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Media Bias Archive

Monday

13

July 2009

0

COMMENTS

On Racism, Media Filter Still In Force

Written by , Posted in Media Bias

You’ve probably heard by now about the 65 mostly minority children turned away from a private swim club in Philadelphia despite their camp having purchased access. Although the motivations of the club are unclear (the kids are now being allowed to return), there is at least a reasonable case to be made that race was involved.

The controversy has been extensively covered by the media.  GoogleNews returns 1,523 articles in the past month with the words “Creative Steps,” the name of the day camp hosting the kids.

Two days prior to the eviction of the Creative Steps children, a family in Ohio faced a seemingly racially motivated incident of their own.  The white family, and a couple friends, were assaulted by a large group of black teenagers.  The father, Marty Marshall, spent 5 days in the hospital.  While beating the man, the teenagers were said to have yelled, “this is a black world now.”

A GoogleNews search of Marty Marshall returns 18 stories.

Two seemingly racial incidents occur at the same time, yet the ratio of stories in the press is almost 85:1.  What could possibly justify this disparity? The answer is quite simple, one fits the popular narrative that whites are racist against blacks, while the other indicates that there is no racist monopoly.  The latter fact, if it were widely acknowledged in media coverage of allegedly racist incidents, would put not a few race hustlers out of business and deprive certain politicians of their favorite playing card.  The media, by deciding which stories to bury and which to amplify, has long served as a source of distortion regarding social and political issues.

I had originally intended this post to highlight the difference between new media and old on this issue because I recalled that, as of a couple days ago, a search of blogs on Google produced nearly identical results for the two stories. Yet doing that search again today, I was a bit surprised to see that a large gap exists and the Creative Steps story outnumbers the Marshall family beating almost 10:1.  So while the blogosphere has not completely overcome the media filter on race, its strength has been severely reduced.

Tuesday

21

April 2009

0

COMMENTS

Obama Appointee: Bailout Liberal Media

Written by , Posted in Free Markets, Media Bias

Former member of the liberal media and new Obama appointee Rosa Brooks wants the government to bailout the dying print media industry.

Brooks, who has taken up a post as an adviser at the Pentagon, advocated upping “direct government support for public media” and creating licenses to govern news operations.

“Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off,” she wrote in her parting column on April 9.

Brooks said this would help rescue the industry from a “death spiral” and left the government unaccountable to the journalists who must keep it honest. “[I] can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed,” she wrote.

I can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the media is controlled by the government.  Of course, her entire premise is false.  Media is not collapsing; old media is collapsing.  This is what happens in a dynamic economy, the old dies and the new takes its place.

The old model of heavily filtered news delivered by liberal journalists is a loser.  It’s going the way of the dodo, and for good reason.  The government should not step in to protect this old format anymore than it should have to protect horse and carriages with the arrival of the automobile.  Trying to codify old business models into law will only prevent the new business models that otherwise would have developed from doing so, losing us the primary advantage of a dynamic economy: innovation.

Thursday

16

April 2009

0

COMMENTS

Desperately Distorting The Tea Parties

Written by , Posted in Media Bias

Yesterday was tax day, which meant hundreds of thousands of regular Americans organized and protested Obama’s reckless spending of the money our children haven’t earned yet.  The left, and their allies in the media, have been desperate to paint the protests as manufactured by “corporate interests,” rather than the spontaneous and organic outgrowth of legitimate citizen rage with our tyrannical liberal government.  As usual, the left is projecting their own tactics (Axelturfing, for instance) onto the right.  But it’s the left that pays people to protest.  It’s the left that funnels money from George Soros to pretend grassroots movements.  The right doesn’t use these Alinsky tactics; Obama does.

Another reason the left just can’t believe these protests are real is because the protesters didn’t behave as typical leftist protesters do.  They didn’t destroy property.  They didn’t battle with police.  These are law abiding citizens fed up with the destructive behavior of their government.  They had no intention to join in that mindless destruction of American property.

Liberals must believe that this isn’t real, because they have deluded themselves into believing that everyone supports their reckless spending.  They can’t handle ideological differences, because they can’t defend their ideology against a challenge.  They’d rather pretend you don’t exist than defend their positions.  But in the end that will be their downfall.  They won’t be able to acknowledge the tide that will sweep them from office until the water’s receding, with their failed government in tatters in its wake.

Thursday

12

March 2009

0

COMMENTS

Misleading Statistics On Homelessness

Written by , Posted in Media Bias

I recently sent the following letter to Time.

To the Editor,

Your recent article on homeless children (“Report Says 1 in 50 U.S. Kids Are Homeless,” March 10, 2009) was agenda journalism at its worst. It unquestionably passed off deliberately misleading information without any critical analysis.  Your article made only a single, passing reference to the unusual and fraudulent definition of homeless used by The National Center on Family Homelessness.

When people think of being homeless, they think of having no where to live.  They do not normally think of living in a trailer park or sharing a home with extended family as being “homeless.”  But the claim is even more deceptive than that, as it treats someone who does these things only one time out of the entire year as “homeless” for that year.

I am currently living with extended family while I transition my career.  No one in their right mind would consider me homeless, but The National Center on Family Homelessness does.  When agenda organizations send out press releases, the press needs to do more than just regurgitate their fraudulent claims.

Sincerely,

Brian Garst

Sunday

15

February 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 16

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, Media Bias

We’re all gonna die even faster than we thought:

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This increase in doom-mongering and hysteria wouldn’t have anything to do with the public’s decreasing receptiveness to massive environmental regulation of the economy following the economic downturn, now would it?

It’s also worth pointing how how misleading the WaPo headline is.  The headlines states, “Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates.” This is deliberately misleading. No one actually measured “climate change” and found that it “exceeds estimates.” All they did was change the data input, which does nothing to address the faults in their models.

Tuesday

28

October 2008

1

COMMENTS

Scared Of Debate

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Media Bias

I recently sent the following letter to the Washington Post:

Dear Editor,

Ruth Marcus’ recent defense of Obama was incomprehensible (“The ‘Socialist’ Scare,” Oct. 22). While rightly acknowledging that it’s important to debate the proper role of government, Marcus later uses examples of those trying to engage in such debates as proof of an “uncivil” campaign. Socialism and welfare go to the heart of “the proper role of government,” yet she finds discussion of such issues to be “ominous.” We must, in her view, move beyond the “stale ‘no new taxes’ debate.” Rather, she is concerned that engaging in these important debates will make it harder for the next President to “unite a divided country.”

Marcus wants a debate, but only after we first all accept her premise that taxes are good, and that any increase should be seen as nothing more than the price for civilized society. It sure is easy to win a debate if everyone is forced to accept your ideas before it even begins.

Sincerely,
Brian Garst

Tuesday

7

October 2008

0

COMMENTS

WaPo Distorts Logic To Defend Obama

Written by , Posted in Election Time, Media Bias

This election cycle has seen a proliferation of “fact checking” and “ad watching” columns and websites, all pretending to peddle impartial analysis of candidate claims.   While useful in the aggregate, some of these are little more than venues for partisan advocacy under the fig leaf of impartiality.  The most recent such Ad Watch column by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post exemplifies this behavior.

Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are — (Barack Obama:)“. . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” (Narrator:) How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops. Increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.

ANALYSIS

This John McCain ad blatantly distorts Barack Obama’s words in an effort to paint him as callous about the role of the U.S. military. The commercial truncates a comment that Obama made to a voter in New Hampshire in August 2007. According to the Associated Press, the senator from Illinois brought up Afghanistan when asked whether he would withdraw troops from Iraq to fight terrorism elsewhere: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” In short, Obama was saying he wanted to avoid just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, not that this was all that American troops were doing. His meaning was the opposite of what is portrayed in this spot. Civilian casualties have been rising in Afghanistan this year, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates last month apologized for U.S. airstrikes that have killed civilians.

This is an utterly dishonest analysis by Kurtz.  Obama was indeed saying he wanted to avoid air-raiding villages, but that doesn’t preclude him from also saying that it’s all that American troops are doing.  Those two positions can be held simultaneously, much to Kurtz’s chagrin.  So while it’s true that the ad does not include that Obama wants to avoid “just air-raiding villages,” it doesn’t claim he wants to encourage it either, and thus can’t possible portay the opposite of Obama’s meaning, another of Kurtz’ false conclusions.  And that issue isn’t even the point.  Whether or not Obama wants to avoid it is immaterial to his assertion that “just air-raiding villages” is what he thinks we are doing now.

Kurtz would have us believe that Obama is just mentioning civilian killing air-raids as a hypothetical outcome of having too few troops, but that’s an overly generous reading of Obama’s statement.  While Kurtz scolds the McCain camp for cutting out part of the quote, Kurtz himself completely ignores an important qualifying clause from his analysis.   If Obama did not believe we were “just air-raiding and killing civilians,” why would he then immediately and describe how that is presently affecting Afghanistan, when he says it “is causing enormous pressure over there.”  He doesn’t say that it “would” cause pressure, he says that it “is.”

Kurtz is free to conclude that Obama didn’t mean to imply that he thought that American troops were only air-raiding villages and killing civilians, but it’s not dishonest to point out that, if taken how it was actually delivered, it’s exactly what his statement claims.  If Obama was overly flippant and imprudent in his response, that’s his fault and his problem.   Obama is prone to these kind of gaffes when speaking off the cuff and without his precious teleprompter to guide him.  Falsely attacking McCain as a liar is apparently how Howard Kurtz wishes to contribute to the Obama campaign and cover up this particular shortcoming of The Messiah.

Wednesday

1

October 2008

1

COMMENTS

Media Mind Readers

Written by , Posted in Free Markets, Liberty & Limited Government, Media Bias

Given the media coverage the last few days, I have come to believe that reporters are able to read minds. It is, after all, the only logical explanation for these headlines:

Stock market rallies amid bailout hopes
Stocks Move Higher On Hopes Bailout Bill Will Be Revived
US STOCKS-Futures rise on hopes for reviving bailout
Wall Street rallies on bailout revival hopes

And it’s not just American stocks supposedly placing their hopes and dreams in the U.S. Congress:

Toronto stocks bounce back on bailout hopes
Russian stocks gain on US bailout hopes
Indian shares close higher on hopes of new U.S. bail-out package
Mexican stocks, peso bounce back on bailout hopes
European, Asian markets improve on US bailout hope

On and on it goes. How do they know what drives investors?  These headline are not reporting news, they’re interpreting it.  That should not be the function of the media, but they do it whenever they want to make sure you evaluate the actual news appropriately and learn what you are supposed to learn (what they want you to learn).

Here’s what they want you to think: “See, everyone is pulling for government intervention. If you damn conservatives will just let big government intervene, stocks will rise and all will be well!” This narrative is predicated on the assumption that every time the stock market goes up it is good, and all drops are bad. As a rule of thumb, this is a fairly adequate framework to help people evaluate what’s going on most of the time. It is not, however, completely accurate. Rises and falls are good or bad in so far as they signal that the economy is strengthening or weakening. Only when prices reflect an honest evaluation of market strength, then, should it be assumed that stock increases are good.  When they do not, they create “bubbles,” and the inevitable result is an eventual downward correction.

One such bubble, in the housing market, has just been popped.  This bubble was created by government intervention, the primary culprit (there are many) being the Fed’s holding of interest rates at levels lower than the market otherwise would have accorded.  It did this, let us not forget, after another bubble, the 90’s dot com bubble, collapsed.  The lesson one should take here is: we should not attempt to fight corrections with more interventionist policies that will only create yet more bubbles.  Even if we assume the media is correct, that investors want an infusion of taxpayer money to prop up flailing business engaging in risky practices, that is not a sound reason to formulate government policy.  We should not make bad long term decisions just because stocks might fall in the short term.  If that fall reflects a realignment of capital toward more efficient uses, as it does in this case, the end result will be much better in the long run if it is allowed to happen.

Sunday

24

August 2008

1

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 10

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, Media Bias

It’s a vicious cycle, I tell you.

Climate change could release unexpectedly huge stores of carbon dioxide from Arctic soils, which would in turn fuel a vicious circle of global warming, a new study warned Sunday.

And according to one commentary on the research, current models of climate change have not taken this extra source of greenhouse gas into account.

…

Commenting on the research, Christian Beer of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, pointed out that the climate change models upon which future projections are based, do not include the potential impact of the gases trapped frozen Arctic soils.

“Releasing even a portion of this carbon into the atmosphere, in the form of methane or carbon dioxide, would have an significant impact on Earth’s climate,” he noted in his commentary, also published in Nature Geoscience.

Methane, another greenhouse gas, is less abundant than carbon dioxide but several times more potent as a driver of global warming.

Our hysteria has not yet been properly calibrated to take into account this new source of doom! And to think just how much more wrong our predictions could be if we did take this new finding into account.

On a related note, I couldn’t help but scoff at reporting this pathetic:

The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists project temperature increases by century’s end of up to six degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic region, which is more sensitive to global warming than any other part of the planet.

“The Nobel Prize-winning UN panel of climate change scientists.”  The purpose of that love-fest description is to get you to bow to the dictates of the IPCC without asking questions.  The problem is that the description is entirely misleading.  First of all, the IPCC is not a scientific panel; it’s an intergovernmental panel (hence the I in IPCC).  It’s made up of government officials, environmentalist activists and yes, some scientists.  Furthermore, it does not follow the scientific process of peer review, and many scientists involved in the reports were never given a say in the final product, but had their names attached (often over their objections) anyway.

“But it received a Nobel Prize,” the faithful will assert.  Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize, which is not awarded for scientific accomplishment, but, history suggests, for successful implementation of left-wing ideology.

AFP sells the IPCC as an award winning scientific authority, but it is nothing of the kind.  Don’t let their falsehoods intimidate you.

Wednesday

25

June 2008

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 7

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, Media Bias

This installment of “We’re All Gonna Die!” covers a bit more than just global warming, but this article was just too hysterical not to highlight.

Everything is seemingly spinning out of control

Is everything spinning out of control?

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year’s presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, “Yes, we can.”

Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2003.

Gee, I wonder why the public might be pessimistic.  Wouldn’t have anything to do with the excessively gloomy and irrational news coverage, now would it?

If that opening paragraph doesn’t scream “we’re all gonna die,” I don’t know what does.

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About Me

profileI serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.

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