You know, it's funny to me. I used to post over at "Ace of Spades" several years ago, and my number one point was about Media manipulating our elections through biased or false news and censorship of information damaging to Democrats.
People thought I was too hard on the News people, and eventually I quit arguing with them.
For the last couple of months I peek in there ever so often and what do I find? I find them frothing mad about how the media keeps manipulating the political landscape through biased or false news, and censorship of information damaging to Democrats.
It took them awhile, but they finally realized on their own that what I was telling them was in fact the most serious problem currently facing America today.
I guess some people have to get beat in the head often enough with an obvious stick before they finally recognize what is happening.
Anyone who grew up in an ethnically diverse area should have noticed that the description of perpetrators often went right down to the shoes they wore, but conveniently left out the race, at least often enough that the absence of the inclusion of a racial demographic indicator was in and of itself an indicator that the perpetrator was black.
The whole "Amish" thing at TOS was started in response to the absence of such characteristics in descriptions of perpetrators, even if the suspect was still at large.
Then, when names were left out, often those names were Arabic sounding (at the least).
If a politician was being gigged over something--especially a heinous criminal act, if they were a Republican, it was in the first line of the story, if not the headline. If a Democrat, that affiliation was not to be found or buried near the end, and then only for stories that could not themselves be buried.
What may have started as denial on the part of individual writers, however, has become an endemic trait of the industry. More can often be correctly deduced from a story by what is NOT said, which dogs didn't bark, and what is actively downplayed. If something happens in your town and the FBI pops in within the hour and says it isn't an act of terrorism, you can just about bet your sweet bippie terrorism is suspected.
That level of deception and bias is so commonplace in the Liberal Media, that everyone thought FOX was right-wing for being (more accurately) "fair and balanced". They were, in fact, middle of the road, for the most part. They even had a liberal or two giving opinions (Williams, Bolling, et al).
Were the problem comes in, though is where people don't notice such things, and many don't, either because they conform to their own bias, they aren't thinking about what is actually being said, or they are incapable of critical thought. It is equally risky to jump to conclusions based on counter bias learned from innumerable instances of the media downplaying or ignoring salient facts.
Perhaps the gold standard was "It's just about sex." accompanied by winks on national network news, referring to the (then) POTUS's perjury and obstruction of justice, not to mention using an intern for personal gratification; behaviour which would have had any CEO on the planet summarily sacked by the close of the next workday, but charges the Left would gladly have tossed Richard Nixon out for, well the first two, anyway. There was no indication of intern abuse in the Nixon White House, nor infidelity, nor quibbling over the meaning of "is". Ironically, an overzealous Hillary Rodham Clinton was pursuing Nixon's ouster on nearly equal charges when she lost that job. Not even Fox would touch that.
Instead the press lauded her for standing by her man, and taking one for the 'team' even though she wasn't the one taking one, and ever covered her tracks after that, though they'd buried the FBI files story, some of the Rose Law Firm goodies, Whitewater, and cattle trading long before.
Had Clinton faced a press with the vigor for heads on pikes they displayed during Watergate, whoever ran as a Republican for POTUS would have faced a different challenger, possibly following a different Democrat (because that one got a pass in even more ways than HRC and Bubba).
Yes, the bias is important, more so than ever. But it has ever been more important to be kingmaker than king, and the press has appointed itself the role.
