Media

Media bias can be seen in many ways - the stories they tell, the stories they don't, the adjectives they use, what information they put in, what information they leave out.

Classically Liberal tells the tale of a lot of missing information in news reports of shooting incidents over the last few years. Which side of the gun control debate do you think the media is on?

Here's why most of the news you hear about Iraq is wrong. There's no one there to cover it.

The media likes to say how bad the economy is during the Bush years even if it's really going well. They have to make up stuff to show how bad things are. Here's today's economics lesson - there never has been a link between wages and productivity no matter what the MSM tells you. There appeared to be a correllation during the Dot Com boom but looking beyond that in either direction reveals no such connection. But, if you only show the right part of the chart....

If you want to know what Iraqis feel about our presence in their country, who should you ask?

1. A politically motivated American Senator or Congressman with an agenda against the sitting president
2. An insurgent A terrorist who wishes Iraq would return to its former totalitarian ways with him in charge
3. An Iraqi citizen who wants what's best for all of Iraq's people

Unfortunately, this study appears to have only looked at what was reported and failed to look at what wasn't reported. Media bias can be expressed in two ways: what they choose to report on and what they choose not to report on. If they chose not to report on several significant positive issues, that would indicate a bias against Bush's war efforts.

With that said, the numbers reported in the article say to me that there was evidence of bias. The numbers quoted for articles about the candidates during the election lean fairly significantly towards a pro-Kerry and anti-Bush stance.

By the way, anyone know what's going on in Afghanistan lately?

Why do we trust the media at all when they show us how little they know about what they cover? More interesting stuff from Michael Crichton.

When my kids were little, they would blame the tattler for getting them in trouble. This still happens to some extent even though they have become adolescents and young adults. It's as if they think what they did wrong wasn't wrong until they were caught.

The media response to the Eason Jordan affair reminds me of my kids. They refuse to accept that what was done was wrong. Instead, they try to shift blame to those who brought it up - the blogosphere.

The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting article in response to the media response.

Although Hindrocket writes a nice article on the problems with using mainstream media as a reliable source, I'm not sure this part really holds.

If an assertion sounds outlandish, like the claim that roving bands of 18th century Catholic priests went about hanging people, realize that it may very well be a fabrication. (Or, to take another example, the claim that a Secretary of the Interior expressed the view that environmental preservation is unnecessary in view of the imminent end of the world.)

If someone wants to believe the error, it doesn't trigger the 'outlandish' filter. The probable reason these things didn't get fact checked was because they fit right into the mental model the person passing them on held of the target. They didn't seem outlandish at all.

Lifetime achievement awards come cheaply these days. Leonardo DiCaprio has captured one at the ripe old age of 30. The bar has been lowered to having acted in a handful of successful movies.

I thought these kinds of awards were reserved for a lifetime of good works? This kid has a ways to go before reaching middle age.

CNN didn't want to miss any possibilities here.

A nice piece on bloggers vs. MSM at cut on the bias.

If after years of exposure, coverage, talking, conferences, chats at the water cooler, ruminations in major magazines, scandals, scooping up the best for their own use, generally puzzling over the "phenomenon", if after all that time of thought, the mainstream media don't have a handle on blogging - why is there any reason to think they have a handle on anything else?

One more reason to get rid of the television especially if you have young children.

We got satellite TV (Dish Network) last year. Even with hundreds of channels, I find little worth watching except sports and an occassional movie. With so many TV shows pushing one agenda or another these days, I think I have bought my last television set. It's just not worth nearly $60/month for programming when all I watch is a couple of football games on Sunday. Now if I could just find something else to keep the wife busy besides HGTV...

Newspapers are driven towards sensational items because those are the things that sell newspapers. That's why the front-page headlines are usually littered with bad news - it sells. If your entire perspective were driven by what you see on the front page, you would commit suicide in short order or give up newspapers. The perspective from the front page is very narrow and doesn't provide much balance. If you walk down any street in America, you probably won't see anything like what's described on that front page.

Add to this the liberal bias of the majority of the press. I'm sure this hasn't been reported in the newspapers but I'm also sure that just about any day you can go to the opinion page and find someone claiming the war in Iraq is unjustified. There are several excuses that may be mentioned; We never found any WMD, Bush was settling a score for his father, it's all about the oil. Those opinion pieces may also claim that Iraqis don't want us there and quote one or two for good measure. But have they spoken to the families of the 400,000 mentioned in the article linked above? The press is just looking for they can report that would reflect poorly on Bush. This trivializes the deaths of these 400,000 as well as all of those soldiers fighting for Iraqi freedom.

I have found many blogs that have posted letters written by the soldiers that are on the ground in Iraq. The stories they tell are the exact opposite of what I've seen in the newspapers and other media outlets. The problem is described quite well in this letter referenced by PoliPundit. If people are getting their entire perspective on the war from what they read in the papers, it's no wonder so many people voted against Bush in the last election.