The "liberal" Washington Post? Puh-lease!
How much longer can you little victim beotches whine about the "liberal" press? Shut the f@#k up already! It's a dead horse!
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Argument: All reporters are liberals.
Response:Conservatives say this all the time, but it's just false. The most reliable survey of Washington-based reporters showed in 2003 that 37 percent were Democrats (just about the percentage in the general population), 19 percent were Republicans, and the rest – the largest group – were Independents. Other surveys have shown that while journalists lean left on social issues such as abortion, they lean right on economics (ever wonder why every newspaper has a business section, but none have a labor section?)
Argument: Journalists try to get Democrats elected.
Response: For decades, the trade publication Editor & Publisher has surveyed newspapers on whom they endorse for president. Only twice – in 1964 and in 1992 – did the Democratic candidate get more endorsements. George W. Bush was no exception, easily outpacing Al Gore in endorsements (Bush got over 60%).
Speaking of Al Gore, would a liberal media have attacked him the way they did? For instance, the idea that Gore "said he invented the internet" was repeated in over 2,600 news stories during the 2000 campaign – but it is completely false. He never said it. Ask a conservative to tell you with a straight face that the press treated Gore better than Bush during the 2000 campaign (for more on the way the press screwed Al Gore, see this article, this article and this article.
Academics have been trying for years to determine whether the media have an ideological bias. There have been dozens of studies, and here's what a recent meta-analysis surveying 59 such studies concluded: "On the whole, no significant biases were found for the newspaper industry. Biases in newsmagazines were virtually zero as well…studies of television network news showed small, measurable, but probably insubstantial…biases."
Here's a trick – ask a conservative who argues that the media have a liberal bias to give you some examples. They'll talk about times when a Republican got negative coverage. Give them a few back – say, the endless coverage of the Clinton "scandals" all of which amounted to nothing, or the Bush non-scandals (like his probable insider trading when on the board of the Harken corporation) that were all but ignored by the press. Their response will likely be, "But Clinton deserved it!" You can come back with, "So when a Republican gets bad coverage, it's evidence of liberal bias, but when a Democrat gets bad coverage, the press is just telling the truth?"
Argument: Conservatives get shut out of the media.
Response: This is just laughable on its face. There is not a single liberal who has his or her own show on national television, while there are a plethora of conservatives who do – John McLaughlin, Bill O'Reilly, Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke (The Beltway Boys), Dennis Miller, Joe Scarborough, John Kasich, Oliver North, Tony Snow, Cal Thomas – the list of conservatives with huge media megaphones goes on and on. The one liberal who had his own show, Phil Donohue, was cancelled by MSNBC because he opposed the Iraq war.
Talk radio is the media, too – and this medium is dominated, on the order of 90-95%, by conservatives. The radio universe is ruled over by a behemoth called Clear Channel, a corporation run by people who give large contributions to the Republican Party. Clear Channel dropped Howard Stern once he began to criticize President Bush, and refused to syndicate Air America host Randi Rhodes (who was at a Clear Channel station), despite the fact that Rhodes dominated her media market in Florida, crushing Rush Limbaugh in the ratings.
And conservative "experts" are much more likely to get quoted in the news than liberal ones. The latest of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's annual studies of think-tank citations in major newspapers and on broadcast media showed that 47% of quotes were from representatives of conservative think-tanks, 41% came from centrist think-tanks, and only 12% came from liberal think-tanks (see the archives of FAIR's studies here).
Meanwhile, extremist conservatives are all over the media, while liberals more than a step or two from the center are nowhere to be found. For instance, Ann Coulter – who regularly calls for the murder of people with whom she disagrees – has been put on television hundreds of times. But can you name anyone as far to the left who is given a forum on television?
Argument: The media accept liberalism as the norm, but see conservatism as aberrant.
Response: When a conservative says this, the appropriate response is, "Where's your evidence?" And they don't have any. For example, in his book Bias, Bernard Goldberg charges that conservatives get identified as such by the news media, but liberals don't. "In the world of the Jennings and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and have to be identified," Goldberg wrote. "Liberals, on the other hand, are the mainstream and don't have to be identified." This is an empirical claim, and an easily tested one at that. When linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, armed only with that obscure tool known as Lexis/Nexis, set out to test whether Goldberg was right, he found that Goldberg had it backwards. In fact, liberal members of Congress were more likely to be identified as "liberal" than conservative members of Congress were to be identified as "conservative." Virtually all of Goldberg's claims are similar: one can easily discover whether they are true or not, but Goldberg never bothers.
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As promised, Kerry begins to define himself
![[Image: TMW05-19-04.gif]](http://workingforchange.speedera.net/www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/wfc/TMW05-19-04.gif)
