by Klaus Rohrich
February 24, 2005
We are now in the 12th year of the Liberals' rule and it's beginning to feel more like a dynasty than a government. I don't often encounter people who tell me that they like the Liberals or that they voted for them or that they agree with anything they do. Over the past decade, there have been scandals plaguing the party that appear to be too numerous to recount here, but suffice it to say that they provide ample evidence that Liberals are helping themselves to taxpayers' money to achieve self-enhancing goals and abusing power. Yet election after election they manage to get back in.
It occurred to me that one of the reasons they manage to do so is that they have a powerful ally in the so-called mainstream media, which allows them to cover up their misdeeds or mitigate their severity if they can't be hidden. Like their U.S. counterpart, Canada's mainstream media is largely left leaning and will do anything, no matter how unsavory to ensure that the federal government does not fall into conservative hands.
What's amazing to me is that the leftists media deny their biases with a straight face, assuming that their extremist views are really mainstream. This appears to be one of the reasons why 66 percent of all Canadians are "homophobic bigots" in preferring to maintain the traditional definition of marriage.
The National Post's Barbara Kay recently wrote an article about authoritarian leftist orthodoxy in our universities which was met by several writers of the so-called mainstream media with exclamations of "so, what?" and "Get used to it!" In reading some of these responses I wondered what would happen if a university professor refused to give passing grades to his students because they were in favour of same-sex marriage or because they were feminists. I think it's a safe bet that the screams of outrage would demand immediate dismissal of said professor. For evidence of this double standard look no further than the flap at Harvard, caused by none less than the school's president, Lawrence Summers, when he mused about the innate differences between males and females.
Yet it appears to be perfectly okay to discriminate against students who voice conservative opinions to the extent of affecting their future ability to make a living.
I recently acquired a book entitled and That's The Way It Isn't by Brent Bozell III and Brent H. Baker, which is billed as a reference guide to media bias. What I found amazing about this book was not the fact that the media carries a left/liberal bias, but the extent to which their bias puts them outside the mainstream. In the early 1980s, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, of the Centre for Media affairs, and Dr. Stanley Rothman, Mary Gamble Huggins, Professor of Government at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., conducted an exhaustive study of attitudes and beliefs held by the so-called media elite. Through personal interviews and questionnaires, the two ascertained that of these elite (i.e. writers for the New York Times, Washington Post and major television network reporters) some 90 percent were pro-abortion, 80 percent favoured affirmative action and a large majority were of the belief that third world poverty was a direct result of actions taken by the U.S. Between 80 percent and 90 percent voted Democratic in all U.S. presidential elections since 1964. Over half believe that the government should guarantee jobs and reduce the income gap between the wealthy and the poor. In citing sources for news stories about welfare reform, 75 percent of reporters used liberal sources. Similarly when writing about the environment, 69 percent used environmental activists as sources. Stories on nuclear energy cited anti-nuke activists 55 percent of the time, while they cited technical journals only 40 percent of the time. I think you get the picture.
In the debate leading up to the CRTC's decision to allow the Fox News Network to be offered to Canadian Cable and satellite TV viewers, an article in McLean's Magazine was so unabashedly one-sided in condemning Fox News that it was almost embarrassing to read. With the heading Rude and rabidly pro-Bush, Fox News is aiming North. Is Canada ready for loudmouth TV? the author of the piece, Charlie Gillis, flippantly dismisses Fox News as a rabid, right-wing, neo-con, pro-war, anti-everything-that's-good organization that would leave Canada better off if it weren't allowed to air its poisonous views here. So much for freedom of the press or expression.
What galls me to no end is that the leftist media do not consider themselves leftist. They constantly portray themselves as being middle of the road moderates and balanced, a fact that was proven by Lichter and Rothman's questionnaires, wherein the majority of respondents classified themselves as middle of the road.
Now I know that you are probably scratching your head in wonder. If the majority of people are not in agreement with the media's bias, why do they, as voters, continue to do their bidding? The media's power has been formidable throughout history. There is no doubt that at one time the bias of most media was toward the conservative end of the spectrum. How else could individuals like Sen. Joe McCarthy destroy so many lives? Yet that very media came back at McCarthy and managed to destroy him. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the media gradually began to acquire a liberal orientation and because media outlets began to extend their reach through new media, like television, the liberal viewpoint gradually assumed a greater mantle of orthodoxy, where today, media personalities don't realize they are to the left of the mainstream.
The news media is assisted by their kissing cousins in Hollywood in lending credence to their distorted views. The majority of media outlets today ardently pursue the 18-49 year old demographic. This group will ultimately emerge as a lot more liberal than their current forbearers because they are inundated with liberal messages from the time they are pre-schoolers.
and that's how and why the Liberals will continue to rule Canada for what will likely be a long time. The research cited above was based on the U.S. media. The Canadian Media has an even more decidedly left/lib slant than any found in the U.S. In last year's election, the cry of the mainstream media seemed to be "Vote for the thieves, not the fascists!" In listening to and reading the mainstream media, it did not seem to matter what the Conservatives did or said, it was ultimately always cast in its worst possible light. The opposite held true for the Liberals, whose inept, unprincipled and scandal-plagued history was all but forgotten.
ascertaining the attitudes of Canadians as a whole, it is clear that the Canadian media is totally out of step with the mainstream. The only part of the country that even comes close to reflecting beliefs and attitudes similar to the mainstream Canadian media is Ontario, and this is largely limited to the Greater Toronto area.
"J' accuse!" cried Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair, taking the French army to task over its shabby treatment of alfred Dreyfus. The same might well be shouted at the mainstream press in helping to keep Canada in the hands of far left politicians.