Media Bias

I read a great piece on media bias today by Bruce Bartlett. He pontificates on the big media’s focus on Republican misdoings vs. the same (or worse) behavior of Democrats.

…the liberal media harp on Republican misdeeds monotonously because to them the subject never gets boring. By contrast, Democratic wrongdoing tends to be treated in a perfunctory manner with no follow-up. This imbalance of coverage, which is unrelated to the seriousness of the charges, naturally tends to make people think Republicans are more corrupt, when a reasonable person reviewing all the evidence would have to conclude that Democrats are much more likely to be corrupt.

He gives some great examples of evidence in the article, and some of it is pretty damning. Now some stories obviously deserve front-page coverage, but when you systematically focus your coverage on a particular group, someone is going to notice the disparity eventually. I’m certainly not qualified to speak on his assertion that Democrats are much more likely to be corrupt, but when many things they do get buried in the back pages of newspapers, you would never know it if they were.

When our only main source of news was Walter Cronkite, people thought differently and took his word as gold because “that’s the way it was”. Most people (including myself) don’t even notice the bias until you start reading and listening to many different non-mainstream sources of news. Thank goodness the bias is now being shown for what it truly is.


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