Ace of Spades HQ

« She's A Tall Drink Of Water | Main | Author Steven Vincent Killed In Iraq »

August 03, 2005

What Else? Media Bias

Radio Equalizer finds the MSM once again quite predictable as to what it regards as an "interesting" story.

The Air America scandal has only been mentioned by the usual conservative suspects-- Washington Times, New York Post, New York Sun. And the story is growing more, not less, scandalous. Quoting from Captain Ed's article in the Weekly Standard (link at Radio Equalizer):

One would expect that mainstream journalists would want to take advantage of this opportunity to cover this harmonic convergence: A greedy corporation had taken a half-million dollars of city grant money from two certifiably sympathetic and traditional victim groups in order to pay off its already-wealthy employees.
...

After speaking with the president of the charity's executive committee, Jeanette Graves, the Sun's David Lombino discovered that the CEO in question got the loans using rubber-stamp replicas of Ms. Graves's signature on documents never seen by her.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, a pair of hip-hop DJ's have called, on the air, for attacking police, suggesting the best manner of doing so (step one: grab their radios so they can't call for back-up as you assault or kill them), and not a peep from anyone in the MSM.

Conservatives and liberals are each animated by different sorts of stories. We both are selectively interested in stories that reinforce our world-view, or underscore what we believe to be the pressing problems of the day. This is ordinary and human.

But liberals cannot continue maintaining they can pack their newsrooms with almost nothing but blue-state liberals and manage something even close to a balanced coverage of the news. Liberals' antennae naturally only twitter when they detect certain kinds of stories. That is, I guess, excusable, but what is not excusable is that they soon become aware of stories they missed for the first time as they weren't looking for that sort of story and yet continue to embargo them, knowing full well that at least half the country is interested in that story... or would be, were they to lower themselves to report on it.

They claim to have the mission of informing the public, but they only want to inform part of the public, and they only want to inform them of stories that seem to advance the liberal cause.

It's been said over and over, but once again, this time with feeling: There's nothing wrong with a partisan press. One could make the case that such a press is more vibrant and more engaged in the battle of ideas than our supposedly objective press.

But a partisan press masquerading as an objective one is simply a lie. And a lie that is hurting the political debate.

posted by Ace at 12:59 PM

Comments

A lot of people go into journalism because they want to "change the world." So long as they believe that admitting that they are propagandists, not journalists, would make them less effective at propagandizing, they are not likely to do it.

Posted by: Van Helsing on August 3, 2005 01:10 PM

Agreed, Van Helsing. Yesterday Leonard Pitts at the Miami Herald wrote about the recent suicide of a Miami city commissioner who may have been driven to take his own life by a series of stories in the paper (exposing his rather spectacular corruption). Pitts’ article was thoughtful, but I was struck by one paragraph:

It is not the news media’s job to spare feelings. Rather, it is media’s job to put the corrupt, the inept, the mendacious, the venal, the hypocritical and the plain stupid “on blast,” as the kids say, i.e., to publicize their sins and misdeeds broadly. To speak truth to power and truth about power. To call spades spades.

That might or might not be a noble calling, but it’s advocacy. It’s not reporting the facts and letting others slay the dragons. By and large, boomers make terrible journalists because boomers always have to be the star of the story, and you can’t be the star if you’re writing the story.

One other question: do kids in Miami, or anywhere else, really say “on blast”?

Posted by: utron on August 3, 2005 01:29 PM

I'm to the point where I'm ambivalent on the media bias thing, because it really is now objectively helping conservatives.

The liberal cocoon of NYT/CNN allows Democrat politicians to mature without anything approaching a full vetting. The end result is that realy bad candidates and ideas don't get shot down until close to the finish line, rather than out of the gate. Does anyone think a conservative John Kerry could have secured his party's nomination? It wasn't until the campaign, and late in the campaign at that, that his negatives began to pile up to the point where they could not be ignored. The same was true for Gore, and I predict it will be true for Hillary! as well.

Overall, it is bad for the country not to have a reasonable debate on partisan issues. However, a shrill echo chamber removed from the mainstream hurts the left more than it does the right.

Posted by: Ayes of Death David on August 3, 2005 01:59 PM

Ayes,

Great point about Kerry. I remember my brother chuckling to me over the phone after Kerry won his party's nomination. His quote was, "The Republicans are gonna crack that guy open like an egg."

He could see it coming, but the Democrats, sheltered from the truth by a biased media, thought they'd found a world beater. Shit, they even threw Dean, the guy they REALLY liked, overboard in order to run someone "more electable."

Posted by: The Warden on August 3, 2005 02:07 PM

Kerry WAS "more electable" than Dean.

Dean would have resulted in a McGovernesque blow out.

Truly electable dems had they managed to make it through the primary gauntlet (ex. Bob Graham) get slaughtered early though because of the early influence of the far left states in the primary process and the insane propensity for dems to primary vote for "who they like" (no matter how wierd a spacecase they may be) rather than who might be able to beat the likely opponent.

Graham would have swung FL in the dems favor, and picked up all the traditionally dems states by default.

Basically, dems are suicidal I guess...

Posted by: on August 3, 2005 02:28 PM

George McGovern, coincidentally, was an anti-war war hero.

Posted by: Dave in Texas on August 3, 2005 02:38 PM

The bad news is that nothing has changed, but the good news is that nothing has changed. Gradually, the public has begun to see how totally full of shit the MSM is. The emperor can't parade around without any clothes forever before people begin to take notice, and every time they are caught ignoring stories or lying someone else becomes aware of how full of shit they are. It will be years in the making, but a seismic shift is occuring and slowy but surely people are changing their attitudes towards the MSM and Liberals in general as they continue to lie, obfuscate, cover up, tell half truths and behave in a rabidly partisan way while pretending to be objective and informative.

If the MSM did the smart thing (which, being Liberals they're incapable of doing) they would co-opt the New Media by allowing just enough conservative news and commentary so as to appear to be objective and blunt criticism of them as biased. But this would mean that things that may hurt Liberal causes may have to be exposed, something they've refused to do so far and show no signs of doing anytime soon. So we are back to square one.

The bad news is that nothing has changed, but the good news is that nothing has changed.

Posted by: 72 dogs on August 3, 2005 03:20 PM

In the spirit of the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I propose that we nuke the two DJ cop killers in St. Louis.

I'm just kidding. Don't anyone dare nuke them.

Posted by: Jacarutu on August 3, 2005 06:43 PM

"Kerry WAS 'more electable' than Dean. "

Hmm, is electability comparative? Perhaps it is, between someone who gets elected and someone who doesn't.

Posted by: Jacarutu on August 3, 2005 06:51 PM

Electability has to be comparative when you're talking about candidates within the same party.

Can anyone with a few neurons firing really believe that Dean would have fared better than Kerry?

Posted by: on August 3, 2005 08:11 PM

Air America's new plan to pay back "loan"

Posted by: Rob@L&R on August 5, 2005 05:29 PM

Amazon.com Widgets

Now Available!
The Deplorable Gourmet
A Horde-sourced Cookbook
[All profits go to charity]

Top Headlines

Kid punks CNN chump by speaking truth to retard

Podcast: CBD and Sefton talk birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment and SCOTUS, no boots in Iran, Artemis II and refocusing NASA, the NBA's hatred of everything non-woke, and more!

In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

Artemis moon shot a go, scheduled for 6:24 Eastern time tonight
Great marketing arranged by Amazon to promote Project Hail Mary. Okay not really but it does work out that way.

TJM talks John Boorman, director of Excalibur

Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all

Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]

TJM gives you a brief tour of his movie collection.

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine

US decimation of Iran's ICBM forces is due to Space Force's instant detection of launches -- and the launchers' hiding places -- and rapid counter-attack via missiles
AI is doing a lot of the work in analyzing images to find the exact hiding place of the launchers. Counter-strikes are now coming in four hours after a launch, whereas previously it might have taken days for humans to go over the imagery and data.