by Klaus Rohrich
September 7, 2004
When it comes to prominent democrats, the so-called mainstream media acts like the proverbial three monkeys, not hearing, seeing or telling the crimes and misdemeanours committed by their darlings. It’s long been debated whether there is or isn’t bias in the media, a point hardly worth debating.
What is worthy of debate is the imbalance in reporting that we see on an almost daily basis and much of the media’s insistence that its reporting is objective. There is something inherently disingenuous in media members insisting that they are unbiased, while at the same time their materials take on a decidedly leftists slant.
The current presidential election in the U.S. is a good example. When Bill Clinton was running for and in office, service in the military didn’t appear to be an issue. "So the guy was a draft-dodger. So what?" The media kept insisting. Now service in the military seems to be extremely important, as the Democrat candidate has assumed the persona of war hero. The ridiculous assertions by people like Michael Moore and Howard Dean that George W. Bush was a deserter are reported ad nauseum, despite the fact that they are completely unfounded. The approach that’s being taken on Bush’s service record is akin to arresting someone on a murder charge and then making them prove they are innocent.
Similarly, the notion that "Bush lied, people died" (reminds one of the sheep in George Orwell’s animal Farm) has found huge credence among print and television journalists. again, the facts do not jibe with the accusations. When Bush talked about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction during his 2004 "State of the Union" address, he was citing intelligence reports from several intelligence services, including Britain’s MI5. Yet the mainstream media faithfully repeats the mantra again and again, as if it were the gospel truth. Curiously, that same media was totally mum when Clinton used Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to lob cruise missiles into Baghdad.
When former ambassador Joe Wilson claimed Bush lied about Iraq’s attempt to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger, the media gobbled it up like starving chickens in a feeding frenzy. Later it was determined that Wilson himself was the real liar and you barely heard a word from that very same media. But the damage to Bush had already been done, and that’s all that seems to matter.
In contrast, Bill Clinton’s lies to a Grand Jury and then to a federal judge under oath were excused because, after all, it was only about sex.
On the other side of the coin, anyone questioning John Kerry’s record is accused of character assassination or dirty tricks by the media. Pointing out that Kerry has consistently voted against most major military initiatives, be they the B-1 bomber, the B-2 bomber, the apache helicopter, etc. results in being accused of waging dirty politics, because Kerry served in Vietnam. Kerry’s actions upon his return from Vietnam has upset a lot of veterans, many of whom served with him. However, when they let their views be known, they become "Republican stooges" and Bush supporters.
Recently the National Right to Life Committee sent out a press release detailing their stand on abortion. They received a stinging rebuke in the form of an e-mail from Reuters' Washington editor Todd Eastham: "What's your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. all that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?" The e-mail did not originate from Eastham’s personal e-mail account, but from his Reuters' account. again, an example of media bias toward anything or anyone conservative.
Perhaps the prizewinner for biased reporting will be Harper’s Magazine editor, Lewis Lapham, who ranted about the speeches at the Republican National Convention. In a tedious essay on what he calls "the Republican propaganda mill" Lapham lumps "the Right" into a huge amorphous ball consisting of " the Catholic conservatives with the Jewish neoconservatives, the libertarians with the authoritarians, the evangelical nationalists with the paranoid monetarists, Pat Robertson with the friends of the Ku Klux Klan." He sees the Republicans as a vast conspiracy against decency and concludes that being conservative is equal to being stupid. Hmm, where have we heard that before?
But the crowning piece of narcissistic egotism is the passage below, where Lapham talks about the speeches that were given at the Convention:
The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the american political circus?"
While the passage is well written and interesting, there is one small problem: the critique of the speeches was written long before the Republican National Convention actually took place or any speeches were given. How did he do that?
Is the conservative media biased? Without a doubt, but they do not make a great pretense of being unbiased. Read the National Review and you will note that they are unabashedly and proudly conservative and they do not mind letting their readers know. Same with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, anne Coulter and a score of similar media people.
But there is something very basically amiss when the chief sources of information in North america carry a bias disguised as objectivity. How else could they consider Michael Moore’s movies as "documentaries"? How else could they hawk proven lies and ignore glaring errors?
There is nothing wrong with having opinions. However, when those opinions are disguised as "news" and the "news" is shaped to adhere to an agenda, we risk the loss of our democracy as a cabal of an unscrupulous elite influences our decisions inside the voting booth.