Media the Status Quo’s Strike Force

No secret we are headed for an awful political war in 2012, one in which the media will lead the attack. Here’s the conservative “Big Journalism’s” John Nolte:

Obama cannot win re-election, and furthermore, the media knows this. Obama is a failed president who failed in a way no president before him ever has.

For two years he could and did get absolutely every piece of legislation passed he wanted passed and as a direct result[--prolongation of] The Great Recession. . . Nope, Obama cannot win re-election. The media, however, can win it for him, and the only way they can do that is to toxify our candidates into something unelectable. [emphasis added]

This is a bitterly partisan war being waged by a media disguising themselves as “objective.” They are our real political enemies in 2012, [and] you haven’t seen anything yet. This is merely the tip of the spear, the 2012 warm up.

The evidence of bias is everywhere. By 20-to-1, the TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) apply ideological labels to Republicans over Democratic presidential candidates. Comparing treatment of Republican candidates from January 1 to July 31 this year to that of Democratic candidates over the same period in 2007, the Media Research Center found the networks branding Republicans “conservative” 62 times, but calling Democrats “liberal” only 3 times.

Liberal Democratic candidates John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were never once called “liberal” on any of the networks, while CBS and NBC never tagged Barack Obama as liberal, even though Obama’s arguably the most rigidly liberal president in history. Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty was identified as “conservative” the day he announced, Newt Gingrich as a “conservative’s conservative,” Rick Perry as having “strong conservative credentials,” Michele Bachmann as a “take-no-prisoners conservative,” Bachmann and Sarah Palin as “soul mates — unbending conservatives,” and Rick Santorum as the “strongest social conservative in the bunch.”

The uniformly progressive networks see no reason to label the like-minded, but feel compelled to warn viewers whenever a candidate opposed to liberalism comes smiling down the path.

More evidence. California Democrat Micky Kaus, whose “KausFiles” was one of the first political blogs, recently (August 15) wrote:

The [New York] Times is a struggling new media company now, and in new media the readers, viewers and dollars go to those who tell committed partisans and ideologues what they want to hear. So why not tell your mainly Dem readers that the other side is “on the defensive”? They’ll eat it up. They might even subscribe. Better yet, throw in some macho chest-thumping: The GOP is not just “on the defensive. Their “boasts” are “ringing hollow”! Yeaaaghh! If the Republicans nevertheless inexplicably win the next election–hey, deal with that then.

Still more evidence. Charlotte Allen, in the conservative Weekly Standard, reports on a study and a book by UCLA professor Tim Groseclose. The study, co-authored by Chicago professor Jeffrey Milyo, was published November 2005 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Harvard University publication regarded as one of America’s top four scholarly economics journals. The study found most major American news outlets reflected a liberal bias. Allen wrote:

The media not only skewed left in terms of the political leanings of their personnel, but they could not report about a controversial issue—whether the issue was George W. Bush’s tax cuts, global warming, partial-birth abortion, or the effects of affirmative action on college-campus demographics—without loading the piece in ideological ways that made it a completely different story from that which a conservative, or even a centrist, might tell.

The Groseclose-Milyo study devastatingly undercut the prevailing wisdom, held dear by the press and its apologists, that yes, most reporters may pull the Democratic lever in the voting booth, but they bend over backwards to frame their news stories in a nonpartisan and evenhanded fashion that disguises their personal ideological leanings. As Groseclose and Milyo concluded, that doesn’t happen.

Groseclose’s book, Left Turn, is just out. It shows liberal bias has made American voters considerably more liberal than they would otherwise be. That, Allen says, “cracks wide open the prevailing wisdom, subscribed to even by many conservatives[,] that New York Times [readers] automatically correct for the Sulzberger slant, saying to themselves, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the New York Times.’”

It’s not news here, and probably not news even among the general public, that biased media are deeply committed to bringing Barack Obama back for another term. Nevertheless, it helps to have facts supporting the conventional wisdom. And exposing the media for what they are—conscious, dedicated agents of the Democratic war machine.