"Why do people choose the substitute over God himself? Probably the most important reason is that it obviates accountability to God. We can meet idols on our own terms because they are our own creations. They are safe, predictable, and controllable; they are, in Jeremiah's colorful language, the 'scarecrows in a cornfield' (10:5). They are portable and completely under the user's control. They offer nothing like the threat of a God who thunders from Sinai and whose providence in this world so often appears to us to be incomprehensible and dangerous . . . [People] need face only themselves. That is the appeal of idolatry."
- David F. Wells
Saturday, November 22, 2008
A little late, but somewhat refreshing:
Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.It's an interesting article. The usual excuses are brought up by those who disagree. Obama was interesting. "We love things that are smart".
"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."
Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.
"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."
The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin
Because Obama's campaign was generally so well run, he argued, the press tended to applaud even his negative tactics.I hope that in 2010 and 2012, the press gets back to its more honorable roots, and learns to report the news fairly and without bias. A free press is indispensable.
"We'll scold you for being negative," Heilemann said, "but if it seems to be working, the tone of your coverage becomes more positive."
Note: I'm speaking of the journalism branch of the press. Opinion press is quite another thing and I'm all for our newspaper op-ed, radio, and opinion-blog pundits to share their opinions with gusto in the marketplace of ideas.
[H/T The Corner]
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Comments on "Yes, Let's Do Better Next Time":
2. Bill
- 11/22/2008 9:05 pm CST
Naum,
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Mark Halperin, a journalist, has made the point that journalists were, by and large, biased toward Obama in the last election.
McCain lost, and I think he would have lost even with more fair and unbiased journalism. Obama ran a superb campaign. But you know as well as I do that, disregarding all your hypotheticals about Obama (none of them are true, so why go through all of them), there were certainly some negatives on Obama that, whether fair or not, were considered for the most part off-limits by the press. I have no interest in talking about them with you, though, because Obama won fair and square and I'm ready to support him as my President.
I found this comment to be absolutely bizarre, though: "What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?"
That would be great if they did. Are you saying the skin color of McCain's adopted child is somehow a scandal?
"You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would have been as close it was? Some might say that this is what racism does. That it covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference."
I think you're saying that the negatives McCain brought into the election were such that, if Obama, as an African American, had those same negatives, he would have been stomped in the election. In other words, the press and the voters gave McCain more of a pass because of his white skin.
That's one of the most bizarre (and racist) things I've read in awhile.
Skin color should have nothing to do with any of this.
You are free to disagree with Helperin, and me too, about press bias, of course. But if you must drop the race card, you and I probably don't have much to talk about. I'm color-blind.
5. Naum
- 11/22/2008 9:28 pm CST
No, not calling anybody a racist, just pointing out the bias and cognitive dissonance displayed in the post.
1. Honestly, only a Betlway media insider who thinks campaigns are the country's most important endeavor would even think of comparing alleged media bias in an election season with journalism malpractice that led our country to war; a war that, arguably, is helping to bankrupt the nation. Yeah, those two events are about the same.
2. Halperin, you will remember, is the deep thinker who informed us all that McCain’s inability to explain how many houses he owned was… bad news for team Obama.
3. So when the press spent two years reinforcing a false rumor that the president-elect was secretly a radical Muslim; or that he was "the most liberal senator" (he's not); or repeatedly calling him "Osama"; or playing the Rev. Wright tapes around the clock for an entire month; or wondering whether the president-elect was "one of us"; or questioning whether or not the president-elect was too presumptuous (uppity); or repeating McCain talking points that the president-elect was a socialist (he's not); or that the president-elect will never be able to reconcile with the Clintons; or reporting that the president-elect's wife hates America (she doesn't) -- somehow this is proof that the establishment media showed an "extreme pro-Obama" bias?
McCain is never questioned about his morality over bombing the innocent in an illegal immoral unjust war (Vietnam) where bombings killed over a million non-combatants. But those questions are never asked.
6. Naum
- 11/22/2008 9:40 pm CST
From a Scott Horton Harpers article:
----
[I]n a 2006 radio interview, Dick Cheney said simply that the use of waterboarding to obtain intelligence was a “no-brainer.”
Cheney at the time declined to refer to this practice as torture, preferring instead to describe it as “robust interrogation,” and that reluctance has been echoed in the press. I myself was twice warned by PBS producers, in advance of appearances on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, that I could use the word “torture” in the abstract but that I was to refrain from applying it to the administration’s policies. And after an interview with CNN in which I spoke of the administration’s torture policy, I was told by the producer, “That’s okay for CNN International, but we can’t use it on the domestic feed.”
----
Liberal media? Seriously?
8. Bill
- 11/22/2008 10:45 pm CST
Or, rather, I support you in your contention that the media is biased positively toward conservatives.
9. Naum
- 11/22/2008 11:41 pm CST
OK, Naum, you win. There is no media bias.
Um, not saying that either.
Predominately, there is a corporate conservative bent to mainstream media. On economic, political, military issues, they lean right. On social issues, slightly to the left.
Publishers are overwhelmingly conservative. Maybe not your brand of conservative but more so to the interests of arms makers, Wall Street, corporate chieftans, etc.…
Consider that voices from the far right like Pat Buchanan, the Minutemen, etc.… are given regular media talking slots whereas "the left" is completely shunned. How often do you see Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky (who enjoy readership equal to or greater than Buchanan) on national TV? Never.
We have a tendency to see what we want to see — the fact that McCain got more negative coverage could be because, duh, his campaign consisted of nothing but mud slinging, negative name calling that skirted the line and stoked hatred and racism while the other candidate ran a positive campaign with the negative bits only attacking the record of the party that has been in power for the last 8 years.
Look at the major media outlets:
FOX news - headed by Roger Ailes and they wear their bias on their sleeves, from their own words and the testimony of those who've worked there
NBC - owned by GE, munition makers, granted they block out a few hours to appease liberals, but the network is in the tank for conservative interests, as it is their bottom line
CBS - ownership has publicly proclaimed their desire for national Republican leadership
NY Times - the paper, derided as liberal bastion, that held off reporting Bush surveillance information for many months, who also duped nation (via Judith Miller) into cheerleading for an illegal immoral invasion based on fraudulent (i.e., Curveball) justification that they were on the frontline in hawking…
Washington Times, Talk Radio, etc.…
Media bias? Right.
10. Quaid
- 11/22/2008 11:42 pm CST
"a war that, arguably, is helping to bankrupt the nation. "
Obviously. As soon as the war started, all these banks started lending to people who couldn't afford their mortgage. I can't believe that the press didn't point out the very logical connections of the war in iraq and the impending recession brought on by the mortgage crisis.
Seriously, though - while we could definitely use the billions of dollars spent monthly on the war, it is only a piece of all that we spend our money on, as a nation.
Back to the nature of the post, you can't possibly deny the obvious media bias in the campaign, can you?
11. Quaid
- 11/22/2008 11:47 pm CST
NBC - owned by GE, munition makers, granted they block out a few hours to appease liberals, but the network is in the tank for conservative interests, as it is their bottom line
MSNBC is actively attempting to be the liberal response to Fox News. This comment is an absolute joke.
The NYT unbiased? You're kidding, right? You're bordering on the illogical right now - you realize this, right? Even if one cedes your point about the NYT - something that happened seven years ago - you can't link what happened then with their reporting over the past twelve months. Are you arguing for or against the legitimacy of the Times as a journalistic institution?
12. Sharpton
- 11/23/2008 1:05 am CST
"I hope that in 2010 and 2012, the press gets back to its more honorable roots, and learns to report the news fairly and without bias. A free press is indispensable. "
You must be less cynical than me, because, barring something major, I see it getting worse.
13. Bill
- 11/23/2008 7:50 am CST
"Um, not saying that either."
I know you're not. You're arguing for a conservative bias in the media. Did you not read comment #8 from me?
14. Joseph D. Walch
- 11/23/2008 8:16 am CST
Don't expect the media to be unbiased. The kind of people who go into journalism are typically just pretty faces that are short on substance. Print media is a little different. You can find pretty balanced print media if you know where to look (Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News). At least now with Obama in office we will have more pro-American coverage.
15. Quaid
- 11/23/2008 9:52 am CST
Dallas Morning News
Perhaps there is less bias, but they don't report facts very well - at least on the local level. They've handled the whole DISD thing poorly and tend to dramatize certain things more so than they should. I've yet to be impressed by them, but I haven't made up my mind yet.
I do find it interesting that they were one of the few papers who endorsed McCain.
16. Bill
- 11/23/2008 1:19 pm CST
The reason this is a pointless argument: "Conservative" and "Liberal" are relative terms.
I have no doubt that, based on what I can tell of Naum's political philosophy, the vast majority of the mainstream press is to his/her right. In other words, to Naum the MSM is conservatively biased - true statement. Proof of this includes the charge that McCain should have been questioned as a war-criminal because he was involved in combat operations in Vietnam. The fact that the media did not do so shows its conservative bias, based on where Naum sits.
This is an unwinnable, unedifying, no-benefit argument to engage in (just IMO)
We all can agree that we want the press to be unbiased though, correct?
19. Bob Sacamento
- 11/24/2008 9:12 am CST
The CBS/NYT 2004 election story about Bush, supported with that forged document, was the final nail in the coffin for any claim the MSM might make about being fair to conservatives. (And Bush isn't even all that conservative, to tell the truth.)
Naum,
Your comment #5 confuses me. Do you really believe the press actually acted the way you said it did in your third point? If so, you must watch very little besides Fox News, which really surprises me.
20. naum
- 11/25/2008 10:42 am CST
That CBS election story about Bush precisely proves my point - as the content of the story was true, even if the documents were not authentic.
USA Today
The former secretary to a Texas Air National Guard officer who purportedly wrote memos critical of President Bush's pilot service said Tuesday that the documents are forgeries but they appear to reflect memos her boss wrote and kept in a locked desk drawer.
Marian Carr Knox told the Dallas Morning News after viewing copies of the disputed memos, "These are not real," and that "the information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones."
21. Bill
- 11/25/2008 12:49 pm CST
A story about a major news organization using obviously forged documents to damage a sitting Republican President "precisely" proves your point that the media is biased toward Republicans? How so?
Naum, CBS could have had a good story (making the assumption here that the charges were true - not here to argue that with you) if they had . . . produced a good story. But what they did was stupidly and naively produce a document that was quickly proven to be a forgery.
How do you have credibility after producing a forged document?
This isn't about whether Bush was a good National Guardsman. It's about the abysmally low standards of our media. That's what this post is about.
22. Les
- 11/25/2008 7:34 pm CST
How is the "content of the story... true, even if the documents", the evidence on which the story is based, "were not authentic"? All you've got is someone saying, "Yeah, that looks real to me"? This is substance?
I saw some memos last week that Obama wrote talking about his plans to set up a police state. I don't think they were real, but the information was true because it came from the real ones.
How's that? Did I do good?
You've got to be pinching your nose pretty tight to choke down all that Kool-Aid, Naum.
23. Naum
- 11/25/2008 10:49 pm CST
Did you read the article?
The secretary of the National Guard officer said "THE INFORMATION IN HERE WAS CORRECT… PICKED UP FROM THE REAL ONES".
Story was true, but it was spun by MSM as discredited to inauthentic documents.
It would be like saying somebody was not born in 1963 because the birth certificate proffered was a facsimile and not the original document. The pertinent question is whether the information is true or not, no matter the subterfuge or spin employed by propaganda perpetrators.
24. Bill
- 11/25/2008 11:07 pm CST
Naum,
We're arguing past each other.
This post has nothing to do with George W. Bush. You can think whatever you want to of his guard service.
This is about our media, and its bias.
I remember 2004 quite well, and you are mistaken on this point. the MSM did not "spin" the story to discredit it. The MSM stood by the story while a few resourceful bloggers did all the hard work the MSM is SUPPOSED TO DO in vetting stories. The bloggers were the ones who determined the document (whether it, in some po-mo way, represented the truth or not) was a blatant forgery that was being reported as an original document by CBS.
The MSM did not spin the story to discredit it. Bloggers did. The MSM finally had to face up to the truth that they acted incompetently, retract the story (as far as the document was concerned, although they still asserted that the story was true, even if the document was a lie), and fire Dan Rather.
So, in other words, the "pertinent question" in this post is whether the media reported the 2008 election biased toward one candidate or another.
We both agree it was. We disagree on which candidate it was biased toward, and I think I explained why in comment #16. So I think we agree (to disagree).
If you want to argue that GWB is the worst president ever, you can do that at your blog (or wait for us to post a post here that talks about GWB).
25. Naum
- 11/26/2008 9:15 am CST
No, you miss the point.
The Bush/National Guard story was trotted out as an example of media bias against Republicans/Bush.
But I illustrated that, the exact opposite, it was spun by mainstream media as non-story (because of inauthentic documents) when actually the content of the story (as verified by the statement secretary of the National Guard officer) was true. All that the media focused on was about discredited story when the charges were actually true (that Bush skirted his Guard duties). Whether that document was authentic or inauthentic didn't change the truth that secretary (as well as others) spoke to.
Furthermore, the media played for Bush campaign, discrediting a war hero who went and fought for his country (you can dispute how privileged a son he was, but at least he answered the call instead of using privilege to go AWOL from his duties), yet never critically examining Bush skipping out. The Swift Boat charges (and yes I read their book) were nothing but heresay, innuendo and outright lies.
Again, a vivid example of media bias in favor of one candidate. It doesn't always fall that way, but there is great deference to the establishment — see the earlier cite about guests not allowed to refer to "torture" and the GWB administration (on a "liberal" NPR mind you) as if we exist in an alternate reality where pouring water into somebody's lungs against their will is not considered a form of torture.
I realize you all lean right here, and I am really not arguing for the sake of arguing (for the record, I am an Independent, pledge allegiance to no party (except Jesus Kingdom), and have voted for pols of all parties). Just that you (and all of us) buy into assumptions and orthodoxy that is framed already in a predetermined pattern. And the "myth of a liberal media bias" is a heavy dose of altered reality.
26. Bill
- 11/26/2008 10:16 am CST
Naum,
I think we'll have to agree to disagree. We could both pull out anecdotal evidence all day long to support our sides. I don't think it's worth it.
I could also dig up the stats on the personal political philosophies and voting preferences of a vast majority of our journalists (overwhelmingly liberal) - would that do any good? I doubt it.
I consider myself a fairly reasonable, relatively informed, fair-minded person. Perhaps I'm deluded (or have been sucked in by a heavy dose of altered reality). Maybe our press in this country is really in the tank for conservatives. I don't see it. You are asking me to believe you rather than my own lying eyes :-). I'm not sure we've got too much more to talk about here
Are you OK with stopping this debate? I am. I'm sure I'll be posting again on this subject, and we can rev it up again then if you want. I just want to avoid getting into "I'll top your anecdote with my anecdote" war.
Peace.
27. Bob Sacamento
- 11/26/2008 11:22 am CST
I'm with you, Bill. Sometimes there is such a difference in perspectve between people that, regardless of who's right and who's wrong, discussion just isn't going to be fruitful. I don't feel that I have been out-argued at all. But I admit to being out-lasted, and I'm getting off of this bus. (Until the next post on this topic ;) )
Leave a Comment:
This cannot be for real?
Ponder the following:
What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?
What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer distribution?
What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?
You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would have been as close it was? Some might say that this is what racism does. That it covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.