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Indubitably.


Knutreturns said: Spoken like the true Greatest RDCW Champ!

All hail King Snarf!

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Quote:

Captain Sammitch said:
You'll fit right in with the coherence of most of the threads in here!



Quote:

Captain Sammitch meant:
Wednesday is black and speaks in ghetto, I do not like him or his race of people. I also hate all ethnic groups. I am Sammitch, a racist.





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Very interesting comments today from CBS News business correspondent Anthony Mason about the limited prism through which most journalists view big business in America:

    I think too often the business beat is "what are gas prices today?" and "who did those evil corporations fire?" or "what bad CEO is making too much money?" and business is almost viewed as the big bad boogeyman that's not doing enough.

    But the fact of the matter is, business is kind the fundamental underlying structure of society that makes it go, and you need to kind of look at it that way.

    there is certainly a lack of understanding...there might have been an institutional bias.

    I think a lot of people who come into journalism didn’t know much about business, and weren’t that interested.

    And I think that’s part of the problem – most of us are on the employee side of things, and not on the employer side. And there’s another side to it.

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New York Times public editor Byron Calame has publicly admonished the Times’ chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon, for saying he thinks the US can win in Iraq.

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MSNBC and some other news outlets are reporting that journalists donate to democrats over republicans by a nine-to-one margin:

  • MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.


Not a terribly surprising story, given the obvious leftward tilt of the media's news reporting over the years. However, it is a bit more suprising to read some of the specifics of who donates, especially when the donations are violative of their employers' policies:

  • Randy Cohen...writes the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for The New York Times. The former comedy writer gave $585 to MoveOn.org in 2004 when it was organizing get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bush.

It turns out that "the Ethicist" isn't very ethical. The Times prohibits its reporters from making political donations:

  • some major newspapers and TV networks ...prohibit all political activity aside from voting no matter whether the journalist covers baseball or proofreads the obituaries. The Times in 2003 banned all donations


Also surprising to some may be the democrat donors who work at Fox News:

  • Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."


Some of the journalists tried to defend the donation by saying the cash contributions were part of a process of openess and accountability:

  • One of the recurring themes in the responses is that it's better for journalists to be transparent about their beliefs, and that editors who insist on manufacturing an appearance of impartiality are being deceptive to a public that already knows journalists aren't without biases.


In principle, as I've stated before, that's not a bad idea. Unfortunately, as the article itself notes, the reporters aren't being transparent and, in fact, often go to great lengths to hide their donations:

  • Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.


According to the article, one reporter claimed his donations to John Kerry were irrelevant because he didn't cover U.S. news. He defined U.S. news so it excluded the U.S. war in Iraq. Another claimed that a donation was her husband's until confronted with the documents. A third claimed her father, not her, made the donation to a candidate, even though her "facebook" page showed her endorsing that candidate.

In short, the reporters aren't just biased, they are liars.

No wonder distrust of the media remains at an all time high.

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you ever wonder why thre people who have to watch politics for a living and analyze everything that's done happen to decide that the dems are worth supporting?
or is this some liberal conspiracy for you? like wonderboy and black people theories?


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There's little, if any, support in the article for your idea that these people were reporters who became democrats.

In fact, if you read the whole article, one of the defenses that many of the reporters try to advance is that they don't cover politics and, therefore, their existing biases aren't tied to their work.

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The article also noted that the Press has toughened up their rules in response to the conservative outcry. Now if you cover sports you can't donate to a political party because their bosses are afraid of being labelled as biased. I think it's dumb because their going to be labelled as biased reguardless unless their "fair" like FOX.


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The loss of the popular vote while still winning the presidency.
His many vacation days.
Pre-9/11 bungling.
Appointing cronies.
Massive and embarrassing failures in Iraq that have turned the world from supportive to practically fearing we're turning into Nazi Germany.
Katrina.
Plame leak coming from his White House.
Using religion as a wedge.
The controversial nature of the patriot act.
The many criminal scandals involving his people.
Appointed cronies like Michael Brown.
Changing our surplus into a record deficit.
Ignoring the will of the people on Iraq.
Many many more issues and scandals.


Do you ever think that maybe the press goes after Bush or seems tough on Bush because there is a lot of stink coming from his administration? Or that they gave him a pass after 9/11 and he used that to get us into Iraq and now the press is being tough to make up for their failures?
Where was this "liberal bias" when Clinton was in office? I remember the media milking every problem he had, every investigation that ultimately went nowhere, they still milked it. If there was such a bias, they would've twisted it instead of focusing on all the details.
Fox News is the only network that shows a true bias. They attack critics of Bush and lob softballs at his staff, they use weasel words and those cute little questions at the bottom of the screen to spread the GOP playbook, and they do it shamelessly. Fox does speculative stories about how terrorists will bomb us the second the democrats win, or how John Kerry being elected may cause the stock market to crash. That is bias at work, not the reporter who asked Bush a tough question about a war happens to vote democratic.
\:rollseyes


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 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man

...Fox News is the only network that shows a true bias....


 Originally Posted By: the G-man

.... donors who work at Fox News: Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."....



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 Originally Posted By: the G-man
 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man

...Fox News is the only network that shows a true bias....


 Originally Posted By: the G-man

.... donors who work at Fox News: Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."....



So? I actually said that contributions don't necessarily mean anything about how they work. Fox news is incredibly bias.


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 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
 Originally Posted By: the G-man
 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man

...Fox News is the only network that shows a true bias....


 Originally Posted By: the G-man

.... donors who work at Fox News: Codie Brooks, of Brit Hume's "Special Report," gave $2,600 last year to the Senate campaign of Harold Ford Jr., the Memphis Democrat. She said she raised much of the money from friends. "A lot of Fox employees have contributed to Democratic candidates," she said. "I know I'm not the only one."....



So? I actually said that contributions don't necessarily mean anything about how they work. Fox news is incredibly bias.


As opposed to any other televised news outlet?


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I already wrote my view on that out, but G-man cuts a quote and you respond to his cuts. Just making the debate run around in circles until the original point is lost. \:rollseyes


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 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
you ever wonder why thre people who have to watch politics for a living and analyze everything that's done happen to decide that the dems are worth supporting?
or is this some liberal conspiracy for you? like wonderboy and black people theories?


One thing I forgot to mention in response to this point. Waay back at the beginning of the thread, I already addressed this issue when I noted:

 Originally Posted By: the G-man
...a number studies have found that journalism students skew liberal. In other words, they were liberal before they began working as reporters...

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\:rollseyes
people who look at the facts and don't like Bush have a liberal bias?

jeez, the problem is the word bias. you assume that if someone is liberal they will twist everything to fit their world view. that's ridiculous. as i said the "liberal media" covered Clinton with gusto, they like scandals because they equal money.
A lot of people find Bush troubling because there is a lot of death surrounding him.


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 Quote:
Fri, Jun 22, 2007 6:55pm ESTSend to a friend Print Version
"Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser
A Tale of Two Studies
Two new studies released this week examine the news media, in quite different ways and with vastly different efficacy. The Center for American Progress and Free Press teamed up to release The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio, and MSNBC posted a report about political contributions made by journalists.
Conservative media critics, eager as always to discuss what is in the hearts and minds of journalists rather than what is actually in newspapers and on television, have seized on MSNBC's list of 144 journalists who "made campaign contributions from 2004 through the first quarter of 2007."
Matt Drudge hyped the article with his lead headline: "THE GREAT DIVIDE: REPORTERS GIVE DEMS MONEY OVER REPUBLICANS 9 TO 1!" On Fox & Friends, hosts Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson agreed that the study shows a "media bias in the country" and that it also showed there isn't one at Fox News:
DOOCY: And so what it comes down to ultimately is, you think there's a media bias in the country? Just look at the statistics from the FEC itself. And people -- reporters gave to Democrats nine times more often than the reporters would give to the GOP.
CARLSON: Yeah, but you know what I got out of the story, Steve? Was that actually coming home right here to Fox News Channel, I liked the fact that they did this report and showed that people who work here at Fox gave to Democrats. Because so often, we are accused of only being a Republican or conservative news channel.
DOOCY: It just goes to show you.
CARLSON: Fair and balanced.
DOOCY: Absolutely. Fair and balanced.
Any study that Fox News uses to demonstrate that it is "fair and balanced" probably has a flaw or two.
For starters, MSNBC found fewer than 150 journalists who have made political contributions. There were more than 116,000 working journalists in America as of 2002. The 144 who made contributions not only constitute a tiny fraction of American journalists, they cannot be considered a representative sample of the whole. Indeed, we know that they are un-representative of all journalists: They made reported campaign contributions, and their colleagues did not.
Furthermore, 144 journalists may be a tiny number, but it is also a grossly inflated one. As Matthew Yglesias noted:
This effort at ginning up controversy by revealing political contributions made by employees of media organizations seems fundamentally misguided. For one thing, no effort is being made to see if the people named have any ability to impact coverage of national politics. They have, for example, a former copy editor here at The Atlantic on their list, but what nefarious influence is she supposed to have had on the magazine's coverage?
Indeed, if you look at MSNBC's list, you won't find Tim Russert or Bob Woodward or Maureen Dowd. You won't see many contributions from reporters for CNN or The New York Times or The Washington Post or ABC News. But you will find sports copy editors for the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a sports statistician for The Boston Globe, sports columnists for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and a sports editor for the San Jose Mercury News. Who dares even to imagine the liberal claptrap that must seep into coverage of the Fort Worth Flyers basketball games?
Yglesias also noted that, while Democrats may have enjoyed the occasional $250 contribution from a few copy editors, the media sector funnels far more money to Republicans via PACs:
I can tell you that in 2006, GE's PAC gave $807,282 to Republicans and just $474,118 to Democrats. In 2004 there was a similar division of funds, in 2002 "only" 60 percent of it went to the GOP. Indeed, as you can see here essentially every PAC in the media sector backed the GOP over the Democrats.
But the real problem with drawing conclusions about the media based on MSNBC's list is that it tells us next to nothing about the content of the news we read and watch and listen to.
Even if you believe that a contribution from a sports copy editor to a congressional candidate proves that more journalists are liberals than conservatives, it doesn't follow that news reports reflect a liberal bias. Indeed, as longtime journalist and Building Red America author Tom Edsall has explained, decades of attacks from conservatives have had the effect of turning even journalists who may personally be liberals into "unwilling, and often unknowing" conduits for conservative misinformation:
The conservative movement has been very effective attacking the media (broadcast and print) for its liberal biases. The refusal of the media to disclose and discuss the ideological leanings of reporters and editors, and the broader claim of objectivity, has made the press overly anxious, and inclined to lean over backwards not to offend critics from the right. In many respects, the campaign against the media has been more than a victory: it has turned the press into an unwilling, and often unknowing, ally of the right.
...

Media Matters


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We ripped that biased Media Matters study apart earlier, Chris.

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Reguardless of your opinion, MM makes some good points. Once again we have conservatives making claims that are not based on any actual press content but instead it's how a tiny fraction of 1 percent donated money.

 Quote:
Yglesias also noted that, while Democrats may have enjoyed the occasional $250 contribution from a few copy editors, the media sector funnels far more money to Republicans via PACs:
I can tell you that in 2006, GE's PAC gave $807,282 to Republicans and just $474,118 to Democrats. In 2004 there was a similar division of funds, in 2002 "only" 60 percent of it went to the GOP. Indeed, as you can see here essentially every PAC in the media sector backed the GOP over the Democrats.


That's some major money & some major bias!

Last edited by Matter-eater Man; 2007-06-23 12:02 AM.

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That MSNBC NEWS report must have you really spooked if you're resorting to posting Media Matters EDITORIALS again.

In any event, before you go too far with the canard that the big money from the media goes to republicans you might want to recall or reread earlier posts about how, for example, the heads of CBS/Viacom, ABC and CNN, just to name three, are all lefties.

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And you might want to reread the part where I pointed out that just because someone is a liberal doesn't mean they'll lie or distort the truth to show some bias. But fox news is in bed with bush, has close ties with bush, and is very easy going on the president while attacking any critics.


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Actually, Fox doesn't really like Bush right now.

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Ray keeps trying to turn the conversation back to Fox because he has no answer for the point of how many in the media are democrats.

But even his Fox argument is flawed.

On one hand, Ray says that Fox must be biased because "its in bed with Bush." On the other than, when faced with proof that 90 percent of all reporters are democrats (and, therefore, ideologically "in bed" with that party) he claims that doesn't mean they won't be objective. He's contradicting himself based on the party affiliation of the reporter(s) in question.

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Perhaps you've talked about this but how do you feel about FOX G-man? Is that the network that gets it right or does that too also have a liberal bias?

What was the proof that 90% of all reporters are democrats?


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No matter what any liberal can ever say they have to at the very least acknowledge that Fox changed the way news is reported. I think it was for the better. Before Fox you would have a guest come in GOP or Dem and spin the interview any way they wanted with alot of bullshit.....Fox started having one person from each party/point of view to discuss/spin any way they wanted and let the viewers decide.....Fair and Balanced.

Since then almost every news program has adopted the same format.

The past year or so I have found myself gravitating back to CNN...not because of any bias...but they are simply reporting the news a little more fairly now and I like their anchors better. (kiran chetry switched to CNN so did I, plus Juliet Huddy left) MSNBC is more or less the same thing too now.......I'm not talking about guys like O'reilly Olberman or Blitzer or Hume.....they all have different types of shows and don't hide which way they lean. But more or less Fox made news reporting better for everyone.

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 Originally Posted By: the G-man

Randy Cohen...writes the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for The New York Times. The former comedy writer gave $585 to MoveOn.org in 2004 when it was organizing get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bush.
It turns out that "the Ethicist" isn't very ethical. The Times prohibits its reporters from making political donations


'UNETHICAL' WRITER TOLD: MOVE ON

 Quote:
A newspaper in Washington state announced yesterday it was dumping the "The Ethicist" column of New York Times writer Randy Cohen after he was fingered for forking over campaign cash to the liberal MoveOn.org.

The Spokane Spokesman-Review had planned to start running Cohen's nationally syndicated column today but instead spiked his prose from its pages after learning of the payout.

"It would by hypocritical of us to run an ethics column by a journalist in violation of our own ethics policy," editor Steven Smith wrote online.

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Novak's advice for conservative journalists

  • The veteran conservative journalist Robert Novak was on the Diane Rehm Show on Monday. He was talking about his 50 years in journalism, and talked about how liberal the profession is. He said that conservatives don't want to go into journalism, but for those who do:

     Quote:
    The advice I give them is to go into the closet. Don’t tell anybody you’re a conservative, because you’re not going to get the job, and you’re not going to get the advance.


    That's smart advice, I think. It is hard to convey how unfriendly, even at times hostile, American newsrooms are to conservatives, especially religious conservatives. I know a person who works at the very top of American broadcast journalism, who is literally afraid that her colleagues will find out that she's an Evangelical Christian, for fear of what this will do to her career. There are so few conservatives working in daily journalism that it's easy for stereotypes to be taken as fact by journalists. The thing that's striking to me, coming to the end of my second decade as a professional journalist, is not that the media are liberal, but that so many journalists have no idea how liberal they are. That is, they take their own political and cultural views as normative, because most of the people they know share those beliefs.

    I don't suppose I will ever understand how journalism executives will make such a fetish of "diversity" in hiring, but make no apparent effort to reach out to graduates of religious colleges, or other places where they might actually find people whose beliefs are consonant with a rather large segment of the public whose views are grossly underrepresented in newsrooms. As a purely business strategy, this makes no sense. Nor does it make sense for a publication that wants to report on the community as it actually is, in all its contradictions and complexities, as opposed to the community that one's ideology directs one to see.

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I think it's funny that a guy like Novak who made lots of money being a conservative press person is acting like it hurt his career. It clearly didn't. I use to like Novak but now he just seems like a whiner. That is as attractive as when a liberal whines & mopes about unfairness btw.

There are conservatives in the media that I actually like that offer a perspective but they get overshadowed by those who are really less about conservatism & more about political propaganda. The media would do better looking for true balance than giving that crowd so much airtime IMHO.


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That's not a completely invalid point about Novak's success.

However, Novak did begin his career many years ago, when it seemed as if the mainstream press was not so uniformly liberal. I took his comments to be directed at the younger people just breaking in, not the guy with 40-50 years of journalism under his belt.

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Which way would you say the press has been moving towards since the 60's & 70's, more conservatism or more liberal? Novak & others seem to be ignoring that things have changed.


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I think the traditional news outlets (NY Times, the big three networks, etc.) have moved to the left.

In turn, that leftward migration allowed the rise of non-traditional outlets for conservative opinion (e.g., talk radio, the internet).

However, as noted ad nauseaum in this thread and elsewhere, the media itself seems to label only one side of that dichotomy. Conservatives are labeled "Right Wing" and sent to the talk radio/cable TV ghetto, while liberals are allowed to wear the mantle of "mainstream" or "objective" and allowed to host the network news.

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I really dissagree that the media has moved left especially since the 70's. For those of us who are older it would be interesting to see what others think. This was before FOX & when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect. Conservatives have been busy over the decades!

The labelling you refer to is done by the folks themselves who are quite proud to be conservative & it makes them money. (guess that makes them the drug dealers & ho's of the "conservative ghetto") If there are any that you feel are really mainstream, who exactly?


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Fox News and conservative talk radio are a direct result of liberal hegemony over the news media. Conservatives' alternate-media struggle to challenge liberals reporting only the liberal side of issues. Where conservatives were not able to give any counter-point rebuttal to liberal advocacy in the news media.


Again, refer to Bernard Goldberg's book, Bias, where a 30-year veteran of CBS news deconstructs how the news is slanted to a liberal perspective.

Goldberg points to the Reagan era as the point where the liberal media took a sharp left toward slanting the news.
One of several examples he cites is "homelessness" and how it was reported as a major crisis that was getting increasingly worse during the Reagan and Bush years. But suddenly when Clinton was in office, while there was no government action or decline in homelessness, the media ceased reporting it. How did Clinton stop the homeless crisis? He got elected.

The labelling of "conservative" and "right-wing" is by reporters, and not by conservatives themselves. And Goldberg points out that, on Sunday-morning talk shows and the broadcast evening news, that radical left wing liberals are not proportionately labelled, and that's largely because liberals reporting the news agree with the liberal radicals quoted.
To liberal reporters, including Dan Rather, these radical liberal views are "mainstream" or "middle of the road" whereas their perception of more conservative notions is that they are radical, and thus have to be clearly labelled as not mainstream.

I noticed a sharp uptick of liberal partisanship during the 1992 presidential campaign coverage, especially contrasting the Democrat and Republican conventions. Reporters glowed with enthusiasm in their reports of Clinton, Gore and the Democrat convention.
Conversely, they sneered at the Republican 1992 convention as boring, and tried to portray it as uninteresting and just repeating of old ideas, and often would have lengthy comments by reporters while key Republicans were giving speeches, and I would think: Get out of the way and shut up, let me hear him speak, so I can hear him and evaluate for myself what he is saying!

I felt the media helped Clinton get elected (with only 43% of the vote, I might add). If you saw Bush Sr live giving a campaign speech on CNN, his campaign arguments were persuasive and logical.
If you heard it soundbyted on the 6 o'clock news, Bush was defensive and repeating tired canned arguments.

And I think since November 2000, the liberal press has been more partisan than ever. Even before 9-11, the press portrayed Bush as an idiot, and portrayed his presidency as failed before he had a chance to enact anything.
As I said elsewhere, Ann Coulter's book Slander goes into how the media called Florida for Gore prematurely, and how that is estimated(comparing Republican voter turnout to the 1992 and 1996 elections) to have cost Bush a decisive 35,000 votes, that would have eliminated any question of Bush's winning Florida in 2000.
Coulter also tabulates how quickly states were called for Gore with a fraction of the votes counted, and how much more hesitantly any state was called for Bush, across all the liberal-dominated networks.


The liberal bias of the media was certainly made evident by several 60 Minutes stories in 2003 and 2004, where the author of every book critical of the Bush administration was given an infomercial on their program (Richard Clarke, Bob Woodward, Michael Moore...) where there was absolutely no challenge or counter-argument given of these authors' ideas, in anything resembling a balanced investigation of their allegations.
In the earliest ones, CBS neglected to even point out that the books were published by a subsidiary of CBS. Thanks to bloggers, they gave brief acknowledgement to this fact with the later books presented on their program.

And the ultimate example of partisan liberal bias, CBS/60-Minutes' forged letter expose about Bush's military service in October 2004, such an embarrassment that it finally cost Dan Rather his position as CBS news anchor.


It is only the appearance of seeming unpatriotic and looking like treasonous partisan assholes that the liberal media make the slightest effort to even appear to be objective.



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Reagan & Bush gutted HUD & a couple of other programs in their first year that resulted in the number of homeless doubling. I see it a case of the cuts pleasing many conservatives but they of course didn't want what followed reported.

I totally don't agree that conservatives have lost ground since the 60's & 70's in the media. I would say it's just the opposite & that they've been busy building not only their own private clubs where balance isn't welcome but have also worked in being more effective using the mainstream media. All the while yelling charges of bias in an effort to bully the press.


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Slander is a vulgar book. I've read the bulk of it (until I felt ill). It's full of hatred and ad hominem attacks. Every single point goes to how evil liberals are and if we just embraced the republicans then it would all be ok. There is not a single page of the book that doesn't spew anger.
Contrast that with Al Franken. His books are obviously bias towards his view, but his attacks are done with more a sense of mirth and satire rather than flat out insults. He also doesn't make the simplistic "black/white" assumptions Coulter does.
Now I dare Wonderboy to respond without calling me liberal or assuming that my post is part of a liberal hive mind.


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 Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
Slander is a vulgar book. I've read the bulk of it (until I felt ill). It's full of hatred and ad hominem attacks. Every single point goes to how evil liberals are and if we just embraced the republicans then it would all be ok. There is not a single page of the book that doesn't spew anger.
Contrast that with Al Franken. His books are obviously bias towards his view, but his attacks are done with more a sense of mirth and satire rather than flat out insults. He also doesn't make the simplistic "black/white" assumptions Coulter does.
Now I dare Wonderboy to respond without calling me liberal or assuming that my post is part of a liberal hive mind.


Considering the level of hatred, profanity, ad-hominem attacks and insults that you post on pretty much a daily basis here on RKMB, I find it laughably ironic that you would use the word vulgar to describe anyone else's writings.

I think I answered the rest of your remarks about Coulter in a previous post:

 Originally Posted By: Wonder Boy
  • Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man said:
    Anne Coulter is a cunt. I [spent] about 20 minutes skimming Slander in a bookstore a few years ago. It's poorly written and no matter what page I turned to it just offered her opinions dressed as facts. It was like reading a Wonder Boy post. "Liberals are stupid here's why" "liberals lie", "liberals don't get it."
    She doesn't actually deal with issues, she just attacks the left for the sake of attacking them. Compare it to Al Franken's books which will attack a person for their actions and words. And her stuff has been shown to be poorly researched with a lot of lies. Check the endnotes on her books, there she fulfills the legal technicalities to avoid lawsuits but basically admits to misleading statements in the main text.


A liberal partisan who skimmed the chapter titles and didn't actually read the book would see it that way.

Certainly, I'd have to agree, she makes a number of sweeping anti-liberal partisan remarks that I don't take to be factual.
And as has been pointed out across at least two previous Ann Coulter topics, her more hyperbolic rhetoric often makes it easy for her more serious points to be dismissed by the left.
But these showy tactics also get her noticed, to some degree it's playful banter, and if she were such a poor writer, she wouldn't have an unbroken chain of five top-ten bestsellers.

For example, she reports how in the 2000 Bush/Gore election, using detailed statistics, how the liberal-partisan networks were quicker to call states for Gore than they were for Bush, with only a tiny fraction of the votes counted.
In particular, how Florida was falsely called for Gore prematurely, and that supressed Republican voter turnout by an estimated 35,000 votes (based on voter statistics from the two previous presidential elections in Florida).
And how these "stolen" votes by a partisan media would have decisively given Florida's electoral votes to Bush, beyond any possible dispute margin.
How Gore tried to suppress military absentee ballots int he re-counts, and other manipulations.
Not simply opinion.
Coulter makes her views with extensive statistical facts.

Coulter also compares conservative Phyllis Schlafly, and her lifetime acheivements, her scholarly works, and how she almost singlehandedly annihilated the Equal Rights Amendment, through her research, public speaking and other scholarly work.
And yet despite her achievements, has been snubbed and ignored by liberal reporters, liberal academics, and liberal feminists.
Coulter details in contrast Schlafly's achievements, as compared to the darling of liberal feminism, Gloria Steinem, who far from acheiving personal success, has been a financial and commercial failure, propped up by money from wealthy men she's had sexual relationships with, who make her appear far more successful than she truly is, and far from a model of female independence, is a kept woman. Unlike Schlafly.
Yet Schlafly is reviled by liberals, and shunned by liberal reporters and liberal publishers, while Steinem is exalted.

Coulter also details the biases of the liberal book-publishing industry, and demonstrates --again, through 40 years of extensive book-sales statistics-- that despite how conservative books statistically sell better than liberal works, they are spurned by the liberal book-publishing industry, who instead take great losses to publish the works of their pet liberal causes.
Smaller, less mainstream publishers distribute conservative works, and reap enormous profits.
Despite 4 decades of conservative book sales statistics, that show the wisdom of at least publishing a somewhat proportionate percentage of conservative works.

These are just three examples from Coulter's book Slander. That you choose to dismiss and ignore.

And how comedic that you would hold up Al Franken as a contrasting masterwork of "öbjectivity"and "research"! Whose only books I've heard of are Rush Limbaugh is a big fat ugly etc., etc. and Lying liars and the lies they tell or somesuch. Both have a sneering infantile namecalling nyah-nyah-nyah quality.
Coulter may indulge in partisan remarks at many points, but at least she has some extensive facts beyond angry insults to back up her partisan stance.




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Reason magazine:

  • There's a new tool that lets you see the sources for anonymous edits made on Wikipedia. Naturally, hilarity ensues. The best one so far is an edit to the "George W. Bush" page originating from the ever-impartial New York Times:



Nope. No bias there. No siree, Bob.

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wow. G-man you keep reaching. What matters is what goes on the air, what gets printed.
Fox News gives Bush and friends on air blow jobs daily. From what I've seen the regular press likes going after scandal. If they were so liberal than they wouldn't have had 24 hour coverage of Clinton during the impeachment. And they wouldn't have given it as much coverage (actually more) than they give the numerous legitimate scandals Bush has.
Maybe instead of bitching that the press is liberal for doing stories on Bush and his fucked up job as president you should be bitching that the president from your party is doing such a fucked up job. Or you should be glad that there is someone keeping some semblance of honesty in government by going after everything.
If it was all Fox News flag waving and softball interviews where would we be?


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Editor & Publisher, trade journal of the journalism trade, reports on what Seattle Times executive editor Dave Boardman calls "an awkward moment" at a news meeting:

  • What happened? According to Boardman in the latest email installment of what he calls "Dave's Raves" it was this: "When word came in of Karl Rove's resignation, several people in the meeting started cheering. That sort of expression is simply not appropriate for a newsroom. . . . As we head into a major political year, now's a good time to remember: Please keep your personal politics to yourself."


Boardman himself then sent another "Dave's Rave," which E&P reprints in full. Here's an excerpt:

  • I ask you all to leave your personal politics at the front door for one simple reason: A good newsroom is a sacred and magical place in which we can and should test every assumption, challenge each other's thinking, ask the fundamental questions those in power hope we will overlook.

    If we wore our politics on our sleeves in here, I have no doubt that in this and in most other mainstream newsrooms in America, the majority of those sleeves would be of the same color: blue. Survey after survey over the years have demonstrated that most of the people who go into this business tend to vote Democratic, at least in national elections. That is not particularly surprising, given how people make career decisions and that social service and activism is a primary driver for many journalists.

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America’s “leading news magazine” has apparently dropped its only two conservative-leaning columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol.
  • Asked by The New York Observer if he would have preferred to stay with the magazine, Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Washington Post, replied that he didn’t have a choice. “It’s a hypothetical that didn’t arise,” he said.

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