Patterico Trashes the LA Times, In the LA Times

In a back-and-forth discussion with writer Marc Cooper. Oddly, both men agree the Times is a bad paper and dying; they just disagree about the cause of death.

The Times should get a certain amount of credit for running their bete noir in their very paper. But Patterico should get a lot of credit too. A lot of times when people get this kind of opportunity to serve in a respectable liberal outlet, they suddenly become defenders of it. (Witness David Brooks, who seems to now think the NYT is an objective newspaper.) Or become a bit over-polite.

Not Patterico. He really lights them up.

Patterico teases the exchange with some choice quotes on his blog, too, in case you just want the highlights.

Patterico fails to present one of my favorite arguments, though. The MSM is always willing to consider the possibility they're politically biased against key members of the Democratic coalition -- they take charges they're "biased" or at least too negative as regards blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, gays, women, etc. If a prominent member of one of these groups makes a charge of bias, the MSM always follows quickly with an essay or a Ted Koppel panel show seriously questioning their own lack of sufficient sensitivity, and almost always confessing some degree of guilt, and always vowing to take steps to "do better" as regards such groups.

When it comes to allegations of bias against conservatives, however, the charges are rejected dismissively without so much as a paragraph of genuine reflection.

I think that proves bias right there, myself. It surely cannot be that the MSM is prone to write in a biased fashion against every group except Republicans; that anti-conservative bias is the one and only bias they could not possibly be guilty of. And yet that is what they always insist.

I would suggest that this is an example of the common phenomenon of being quite willing to admit one's venial sins, or even non-sins, while stubbornly and even ludicrously maintaining one's perfect innocence as regards one's mortal sins.

posted by Ace at 05:37 PM

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