Getting Things Started – Bias in the Media

Now that I’ve got all that “About Me” stuff out of the way, I’m going to start talking about my first political issue before going to bed. One quick note first; living in a city and going to college; the vast majority of my friends are liberal, just something to keep in mind.

Bias in the Media.

If you’re a liberal, you’ve heard conservatives “complain” about it for a long time. If you’re a conservative, you’ve probably long since abandoned watching CNN, MSNBC, and so on except when forced to.

Let me start with a few examples. If you’re quite a bit older than me, you might remember Dan Quayle. In June of 1992, an elementary school boy in a spelling bee correctly wrote “potato” on the board. Then-VP Quayle “corrected” the word by writing “potatoe” on the board. Now, potatoe is incorrect, true. However, there are two things of interest here. One, “potatoe” is an old English spelling, like “colour.” Two, Quayle was doing his job as a moderator or whatever by writing what the school wrote on the card.

But the media didn’t care about that. Oh, no. Being a toddler at the time, I of course remember nothing. But my dad’s description goes something along the lines of “the media tore him apart.” Even today, I see the occasional joke at Quayle’s expense, over a not-so-misspelled misspelling from seventeen years ago!

Obama, on the other hand, has, in the last year, contradicted himself, referred to an inhaler as a breathalyzer/inhalator, of all things. (For those of you who don’t know, a breathalyzer detects alcohol; an inhaler saves the lives of asthmatics, I don’t think an inhalator is a real thing.) He’s talked about having been to 57 states. He’s referred to piracy as privacy. He’s claimed that his FATHER served in WWII when he didn’t. He also claims that when his father came home he got the services he needed. How the heck does he know? His dad cut out on him real young. He claimed his great-uncle (calls him uncle) helped liberate Auschwitz, which was liberated by the Russians. He claims to have been born because his parents met/conceived him (not sure which) at the Selma March in Alabama in 1965 (towards the end of the video), four years AFTER he was born.

And to top off his English deficiency, there’s this gibberish. Hear how dead quiet it is when he says he’s glad they’re fired up? And that he can’t hear himself?

And then there’s Biden, who asked a lame guy to stand up. Need I say more?

Back on the Right, McCain’s berated for saying something vague about a 100 years in Iraq and Palin’s insulted for calling Stephen Baldwin her “favorite Baldwin brother.”

The Media gets onto Republicans for these minor things, but turns a blind eye to much of this idiocy among Democrats.

But it gets more serious than that.

Recently, IMAO brought to my attention that an enthusiastic greeting given to President Hussein by the US military in Iraq was staged. Also in the linked article, people made a fuss over the turkey Bush had in a similar photo being allegedly fake!

And regardless of what ya’ll liberals may think, FOX News is not a conservative bastion. It’s just not liberal, which goes to show how much you’ve been conditioned to think like a liberal, if FOX looks conservative to you. I mean, I saw a FOX News story during the campaign featuring a McCain supporter who refused to give candy to Obama-supporting children. She’s certainly wrong and all, but I don’t think a conservative-biased station would run that story.

Now, true, I will grant you that talk radio is predominately conservative. But first things first: more people watch TV than listen to talk radio by far. I’m gonna guess that a lot of people who listen to talk radio seek it out because they’ve heard it’s conservative (either conservatives looking for allies or liberals looking for the opponents’ views), whereas TV is kind of shoved on you. And then there’s Hollywood, and most newspapers; the New York Times, the Triangle’s own News & Disturber; and most important of all: public education. And if you don’t think these things are liberal, just look at the statistics, something like 70%-ish (don’t quote me on these) of public education people vote Democrat. For TV networks, it’s more on the level of 85%-ish.

Now you might say “Freedom of Speech, they can be biased if they want.” True. I”m certainly, absolutely, positively, NOT arguing that the government should oversee the media or anything – it’s the Liberals who want to do that, by crushing the conservative domain of Talk Radio with the Fairness Doctrine. But I am saying that people need to realize what they’re eating and get on a healthier diet; and that the Mainstream Media (MSM) needs to return to its Constitutional mandate to keep the government’s power in check, instead of being big-government PR firms.

That’s all, and good night.