Some of this has been discussed in a prior topic here:
The liberal media
http://www.rkmbs.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=214552&page=7&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1
As discussed prior, when reporters are asked about their political leanings, or more specifically how they
vote, it quickly reveals that reporters are consistently upwards of 80% liberal/Democrat.
If you have 10 network White House correspondents, and all of them voted for Mondale, and
none of them voted for Reagan, how do you think that might affect coverage of the two political platforms?
And when you consider that Reagan carried 49 out of the 50 states in the 1984 election, how well do you think that ratio of liberal reporters in Washington represents opinion of the U.S. population ?
Now, I don't doubt that on many occasions, liberal reporters at least make the
effort to be objective.
I also don't doubt that just as often, liberals deliberately slant the coverage to make the conservative perspective
seem far less well-reasoned and persuasive than it truly is.
A few days ago, I wrote a long post criticizing AOL News' online article summarizing George W. Bush's appearance last Sunday on
Meet The Press, an AOL news article/summary which again (consistent with the rest of the liberal press) blunted the logic and detailed responses Bush was giving, making his answers sound more like canned rhetoric and defensive denials, instead of the detailed answers he actually gave.
The AOL summary would say "Bush denied this" and "Bush denied that", instead of detailing his explanation of the logic of his decisions on the economy, Iraq, intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, and other issues.
My post to AOL's message boards was instantly deleted. Gee, what a shock.
Liberal reporters also pick photos of conservatives/Republicans for newspaper and online photos where they have their mouths formed in a funny way while pronouncing a word, that makes Republicans look stupid, whereas they pick more dignified photos of Democrats. I see this pretty consistently of George W. Bush and Jeb Bush.
Again, in the book
Bias by Bernard Goldberg, a 28-year veteran correspondent for CBS News, he details in chapter 4, specifically pages 62-68,
exactly what G-man was just describing:
How conservative politicians and scholars and senators are clearly labelled as "conservative views" or "conservative leaders", clearly labelling them as
outside the mainstream.
Whereas liberals --even the most extreme liberal views-- are not labelled as being partisan, and are tossed out to the viewing public without any kind of liberal or extreme-liberal subtitle, to inform viewers that their views represent the opposite extreme of the political spectrum.
And by the liberal media doing this, they present liberal views as if they were
mainstream views.
And they're not.
Which intended or not, is liberal bias.
Goldberg in his book says that to liberals, their view IS the mainstream. Because in their insulated liberal bubble that is New York City, where all the networks are based, virtually everyone is liberal. All their co-workers are liberal, most of their friends are liberal, most of the people they'd meet in the street are liberal.
All three major news networks are based in New York City, and they all are surrounded by people who share their liberal views.
Goldberg says that it would
instantly change the ways news is covered, if they simply moved their network headquarters to Lincoln, Nebraska (one of the most conservative places in the United States). Because then they would be exposed to people from outside their liberal bubble, who'd have views different from their own.
What if, on an issue like abortion or the morning-after pill, the networks asked the opinion of a conservative women's group like the League of Women Voters (who the major networks
never ask for an opinion, and are arguably a more mainstream source of women's views), rather than the networks' usual source for quotes, the ultra-liberal National Organization for Women?
But instead, the liberal media consistently portrays conservative women's views as uninformed, ignorant, outdated, and ultimately,
outside the mainstream. And instead go to NOW (a liberal group at the far distant left of the mainstream, but
portrays NOW as mainstream), for views on women's issues that match and reinforce network reporters' own predominant liberal perspective of the issues, onto the public.
