Whoopsie-Pie: ABC Had on Senator Robert Menendez This Sunday and Plum Forgot to Ask Him About the Underage Dominican Prostitutes Story They've Had Since the Middle of Last Year

As Marion Ravenwood said, "Must've slipped his mind."

The man is nefarious.

Martha Raddatz, the latest ABC "reporter" to pass up on the story, is a woman, but the quote's about a man, so.

And speaking of the state-run media, apparently 60 Minutes ran a particularly soft double-interview with Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Kirstin Powers calls it propaganda you'd expect to see from a "state-run media."

Something occurred to me: The preference cascade I was talking about did happen. But it's happened in the press. They feel empowered, they feel history is on their side, they feel the audience is inclining to the liberal position, and so they're not hiding it anymore.

Which, of course, suggests that the very limited amount of Hiding It they did was not for purposes of ethics, but simply for pecuniary reasons; that is, they pretended a little bit simply to not lose parts of the audience.

But, as Instapundit has noted, "ethics" pretends to be some sort of code that provides hygiene to the industry whereas, in fact, "ethics" are usually created precisely to protect the industry, and cover up its excesses.

The media claims, for example, that "ethics" preclude them from revealing their voting histories and their politics, because revealing such would compromise their objectivity.

Bullshit. Their objectivity is already compromised. Objectivity is compromised by bias; it is not compromised by the admission of bias. In fact, the admission of bias increases partiality. Hiding one's bias is dishonest as a first matter but then further creates an environment in which honesty is denigrated, and thus leads to further dishonesty.

The industries have imposed this rule not to serve the public better but to withhold from the public crucial information, which information, while helpful and important to the public in evaluating media reports, would hurt the media itself. That is, if CNN admitted it was liberal, it would in fact be providing more helpful, useful information to its audience, but some of that audience might stop watching it.

This "rule" is a complete lie, and an indefensible one. The "ethical rule" only exists to deceive the public and is directly contrary to the interests of the public; the only beneficiary of this "ethical rule" is the industry itself.

So I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that the media is now treating an "ethical rule," supposedly dictated by non-self-interested considerations, as what it always was, a simple matter of self-interest.

And since they think they won't be punished, market-wise, for showing some more liberal leg, boy are they showing it.

posted by Ace at 03:36 PM

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