The "We Don't Want to Know" Form of Bias

We Don't Want to Know, and We Can't Report It If We Never Discover It, so Let's Just Give this One a Miss.

You've seen this, of course, in the Gosnell case. The media suspects the details of the case would not be helpful for the pro-partial-birth-abortion left and therefore does not endeavor to collect the details. You can't be charged with failing to disclose what you intentionally made yourself ignorant of.

We also see this in the case of Dzhohkar Tsarnaev. Why did USAToday alone get the scoop on the radical mosque and its myriad terrorist connections?

Not just hard work and beating everyone to the punch. Though they should be credited with that.

No, they got the scoop because other media organizations realized The News Would Probably Not Help the Left and hence gave it a pass.

Meanwhile, the NYT, for example, spends its journalistic dollars to interview the Lovely Lads' former high-school classmates and other such The Human Side soft-soap.

USAToday went to where the news was likely to be; the New York Times did not.

This is not because the New York Times didn't know there was some news to be had there. Rather, it's because they had the same notion USAToday had -- that there would be a scoop there -- and deliberately chose to not land that scoop, preferring to write stories about Tsarnaev's dreams of wrestling and Tamarlan's dreams of... well, I'd imagine not having his fucking face run over by a car driven by his brother would up there on his list of dreams.

When the right says the media "hasn't covered a story," the media's defenders will sometimes point to a brief stub of an article listing the very basic facts announced by officials on the matter and claim victory. "See, they 'covered' it," they claim.

But an organization doesn't devote virtually any journalist resources to a story accidentally. They make a choice. They choose which stories to suffocate for want of media oxygen.

If you're reading the New York Times, you're not reading the news. You haven't been reading the news there for quite some time.

What you're reading is a supplementary brief to the DNC's and liberal coalition's newsletter-- the footnotes to that newsletter.

But not the news. Never the news, and by design.

Bonus: Iowahawk parodized the left making a Holden Caufiled comparison last night, before the NYTimes decided to do it for real.

posted by Ace at 07:42 PM

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