "science" stories, e.g. offering anti-vaccination proponents a platform for blatheration in the interest of "fairness."
That's not to say that their aren't subjects that are debatable: abortion, for instance, invites a multitude of opinions (all of which may be right to varying degrees, unfortunately).
But, for instance, there is really no room for debating whether or not waterboarding is torture--people might disagree on the effectiveness of torture, the morality of torture, the legality of torture, the politics of torture--but putting on a Bush Administration apologist to give "equal time" to the proposition that waterboarding isn't what it's been described as since at least the Spanish Inquisition is a kind of inverted partisanship. The people who agree waterboarding is torture are liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians, centrists, neo-conservatives, et al.; the only people who say it isn't are partisan flacks, many of whom are directly tied to those who authorized the acts being discussed.
It's not "THE" truth, it's "YOUR" truth (or MY truth for that matter) that we are ultimately talking about. You are a very intelligent, and well-read and educated person, but the left doesn't have a monopoly on wisdom; there is plenty on both sides to go around.