Media Bias Debate

On a long drive home from a Indianapolis this weekend, I had the dubious pleasure of listening to a CBS news break at the top of the hour on a talk station and in one of their reports on Saturday's anti-War protests the verbiage used to report the gatherings was so slanted that it was startling and was so obviously intended to make it seem much greater than it really was that it wasn't even funny…

It’s always nice to have your father stick up for you, even when you’re 60 years old.Such was the case when former President George H. W. Bush spoke at a recent reception for a journalism scholarship. As reported by Reuters (emphasis mine throughout, h/t Drudge):President George W. Bush's father accused the news media of "personal animosity" toward his son and said he found the criticism so…

We all know the face of real terror. Nick Berg getting his head sawed off by a knife wielding Islamist, suicide bombers laying waste to mass transit in Israel, the World Trade Towers collapsing on the morning of 09/11/01. That is real terror. But, to Reuters, enforcing U.S. immigration laws is terror. The title of the Reuters piece sets the tone for the overwrought sentiment infused throughout…

One of my correspondents on my own site, Publius' Forum, has been trying to clear up a wretched email that was sent to one of our boys in Iraq refusing him service and telling him he should "pull out of Iraq". Fox News has picked up this story that I have been watching for a few days. I've been trying to ascertain if it was real or another example of an internet hoax -- sometimes it isn't easy…

If opposing abortion makes you a "social conservative," what does supporting abortion make you? Why, nothing at all, or certainly nothing worth mentioning in NBC's eyes.NBC's Kelly O'Donnell narrated a segment on this morning's "Today" about the three candidates who threw their hats into the presidential ring over the weekend: Hillary, Bill Richardson and Sam Brownback.O'Donnell described…

Will the rise of blogging and "citizen journalism"* have a positive effect on news coverage of politics? I'd have to say yes. Kate Werk at Small Dead Animals posted the other day on a different reason this will be so:The distinction between national and local is an important one. [...] I find the local reporting by mainstream affiliates in my part of the country to be, by and large, reasonably…

Fans of Fox News's the "O'Reilly Factor" are familiar with a war started by the host over liberal bias in the media. It appears that Bill O'Reilly's employer is also interested in this fight, and that the battle over media bias is on:                                                             For its opening salvo, Fox News aired a new promo Saturday which pointed a huge and unmistakably…

So when are the Big Three Networks going to do something about their hopelessly outmoded and out-of-touch evening-news dinosaurs? The 2006 report on The State of the News Media from Journalism.org, which covered 2005 results, showed that the Big 3 Networks' evening news audience that year averaged 27 million (the exact number is not noted, but inferred from reading the graph at the link; if…