Media / Media Bias

From Bush to Benedict; the media just doesn’t get it

By arthur Weinreb

Friday, april 22, 2005

The problems that are inherent in the mainstream elite media go well beyond the common assertion that they have a left wing or liberal bias. The reality is that much of the slanted reporting that goes on is not the result of a conscious bias but stems from the fact that the media just cannot understand anyone whose thinking differs from their own.

Immediately upon releasing the fact that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was chosen to be the 265^th pope, you would expect the media to calmly and rationally start to go into the background of the man who had just become Pope Benedict XVI. While some of the media did just that, others (most notably MSNBC and Canada’s CBC) became preoccupied with the fact, obviously distressing to them, that the new pope was another "conservative". They went on and on about how Pope Benedict’s assumption of the papacy would result in not seeing women or married priests in the near future. These same elites also bemoaned the fact that the pope who was following Pope John Paul II, a white European, was also a white European.

This notion that the next pope should have been a liberal and that a black african or Latin american should have followed a Polish-born pope was nothing more than a creation of the media. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that the need for a more liberal pope or a pope of a different ethnic background was a major consideration for the 115 Cardinals who met to select the new pope. The shock and dismay of some of the media elites resulted not from any bias as such, but from the fact that they simply cannot understand anyone whose viewpoint differs from their own.

It was no different during the last U.S. election. While the secular media might be forgiven for not understand how the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church think, there is no excuse for not being able to read the pulse of the american public. Many in the media were shocked at the re-election of George W. Bush. Holed up in their liberal conclaves of New York or Washington, the media simply had no idea what ordinary americans were thinking or why, in this age of terrorist threats, the majority of ordinary voters wanted to keep Bush in the White House. all the media could come up with is that somehow a bunch of right wing conservative Christians were responsible for the defeat of the man who should have been king, er president — John Kerry.

Bias is one thing; ignorance of what they are reporting is quite another.

and…

Between the time that the Cardinals began their conclave and the time the new pope was chosen, most news networks continually displayed a live shot of the chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel on part of the screen. The picture was large enough to be a distraction and small enough to prevent viewers from seeing the colour of the smoke when it did in fact emerge. The colour of the smoke was difficult to discern at the best of times and as soon as the smoke emerged, the networks all went to a full picture anyway.

There hasn’t been anything as exciting as the smokeless chimney on television since CNN showed constant shots of water while waiting for authorities to recover John F. Kennedy Jr’s downed plane.