Liberal media bias?
There’s an oft stated notion that the media has a liberal bias. That notion has been seriously challenged since 2001, but it keeps popping up. Mediamatters.org has a couple interesting related stories:
Wash. Post ombudsman Howell misrepresented former Post reporter Edsall’s conclusions on media bias
Summary: In her column, Deborah Howell misrepresented Thomas Edsall’s views on the purported liberalism of most journalists. Although Edsall asserted, as Howell reported, that “most journalists he knew were liberal” during a radio appearance, he explained in a subsequent online chat that, while many of its members are indeed liberal, the press at large is “inclined to lean over backwards not to offend critics from the right” and that the right wing’s “campaign against the media … has turned the press into an unwilling, and often unknowing, ally of the right.”
I’d be inclined to agree with the latter… They’ve got another interesting story about the difference between Time magazine’s post-midterm cover in ‘94 vs ‘06:
Greg Sargent of the American Prospect calls Time out:
But guess what? The story inside doesn’t say anything like that. Though the story’s byline — Joe Klein — would lead one to expect that conclusion, the story simply doesn’t interpret the elections as a win for the center in any way.
Rather, Klein posits that the outcome was a victory for “realists” in the Democratic Party, and actually notes that the “realism” of Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel led them to in some cases pick progressive candidates like Sherrod Brown, one of the many candidates that proponents of the “center-is-ascendent” story line conveniently omit from their analyses…
Liberal bias? Just the opposite…
February 14th, 2008 at 12:51 am
[...] Harry Reid and his Republican friends in Democratic clothing can put lipstick on this pig as much as they want. They will never appeal to people like me who are skeptical about the Democrats as an agent of change after the big clunker put up following the 2006 election. I am pretty sure we are still in Iraq, I don’t think that Congress is working harder and it seems that earmarks and pork barrel spending are still keywords for access to power in Washington. [...]