Media Bias Debate

I seriously didn’t know what to expect when I saw the New York Times profile on a Muslim woman who has joined the United States Army. Despite my expectations, or lack thereof, I had a pretty good feeling that it would be filled with the typical bombastic innuendo and mischaracterizations of the United States military that I have come to expect from a newspaper that that I admittedly loath to…

You might think the media, given the fact that they helped engineer a Democratic victory in the midterms, and that it’s almost Christmas (sorry, Holiday), would ease their assault on President Bush. And you would be wrong. "Hardball" host Chris Matthews recently remarked that President Bush is demonstrating "messianic nuttiness." CNN’s Jack Cafferty finds it "strange" that Democrats aren’t racing…

...but my colleague Julia Seymour has got the Airing of Grievances part down for those of us at the MRC's Business & Media Institute. The camera pans across a sparkling Christmas tree, then zooms in on singer Clay Aiken, who begins to sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”: “... and ransom captive Israel … that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear …” So which holiday is that…

Yesterday Howie, one of my co-bloggers at The Jawa Report conducted what he describes as a "simple test" for mainstream media bias against reporting positive news from Iraq. Howie posted about three separate stories from Iraq, one positive, one mostly positive, and one negative, then tracked the amount of play each story got in the MSM via Google's news search function.

The Pentagon announced that all four major branches of the military met or exceeded their recruiting goals for the month on November. Normally the media glosses over these stories and relegates them to the rarely read deep recesses of the B section. That is unless the news can be used to embed a story within a story – the sort that poisons the main message with a carefully crafted sub-context…

I almost did a double take when reading this editorial knowing it came from the Washington Post. Kudos to the staff of the editorial page for printing something very politically incorrect about deceased former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and acknowledging the horrible truth that Fidel Castro, the aging communist ruler of Cuba, has not been sufficiently denounced. Castro-worship (and…

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who passed away Friday morning, adapted a 1983 speech on the influence of the news media, into the forward for the Media Research Center's 1990 book, And That's the Way It Isn't: A Reference Guide to Media Bias. She proposed: “Some people believe, and I am among them, that the power of the media today constitutes the most significant exercise of unaccountable power in our…

Last year, I sensed that journalists in general prefer to call this time of the year in commerce that of "holiday shopping" instead of "Christmas shopping," but that when it came to people losing their jobs, they preferred to describe layoffs as relating to "Christmas." My instincts were proven correct, as you can see below from the results of three different sets of Google News searches in…