Are you ashamed of the biased presidential coverage?

We were in a decent-size Southern city during the 2004 DNC, and I had to buy an out-of-town paper (same state, and about the same size circulation) to get more than one page of coverage per day. It wasn't that I expected a paper in that red state to treat John Kerry's nomination like the birth of Christ, I just wanted quantity, not validation. We were in the same city last year and a guy we visited, a friend of my father-in-law's, described the first paper as a "liberal rag." I thought it was very funny, because where I live, that paper would be considered reactionary to the point of parody. You know, we have to consider the source of complaints. A lot of people nowadays tune into radio and TV where they are guaranteed to hear nothing that disagrees with their viewpoint, ever. And just because that audience bitches a lot doesn't mean it's right. They aren't objective and we do have to weigh that.

 

Word for word, the best analysis yet I've read on this column.

 

Of course consumers don't often make a good distinction between news reporting and column writing or opinions. That's a given. I don't think that's what the discussion was. I thought we were talking about deciphering bias in political reporting that is fed to the public as unbiased. Sure there are those who don't see through it, but you can't throw a blanket over the entire public on the subject. There are plenty of people out there who recognize hints of bias in reporting. It doesn't have to be thinly-veiled cheerleading to be obvious. A smidge of credit for Joe Average, please.

 

But as j-mac said, what exactly is the bias? Is it that there are more stories being written about one side than the other? Is it that the stories being written about one side are overwhelmingly positive and stories being written about the other side are overwhelmingly negative (and if so, is that the fault of the reporter or is that what's actually happening -- i.e., a team that is 1-9 is going to have a lot more negative stories written than a team that is 9-1)?

What exactly is the bias here?

 

Um, no. The Ghost-Obama was hung in a tree in a front yard and wasn't taken down until the police forced the man to.

In any case, it still doesn't make it right.

 

Columns/talking-head opinion shows are a different animal. More to the point, do you think the straight news reporting in this political season has been essentially objective? I get that we are all shaped by our own experiences, yada yada ... The bigger picture is whether or not the media can be trusted to deliver the news without a slant (and I don't mean a perceived slant like everyone here is talking about - I'm talking intent here). I don't have all the answers. I just know that from a straight trust standpoint, I would feel better-informed if I went back to 1975 and watched Cronkite in black and white than I do today, bouncing around three dozen news channels shoveling ticker blurbs and rhetoric disguised as reporting down my throat.

 

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh103008.shtml

 

Really? He's not assuming anything. He notices a trend and then gives his guess as to why.

 

That's another great question (although we still haven't resolved what 'bias' is yet):

Is this a newspaper problem? Or a television problem? Is it both?

 

His first assumption is that there's bias. Then he provides a series of further assumptions to bolster his first.

There's no evidence in the piece to corroborate any of the assumptions.

 

Give me one example of a straight news story that's biased. If it's so prevalent, then it'll be easy to find, right?

 

Since it's so prevalent, I figured we'd have hundreds of examples by now.