Half empty, or half full?
While duly noting the areas in which he received apositive reception, NPR's coverage of President Bush's speech before the NAACP convention yesterday seemed- not surprisingly, given NPR's ill-concealed political agenda- to focus on the rough spots.
John Dickerson has a different focus- and a more hopeful one, for everyone concerned.
HT: Real Clear Politics
John Dickerson has a different focus- and a more hopeful one, for everyone concerned.
HT: Real Clear Politics
Comments
That agenda would be to choose news stories, the people to interview, the questions to ask, and the angle to pursue on each story with as much attention to putting the Bush administration and social conservatism in as bad a light as possible, while making the most extreme left-wing nonsense as plausible as it can. It has to do with allowing ideology to drive your definition of the very issues, and the way in which you choose to go about reporting them.
If you think that dryness and a systematic approach (hard to be Socratic with nobody to answer you, and especially when you carefully choose those you interview to present confirm your own biases and discredit those who disagree) to presenting its distortions indicates a lack of bias, your contact with reality is even more tenuous than your assertion that facts can be "biased-" especially in favor of an ideology whose essense is to deny them whenever and wherever they are inconvenient, while striving to suppress all opinion which does not fit its own orthodoxy.
Fox was founded because of one of those inconvenient facts, documented beyond challenge over and over and over again: between two-thirds and three-quarters of those who write and report the news are liberal Democrats, and- inevitably- the result is that the news is presented through a lense of ideological distortion.
No deep, dark liberal plots required here, Sam. When the same ideology is shared by the overwhelming majority of those who report the news, its distortion in such a way as to reflect that ideology is inevitable, even with all the integrity and good intentions in the world.
Is Fox biased? Sure- although it's far more consciencious in its determination to present both sides than most of the media. You see, it's aware of its own biases- and thus seeks far more conscienciously than the oblivious folks at, say, NPR to make sure that at least both sides are presented. One of the most interesting features of this entire issue is the degree to which liberals are, on one hand, so fixated on Fox's comparatively balanced coverage, and on the other so unreflectively oblivious to the demonstrable bias of the overwhelming majority of the media which happens to shares your own bias.
Pretty much what one would expect of somebody who thinks that "the facts are liberally biased."
NPR is one of the most consistently distortive of the liberal media, the inability and unwillingness of you folks on the Left to examine or recognize your own biases doesn't change that.
I think that an unbiased party (if there were such) who read your comment and my response, however, would immediately recognize as one of the most basic differences between us my willingness to examine not only my own biases and those of the people who disagree with me, and your inability to even recognize your own. And I think that unbiased observer would also recognize the same general difference between those who hold my perspective and yours.
And, by the way, between, say, Fox News and NPR.