Re: Mark Halperin acknowledges liberal media bias
 

What most progressives see as a 'conservative bias' could also be described as a 'managerial class bias' which becomes a de facto conservative bias. This bias would not be know in the least to any ombudsman, any journalist or corporate executive. It would simply be the way they collectiviely view the world. Let me explain what I mean.

Left leaning people have similar views on things like taking care of the poor, education, race relations. But, the way all of these issues are framed in the debate is from management's perspective...even for progressives. For example, taking care of the poor is an issue of charity, well, an alternative and perhaps more valid framing of the issue is that unemployed people looking for work are paying the price for the nation's monetary policy. Specifically, unemployment is kept higher than it would naturally be to hold off inflation, but in so doing it keeps working wages lower, (working class wages go up when unemployment goes down) professional wages protected and more workers out of work. So, the issue is framed everywhere as the poor draining society, but a valid framing is also that the poor pay for our way of life with their poverty. This is also the perspective of many poor people.

Race issues are also given similar treatment from news media to entertainment media (every year there is a new show about a noble white person going into the inner city to help out the helpless black folk... simply an offensive premise to anyone who reads between the lines even if there are one or two white people who go into an inner city for this purpose every year). Affirmative action is typically covered (a program helping black people) but the mountains and mountains of discrimination are no longer covered (things hurting black people). Instead a 'pro black issue' story is more likely to involve a black person beating the odds, pulling himself up by the boot straps and becoming successful, which, rather than educating people on the extreme disadvantage that black people need to overcome just reinforces the myth that most black people are lazy.

A person could write a few books on media bias and how the entire framing of the debate is done by the managerial class...for example, terrifs and subsidies are protectionist (against free trade) whereas, state-based licensing for doctors, lawyers, accountants and most older professional vocations are not ever reported as protectionist, despite the fact that the country could save 10 times the ammount NAFTA and CAFTA did by coming up with universal licensing and opening up Medical Doctors to free trade.

All of this ammounts to a conservative bias because the framing of the debate distorts the validity of progressive issues.

Here is a source on the media bias that I found very enlightening. http://www.conservativenannystate.org/

Re: Mark Halperin acknowledges liberal media bias
 

[ QUOTE ]
The idea that the press is somehow supposed to be "impartial" or "unbiased" is a 20th century concoction. It's impossible, and anyone trying to tell you that news should be impartial is trying to sell you jars full of moonbeams. In fact, a completely impartial press that merely reports events as they happen, in the absence of logical analysis by people more knowledgable on the subjects than the media consumer, would be downright useless.

[/ QUOTE ] NH

Maccaca vs Erotic [censored] Pedophilic Novels
 

George Allen(R) gets crucified by the press for weeks over a foreign word that no one has ever heard of. Jim Webb(D) writes [censored] erotic pedophilic novels and the press lets the story die in two days.....

Er yeah.....there is no press bias.

Re: Maccaca vs Erotic [censored] Pedophila Novels
 

[ QUOTE ]
George Allen(R) gets crucified by the press for weeks over a foreign word that no one has ever heard of. Jim Webb(D) writes [censored] erotic pedophilic novels and the press lets the story die in two days.....

Er yeah.....there is no press bias.

[/ QUOTE ]

George Allen, a guy with a history of racism (confederate flag and noose proudly on display, harrassment of black foe in college, many witnesses to his casual and frequent use of "niggger") spitefully calls an Indian guy a racist name on tape.

James Webb, war hero, writes Vietnam novel that is on the military's reading list for character development, a novel that received high praise from John McCain. There's sex in his novels - gasp! even gay sex!

Re: Maccaca vs Erotic [censored] Pedophila Novels
 

don't confuse your bias with liberal bias. One of the stories involves racial hate speech directed at a dark skinned person the other fiction.

Re: Mark Halperin acknowledges liberal media bias
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
The idea that the press is somehow supposed to be "impartial" or "unbiased" is a 20th century concoction. It's impossible, and anyone trying to tell you that news should be impartial is trying to sell you jars full of moonbeams. In fact, a completely impartial press that merely reports events as they happen, in the absence of logical analysis by people more knowledgable on the subjects than the media consumer, would be downright useless.

[/ QUOTE ] NH

[/ QUOTE ]

Propertarian NH'ed borodog on a social issue? *writes date down*

But yeah, I agree. No news station should be fair or balanced, they should be what they are; biased as all hell. There should just be more of them, so that the inter-media attitude is fair and balanced. That's what the net is for.

Re: Maccaca vs Erotic [censored] Pedophila Novels
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
George Allen(R) gets crucified by the press for weeks over a foreign word that no one has ever heard of. Jim Webb(D) writes [censored] erotic pedophilic novels and the press lets the story die in two days.....

Er yeah.....there is no press bias.

[/ QUOTE ]

George Allen, a guy with a history of racism (confederate flag and noose proudly on display, harrassment of black foe in college, many witnesses to his casual and frequent use of "niggger") spitefully calls an Indian guy a racist name on tape.

James Webb, war hero, writes Vietnam novel that is on the military's reading list for character development, a novel that received high praise from John McCain. There's sex in his novels - gasp! even gay sex!

[/ QUOTE ]

BTW at least for me the problem with the Allen thing was not that he used some obscure potentially racist term like "macaca". It's that he made up a weird degrading term for an Indian guy. If the camerman had been black and Allen said, hey our friend "Tyrone" over here, or if the cameraman had been Hispanic, and he said our buddy "Julio" is joining us or whatever, I think that's pretty f*cked up.

Re: Maccaca vs Erotic [censored] Pedophila Novels
 

The thing was it wasnt obscure to him. Its a word very well known to his mother. The odds of his mom knowing the word, never saying it to him, it never being defined for him AND him making it up? Next to impossible i would think.

Re: Maccaca vs Erotic [censored] Pedophila Novels
 

[ QUOTE ]
The thing was it wasnt obscure to him. Its a word very well known to his mother. The odds of his mom knowing the word, never saying it to him, it never being defined for him AND him making it up? Next to impossible i would think.

[/ QUOTE ]

I find it really doubtful that he knew it was a racist derogatory term. It just doesn't make any sense that a politician would use such a slur in public. For me it is just the fact that if he wanted to find the cameraman's name he could of asked, the fact that he used "macaca" to me is the same if he had said "Abdul" or "Habib" or anyother Indian/Middle Eastern name.

Re: Mark Halperin acknowledges liberal media bias
 

[ QUOTE ]
But its hard to ignore when a guy of Helperin's experience makes some of these statements.

[/ QUOTE ]

So when Mark Halperin claims President Bush's attacks on Sen. Kerry in the 2004 election "involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done," -- and that Bush team was purposefully complaining about unfair media coverage, which was "all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible" -- are we willing to concede then, that with all Halperin's experience, which you note and I gladly concede -- do we agree that his judgment on the behavior of the 2004 Bush campaign's tactics, and his condemnation of them, are sound?

I have no intentions of discussing 2004, nor do I believe it's relevant how the hell Bush's campaign behaved -- let's put that aside. But since the right-wing blogosphere now holds Halperin as the paradigm of journalistic virtue, I'm a little confused as to what changed their tune.

I need only point to the FreeRepublic community, which had held Halperin in such utter contempt in 2004 that they were organizing email and phone campaigns demanding his liberal treachery end -- that same community now, almost stunningly, believes Halperin is their only ally in the MSM who will give them the awful truth about liberal bias.

I don't have much to offer here other than to say the right can't seem to make up it's mind on Halperin -- most likely because they, like most other consumers of information, enjoy information that reinforces their beliefs and loathes that which doesn't; in light of this (and the endless amount of other evidence we could point to which would demonstrate something similar), I'm going to concur with (surprise) Boro that memes on media bias are perplexing at best and silly at worst -- even Halperin himself admits that (see his quote below), with all his experience, knows that it's the market, and not ideology, which dictates how information is disseminated:

"As an economic model, if you want to thrive like Fox News Channel, you want to have a future, you better make sure conservatives find your product appealing if you're going to do the right thing. You got to do it."

One of the "problems" of not having an American Prvada means consumers are put in a position of having to discern for themselves which information sources are silly, untrustworthy, or disproportionally biased. That the right is chagrin some measure of their fellow consumers still find the NYT trustworthy, or that the left is hot under the collar because lots of people like getting their news from Fox and Drudge should not prompt calls for organized letter writing campaigns or never-ending blogger investigations, but merely a stern reminder: caveat emptor.