Bias? What Bias?
By Michael P. Tremoglie (11/18/03)
Georgia Democrat Senator Zell Miller recently announced during an October 29 interview with Sean Hannity that he would vote for George W. Bush. He implied that the Democratic Party is now a tool of lunatic liberals.
One would think that this announcement, and the announcement last month by former New York City mayor and Democrat Ed Koch that he would vote for George W. Bush would be newsworthy. Such pronouncements are at least as newsworthy as when Vermont Republican Senator Jim Jeffords announced he resigned from the Republican Party. The media reported it for days. They deified Jeffords.
Yet the announcements by the two Democrats were barely noticed. Chances are the mainstream media will not want to publicize this. They are clearly influenced and biased towards liberal ideas and the Democratic Party.
One such example of this was the July 10, 2002 edition of Fox News Channel. One of their liberals-in-residence, Morton Kondracke, parroted the Democratic Party classist line that Republicans are inextricably linked to big business and big business scandals. Kondracke made the incredible claim that only Republicans received money from the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen then being investigated for accounting irregularities in conjunction with the Enron scandal.
If he researched his facts he would have learned that according to Common Cause, Arthur Andersen contributed about $990,000 to Democrats from 1991 to June 2001. This was about 43% of their total contributions.
Kondracke would have known that Democratic Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, one of the Democratic Party’s “accounting reformers” in the Congress, introduced legislation in 1995 limiting the liability of auditors and lawyers in securities fraud cases. In February 2002, former Clinton aide Dick Morris wrote in the Jewish World Review, “ The Consumer Federation of America, the Consumers Union, and Public Citizen called Dodd’s bill "anti-consumer, anti-elderly, and anti-investor" and Ralph Nader labeled it the "accountants immunity act." According to Morris, Dodd has received more contributions from accounting firms since 1989 than any other member of Congress. Citing an AP report in January, Morris claimed that Dodd assisted in waiving the SEC regulation that CPA’s could not be consultants for their clients-which is the crux of the Enron scandal.
How could a supposedly sophisticated journalist not know this?
Media bias is even more apparent in that staple of biased reporting - law enforcement. Videotaping cops arresting such pillars of the community like Rodney King has become a cottage industry and one the mainstream media eagerly finances. Two such videos were broadcast last year. One video was of Oklahoma City cops. One was of Inglewood, California cops. Both people being arrested were black.
From the Oklahoma City video, the cops did not seem to be using excessive force. The Inglewood cop clearly was - although as is usually the case the media will only shows that part of the video that corroborates their preconceived belief that white cops routinely brutalize black suspects.
The mainstream media never reports on black cop shootings or black cops abusing white suspects or white cops abusing white suspects. It is formulaic for the mainstream media. The only thing that matters is when white cops abuse black suspects. (Mainstream media moguls will not answer questions about the inequities of the media reporting of such incidents. For example, during L’Affair Rodney King, there was a contemporaneous video of a black Trenton cop, engaging in what appeared to be the use of excessive force with a black suspect. The video was rarely broadcast.)
The paradigm of this bias is the shootings of LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ. Both of them were killed by cops. Both were of them unarmed. Both of them were motorists. Both of them were black. Both shootings occurred in a large city. Yet the shootings were never national news items.
The difference in both instances was the cops doing the shooting were black. IN fact, in the Haggerty case, one of the Chicago cops, Serena Williams, was a woman. Ask yourself this - with which names are you more familiar: Donovan Jackson, LaTanya Haggerty, or Amadou Diallo? If you could ask Rather, Brokaw, Jennings, or any member of the MSNBC staff the same question what do you think their reply would be.
It would not be Haggerty or Russ.
Media icon Walter Cronkite once said there is no bias in the media. He then went sailing on his boat with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
However, more recently Cronkite admitted that he is a liberal and he explained that most journalists are liberal as well. He then explained exactly why that is.
Who knows maybe Cronkite will start a trend and other journalists will acknowledge their liberalism, although, it is not likely.
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