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How could they get it so wrong? Were they misreading things? Interviewing the wrong people? Were there research methods flawed?

The Media Exposed…Again



The first presidential race that I remember growing up is the 1980 race between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. I was more interested in other things at the time, but my parents talked about it incessantly. They felt that Carter was possibly the worst president of the 20th Century, and they desperately hoped that Ronald Reagan would win the election and bring true leadership back to America.

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But things didn’t look good. According to the nightly news, Reagan was not doing well. Despite low economic growth, high interest rates and inflation, and the Iran hostage crisis, Carter seemed to be winning. Reagan was widely thought to be too old, too conservative, and not nearly bright enough to win the race. Imagine my parents surprise, then, when he beat Jimmy Carter handily, carrying all but five states and the District of Columbia. Four years later, I was old enough to vote and actually paid attention to presidential politics. This time Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, and again things didn’t look good for Reagan. The newspaper and the nightly news were filled with stories of Reagan’s liabilities, and the strides Mondale was making towards winning the election. By election eve, things looked grim; I cast my vote and then went home to watch the returns. Once again, I was surprised to see a vastly different outcome from that forecast by the news: Reagan won an amazing 49 of the 50 states, one of the biggest landslides in history. I remember thinking how odd it was that the news painted such a different picture from what had actually happened on Election Day. How could they get it so wrong? Were they misreading things? Interviewing the wrong people? Were there research methods flawed? It wasn’t until I was in college that I first heard another explanation for this: “liberal media bias.” I worked construction during the summers, and my boss listened to a guy on talk radio named Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was always complaining about liberal bias in the media. It was a novel concept, but it made sense. Of course, since my college days it has become painfully clear just exactly how biased the mainstream media is. I watched Dan Rather tear into George H. W. Bush about Iran Contra, but soft-peddle his questions to Bill Clinton. I remember the Newsweek cover titled, “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” when the Republicans took over the Congress in 1994. I’ve seen everybody from Barbara Walters to Katie Couric paint Republicans as greedy, mean-spirited monsters who want to steal the free lunches from inner-city kids so they can give the money to their fiendish CEO friends. I think everybody today admits that the mainstream media has a clear-cut liberal bias—everybody, that is, but the mainstream media. They have fought this idea since Limbaugh started saying in back in the 80s—and even before then, such as in the 70s when Edith Efron showed that network news coverage of the 1968 election was slanted as much as 16 to 1 against Richard Nixon. Numerous studies since have documented this bias, but each time the media has found some way to discredit the study as part of what Hillary might call the “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” Recently a new study was released that confirms once again the mainstream media liberal bias. But this study was conducted by the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government—hardly a part of the right-wing conspiracy. The study examined 1,742 presidential campaign stories from January to May of 2007 (as the 2008 U.S. presidential season was heating up) in 48 print, online, network TV, cable, and radio news outlets. Among other things, it found that Democrats got more coverage than Republicans (49% to 31%) and that the tone of the coverage was more positive for Democrats (35% positive) than for Republicans (26% positive). The differences were even more pronounced for the biggest name candidates. Barack Obama’s coverage was 70% positive (9% negative), and Hillary Clinton’s was 61% positive (13% negative). By contrast, 40% of the stories on the top Republicans were negative, and only 26% were positive.

Ever shrinking influence of the mainstream media with the rise of the Internet, AM radio, and Fox News

Of course, you’ll find no mention of this study in the mainstream media itself. Since the study was released, only about 20 news stories nationwide have mentioned it—which sort of confirms the study itself. This is troubling. It’s troubling that the press, which holds a place of sacred honor within the U.S. political system—protected by the Constitution in the same amendment that protects freedoms of speech, assembly, government petition, and religion—is in fact NOT an unbiased outlet of information, but is instead largely a Democratic propaganda machine. The good news for us conservatives is that Nixon won in 1968 despite the 16 to 1 news bias against him, and Reagan won handily in 1980 and 1984 despite numerous attempts by the press to paint a different picture. And given the ever shrinking influence of the mainstream media with the rise of the Internet, AM radio, and Fox News, we can be confident that the press will continue to be largely unsuccessful in swaying public opinion.


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Mike Jensen -- Bio and Archives

Mike Jensen is a freelance writer living in Colorado.  He received his M.A. in Professional Writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he wrote his first book, Alaska’s Wilderness Highway.  He has since published Skier’s Guide to Utah along with humor, travel, and political articles for various magazines and newspapers.  He is married with five sons, and spends his free time at a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies.


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