17 Replies to “Not Waiting For The Asteroid”

  1. Any true journalist will have no bias. It’s all the creative wording that pisses me off. Words like “alleged” after the person already plead guilty.

  2. How th usual liberal, in-the-bag for obama usual suspects in the MSM react to the Nobel Award will tell a lot about them. No ‘journalist’ with any shred of objectivity will be able to say that the award was deserved. Those that do say it is deserved will be forever marked with a scarlet letter for saying such things – they will have forever revealed their true spots.

  4. Harold, I don’t think you get the point of the “Not Waiting For The Asteroid” headings. I’m still going to keep you out of the joke, but observe that it is not normally pointed towards tidbits of common knowledge. We all know Canwest is sunk. It’s old news.
    Further I’m going to assume that you like bringing it up repeatedly because you think that because Canwest owns the National Post, that somehow you will soon rejoice in the downfall of said paper. What you don’t get is that the NP has a rather venerable history, whereas Canwest is only it’s most recent owner. I won’t make bets on whether the institution will survive, but take note that it’s perpetuity has little to do with Canwest itself.

  5. Speaking of Flannery O’Connor (and sarcasm’s irony, er, irony’s sarcasm):
    “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
    (quotes)

  6. “While the mainstream media often fail to live up to their own standards, their committed pursuit of neutrality and objectivity is crucial to the quality of American journalism.”
    So…, they fail in their commitment often, but it’s crucial.
    wow, just wow.

  7. This article was just a leftist protecting other leftists in the media.
    He attempts to chide the old media on their bias, while absolutely slamming Fox etc.
    These people cannot be reasoned with, only defeated.

  10. Sheesh I am federal civil servant. Quite often I am required to deal with an issue I have personal opinions on. However I set them aside and deal with it via the policy and procedures of the Department. It was hard sometimes under the Liberals, but as long as the policies, orders were legal, then so be it. It’s not rocket science, it does require a small amount of ethics and I suspect that is where the problem lies.

  11. Good god that author is a twit.
    The dimwits point is that sure our hard news guys biased and lie about it but we’re not conservative like Fox’s OPINION shows so we’re still better than them.
    He just doesn’t get the point and obviously is not in an intellectual and/or honest position to figure out why.
    It’s ok to but stupid and clueless so long as your recognize your inadiquacy. This guy doesn’t.

  12. Conservatives cannot be good reporters or writers.
    Is that the gist of it?
    But if your an honest Liberal hack you can make up for it by just admitting your a liberal hack.
    Great work there.

  13. This is how depraved the MSM has become. Even with the fall of their empires they completely invert it to what killed it to begin with. Its absolute bias.

  14. I have to agree with some of the comments above.
    Just another article trying to CYA for the MSM.
    This guy doesn’t even see his own bias, which is quite obvious in the piece.
    Even articles trying to slam the MSM for liberal bias by liberals project that bias.
    They are hopeless.

  15. I wonder if a fish, laying in the bottom of a boat, mouth and gills moving in unison (and the occasional tail flap) think they are in control of the situation.

  16. DENIAL-Not just a river in Egypt.
    Here’s a column from that “progressive” bastion, Columbia University, emanating from an even lower level of Hell, the Columbia University School of Journalism’s “Review”. A “journalist” or “journalist-in-training” actually had some “moments of clarity”-actual intelligent, articulate thoughts. However, he’s unfortunately also sipping the “progressive” Kool-Aid as he writes, reverting to unsubstantiated “progressive” group-think conclusions.
    (Does the thinking behind his writing also seem to parallel that of Canadian “progressive” “journalists” at the Ceeb, Globe & Wail, Star, et. al?)
    I could’t let slip this opportunity to peer into the mind of a “progressive” “journalist” or “journalist-in-training”. It’s educational for us all. I’ll copy & paste his column and interject my comments:
    Journalism Should Own Its Liberalism
    And then manage it, challenge it, and account for it
    By Thomas Edsall
    The floodtide of e-mails and letters to New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt after his September 27 column on the paper’s failure to promptly investigate the conservative-initiated stories about Van Jones and ACORN testifies to the failure of the mainstream press to deal with the issue of liberal bias.
    “Many readers were not buying [the] contention that liberal bias had nothing to do with the slow response to ACORN and, before that, to the resignation of Van Jones, a White House aide,” Hoyt wrote this past Sunday.
    Hoyt quoted correspondence from angry Times readers: “‘So, beside Jill Abramson, Bill Keller and Barack Obama, were you able to find anyone, not resident in a cemetery, who was so tuned out?’ asked Charles Harkins of Spartanburg, S.C. Jerry Komar of Collingswood, N.J., charged that Times editors ‘hoped the story would blow over. They were caught in their own web of bias.’”
    Glenn Beck, FOX, and a couple of conservative video reporters have, in effect, forced the editors and ombudsmen at two of the nation’s leading newspapers, the Times and The Washington Post, to assume a full-scale defensive posture regarding charges of liberal bias.
    At the Times, according to Hoyt, managing editor Abramson and executive editor Keller have assigned an editor to keep an eye on the “opinion media.” At The Washington Post, executive editor Marcus Brauchli confessed to ombudsman Andrew Alexander that “we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues.” [COMMENT: They’re not “conservative issues”, Mr. Ombudsman, they are NEWS STORIES that your “progressive” paper refuses to cover. As Stalin had images of Communists who’d been purged airbrushed out of existence, you airbrush out news -reality- that contradicts or questions “progressive” dogma.] Brauchli announced to Alexander his intention to “challenge our reporters and editors with great frequency to look at what is going on across the political spectrum … at the extremes, among the rabble-rousers, as well as among policymakers.” [COMMENT: How telling is that sentence, both professionally and biased!] Undoubtedly, Alexander (and Brauchli) are experiencing the same e-mail campaigns that plagued Hoyt.
    The actions at both the Post and the Times are ad hoc reactions to the latest blow up, and do little or nothing to address the underlying reality at most papers.
    The mainstream press is liberal. Once, before 1965, reporters were a mix of the working stiffs leavened by ne’er-do-well college grads unfit for corporate headquarters or divinity school. Since the civil rights and women’s movements, the culture wars and Watergate, the press corps at such institutions as The Washington Post, ABC-NBC-CBS News, the NYT, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, etc. is composed in large part of “new” or “creative” class members of the liberal elite—well-educated men and women who tend to favor abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. In the main, they find such figures as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell beneath contempt.
    In a UCLA study of media bias, reporters were found to be substantially more liberal and more Democratic than the public at large. Hoyt, in a column last year, acknowledged this finding: “Being human, journalists do have personal biases, and a long line of studies has shown that they tend to be more socially and politically liberal than the population at large. There is no reason to believe Times journalists are any different.”
    If reporters were the only ones allowed to vote, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won the White House by landslide margins. More specifically, reporters and editors tend to be social liberals, not economic liberals. Their view of unions and the labor movement is wary and suspicious. They are far more interested in stories about hate crimes than in stories about the distribution of income.
    But, and this is a mega-but, even though the mainstream media are by this measure liberal, ending the discussion at this point would be a major disservice to both the press and the public. While the personnel tend to share an ideological worldview, most have a personal and professional commitment to the objective presentation of information, a commitment that is not shared by the conservative media. [COMMENT: Really? Like for example, how almost all of the MSM refused to cover any of the sordidness behind Barack Obama during the presidential compaign? Preferring instead to send about 40 “journalists” to Alaska to try to dig up or fabricate dirt on Sarah Palin?] FOX News, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The Washington Times, Drudge, The Washington Examiner, The American Spectator, CNS News, Town Hall, WorldNetDaily, Insight Magazine are all explicitly ideological. [COMMENT: “explicitly ideological” apparently means covering stories that the “progressive” MSM either refuses to cover, or minimizes or lies about them if they do cover them. Reference the “conservative issues” remark earlier by Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli.] FOX makes the bizarre and palpably untrue claim of ideological neutrality, “We Report, You Decide”—a claim it violates so routinely that no one takes it seriously. [COMMENT: He makes an assertion without giving any supporting facts or evidence. I believe the accurate descriptive phrase for that is “in my opinion”.]
    While the mainstream media often fail to live up to their own standards, their committed pursuit of neutrality and objectivity is crucial to the quality of American journalism. That commitment is the main reason the mainstream press is so intensely sensitive to allegations of bias. [COMMENT: “intense sensitivity” always has an acute cause and is in this case, IMO, more a cognizance that the accusations are uncomfortably accurate and the people comprising the MSM don’t want to admit or deal with that.] The refusal of mainstream media executives to acknowledge the ideological leanings of their staffs has produced a dangerous form of media guilt in which the press leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right. [] This happened at The Washington Post and was reflected in weak and sometimes fawning coverage, first of the opening years of the Reagan administration, and even more so during George W. Bush’s first term—when not only the lead-up to the Iraq invasion but key domestic initiatives went largely unexamined, with disastrous consequences. [COMMENT: Almost choked on my coffee over that absurd statement! The MSM bashed Reagon & Co. and Bush & Co. from Day One of their administrations. Do they think we all have amnesia?!]
    So, to quote Lenin on behalf of the mainstream media, What is to be done? There are a few things.
    An important first step is to abandon the notion, popularized by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, that white working class voters are suckers, willing to cast ballots against their economic interests because corporations and evangelical Christians have scared the bejesus out of them with phony issues like gay marriage, abortion, government takeover of the healthcare system, and distribution of condoms in the schools.
    [SOME SANITY, STARTING HERE] These voters are not stupid. Unlike upscale youngsters in Cambridge, the Upper West Side, and Berkeley, who are equipped financially and psychologically to go with the sexual flow, the children of folks casting ballots for Republicans often get into big trouble when they get pregnant (see, Sarah Palin’s daughter) or tell their teacher to go to hell. To many of their parents, the school system has no business handing out condoms, in effect encouraging early sex. The overwhelming majority of Republican voters already have health insurance and they have genuine concerns about the damage to that coverage that government might do. These are people who arguably lose some of what they have when resources are redistributed under policies mandating, for example, affirmative action and busing. The mindset that perceives these voters as dumb jerks is what permitted a reporter and a series of Washington Post editors to let a description of evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command” go unquestioned into a front-page story.
    Along the same lines, reporters might consider carefully the question of why the party of the left in this country, the party that claims to represent Jane and Joe Sixpack, has such trouble winning the votes of the white working class. The answer may lie more in the issue of redistributed benefits than in a right-wing conspiracy.
    Reporters might also attempt to think outside the prism of their own experience. Why did so many fail to see the news value when they learned from Glenn Beck that Van Jones, Obama’s environmental czar, had signed a 2004 petition accusing the Bush administration of deliberately allowing the 9/11 attacks to occur, calling for an “immediate inquiry,” and noting that a survey of New Yorkers showed 41 percent believed “US leaders had foreknowledge of impending 9/11 attacks and ‘consciously failed’ to act?” Similarly, what form of ideological myopia prompted the mainstream press to miss for days the story of ACORN staffers advising a self-proclaimed pimp and prostitute on ways to illegally get federal grants and to falsely fill out loan applications? AND ENDING HERE-within, it’s actually fair, accurate, unbiased writing.]
    One of the virtues of liberalism is its empathy and its willingness to see the good in human nature. Empathy, however, can run amok, as it did in a front page Washington Post story from 1991 that sought to balance the good side of Henry “Little Man” James, age sixteen—he’d give the mothers of his kids cash, diapers, and other caring gestures—with the bad side—riding in the backseat on 295, he told his buddies he felt like “bustin’ somebody,” rolled down the window, and shot Patricia Diann Bigby Lexie, age thirty-six. James had already been accused of two random, motiveless shootings, was described by police as running a violent crack cocaine ring in his neighborhood, and was implicated in a third shooting. The day after his arrest, 200 neighbors signed a petition asking that he be kept in jail without bail. The Post headlined the story “Conflicting Views Of I-295 Suspect; Teenager Seen as Mean, Nurturing,” The response of many readers was outrage.
    The Van Jones and ACORN cases are the extremes, but the more pervasive and subtle form liberal ‘blindness’ takes is in routine coverage. Stories, local and national, of virtually every culture-war issue commonly reflect reporters’ allegiance to social insurgents against traditionalists—and readers, who include many with traditionalist leanings, sense this. The facts and quotes from the school board meeting or Congressional debate are accurate. But something is missing in the reporting on the parents who do not want explicit sex education taught in the third grade, or the pro-lifers who are convinced that abortion is murder. These people exist all too often as stick figures or caricatures whose views are delegitimized.
    The liberal outlook of reporters and editors is clearly not an easily resolved issue. But perhaps the worst strategy is to avoid recognizing it—taking steps to hide one’s own views, for example, by not voting.
    Attempts by journalists to conceal deeply held political convictions can be dangerous. While no agreed-upon mechanism or forum exists, at present, for editors and reporters in the mainstream media to declare personal ideology and partisan leanings, the goal of improved objectivity is more likely to be achieved through individual self-scrutiny and institutional honesty among those in authority. A reporter fully aware of his or her own relevant political and moral beliefs, and conscious of how those views influence what and how he or she reports, is likely to produce better journalism, in which both left and right get their due, without resorting to the bland, forced neutrality found in many publications seeking to conceal the beliefs of their staffs.
    [COMMENT: Then the author loses it, stringing together politically correct “progressive” assertions without any substantiation.]Although it is the subject for another essay, the fact is that there are very few good conservative reporters. [COMMENT: Maybe that’s because conservative journalists can’t get hired in the “progressive” MSM? Maybe they get weeded out in the interview process or in the vetting? OR that if they do get hired, they don’t last long before either being fired, otherwise forced out or, becoming tired of fighting battles with “progressive” idiots, they quit and going into another line of work?] There are many intellectually impressive conservative advocates and opinion leaders, but the ideology does not seem to make for good journalists. [COMMENT: Really? Prove that statement! H.L. Mencken, Edward R. Murrow, Bill Mauldin, Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin, Melanie Phillips, Dr. Walter Williams and many, many others come to mind as great conservative journalists and writers.] In contrast, any examination of the nation’s top reporters over the past half-century would show that, in the main, liberals do make good journalists in the tradition of objective news coverage. [COMMENT: Dan “fake-but-accurate” Rather, for example? Again, an assertion made without any substantiating facts or evidence. Again, it’s merely an opinion] The liberal tilt of the mainstream media is, in this view, a strength, but one that in recent years, amid liberal-bias controversies, has been mismanaged. [COMMENT: Sigh. Ditto my immediately preceding comment. I suppose “mismanaged” means they just weren’t skillful enough to make us peasants see the value of the liberal tilt he admits exists.]

  17. The writer is ‘contributing editor to HuffPo’..it was an obligatory attempt at intellectualising the situation. Whitewash.
    He managed to rile some lefty commenters. Hit some sensitive spots.
    I like this comment at the site:
    “The idea of the press”bending over backwards” to hide its liberalism reminds me of the story of this man, who was so dirty that he had to wash very often so that no one notices.”

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation