A Media Culture of Corruption
By Vincent Fiore (03/07/06)
It is almost impossible these days to open a newspaper or watch any of the alphabet-media empires without hearing President Bush or his administration cast in negative terms.
On the cable outlets, the media castigation of Bush and the GOP only worsens, as the viewer gets to hear CNN and the like regurgitate the latest Bush “scandal” every 12.5 minutes or so.
Surely, the Bush administration has made some missteps these past few years, and deserves to have its head handed to it occasionally. Democrats and liberals, of course, might be expected to balk at almost anything Bush promotes and signs into law.
Ask nearly any Republican or conservative, and he or she is likely to tell you that there are many things that have set one’s teeth on edge regarding this administration.
So what is one to think about a mainstream media that hides behind a First Amendment right of a free press, yet acts like a bought-and-paid-for Political Action Committee (PAC) on behalf of the Democratic Party?
With little surprise from those of us who know how the “independent” press operates from day to day, everyone else got to see one of those “bought to you by your National Democratic Party” moments by the PAC media.
The recent CBS poll that found President Bush’s approval rating at an all-time low of 34%, and Vice President Cheney’s at an even more anemic 18% is a case in point. This was not so much a poll inasmuch as it was broadcast as breaking news.
( www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/27/opinion/polls/main1350874.shtml )
Indeed. That was the entire purpose of such a poll. One goes to the CBS website to find banners trumpeting the news: a picture of a sad and dejected Bush, looking for all the world like he is about to cry. There are no less than five news videos and a half a dozen related stories that essentially say “Everything bad because of Bush.”
But about that poll: By now, most people have heard that the sample was heavily weighted towards Democrats and Independents, but for the record:
--The sampling was of 1018 “adults.” Not “likely voters” or even “registered voters,” just adults, like my neighbor, the non-voting, non-registered recluse, who, when last asked what he wanted to see in a president, responded “a knife hilt.”
--The “unweighted” sample of Democrats was 409, to the Republican sample of 272. That’s a 40% to 27% ratio, with Independents rated at 33%. Once these samples were “weighted”--which means they were adjusted to reflect the country’s general make-up--the poll still reflected a bias towards Democrats by a margin of 37% to 28%, putting Independents at 35%.
--I noticed something that I cannot recall seeing in many other polls of this type, and that is the specific reference to “African Americans,” who these days usually vote monolithically Democrat. After sampling 207 blacks for the poll, CBS weighted it to 118, a more representative number in regard to population. Still, why are blacks over-represented here? Why not Latinos or Asians? Is it because blacks have consistently voted Democratic in the 90+ percent range when voting in the last two presidential elections? Were they singled out from the beginning to achieve a desired result?
No, that couldn’t be it. That would be, along with the overall sampling of “adults,”
and the over-sampling of Democrats in general, grossly negligent. I mean, we’re talking CBS here, the network that brought you “Memogate,” the story of a major media anchor’s insistence that forged documents are okay, because even though the documents are “fake,” they are nevertheless “accurate.” (www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110005624)
Thankfully, Dan Rather has left the building. But unfortunately, his legacy of bias lives on in Blackrock and CBS. Too bad that legacy of bias also pervades just about all of the mainstream media.
Readers of the mainstream media, though, must by now be aware of the culture of partisan corruption that the media displays on a daily basis. As one manufactured crises winds down--like the Vice President Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting partner--another crisis of historic proportions pops up.
This week, Americans have a choice: You can opt for the UAE (United Arab Emirates) terminal deal, in which the media worriedly reports that a wartime president is seemingly selling the country’s ports to terrorists, or the Hurricane Katrina video, in which the media breathlessly reports that “Bush knew” that those levees would burst, and kill those black people by the score.
Both stories are being portrayed as a “smoking gun” indictment of the Bush administration. The UAE interest regarding the terminals surfaced last October 31, 2005, in the Wall Street Journal. The Hurricane Katrina video of August 28, 2005, has actually been in the possession of the AP for some time now, but was reported as having been “leaked” to them by someone in the administration. In fact, the national press had their own copies that day, since they were invited to that very news conference. There is no “there” there. Yet, the PAC media continues its culture of corruption when reporting upon the events of a Republican president.
(www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/14015353.htm?source=rss&channel=thestate_news)
The story here is not the liberalism that dominates newsrooms across America, but the media’s unflinching willingness to be guided by it. In most cases, even the pretense of journalistic fairness has faded, so consciously committed to the politics of liberalism are today’s news organizations.
A while back, I forwarded the notion that the mainstream media were engaging in a “soft coup d’etat” of the country’s political process, and I echo that here today. Instead of blood and bullets to enact a takeover, the media use headlines and editorials.
Often penning front page parables that more often reflect wishful thinking than fact, the mainstream media hope that you do not take notice of its own culture of corruption in regard to the news.
But if you did take notice, you would know that most of what you read and hear from today’s “guardians of society” is intellectually dishonest because it is politically motivated, and that is that. It is, without preamble, a media culture of corruption that plays itself out daily in our newsrooms and on television.
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