It's time for a reality check ...

Well of course the media is biased

It’s impossible to be completely without bias when reporting the news.  Every first-year J-school class used to teach that. 

However, they taught that news reporters and editors needed to be ever vigilant against allowing their own bias to color the presentation of the facts.

In short, those reporting the news needed to separate their opinions from the facts.  If they wanted to incorporate their opinions into a story, it ceased to be “news.”  If they inserted other’s opinions into a story, they needed to strictly attribute and verify those, and whenever possible find counterpoints.

That’s what real news journalism was supposed to be – a rigorous search for the truth, supported by facts, and presenting a balanced reporting of the results, as objectively as possible, to allow the reader or viewer to draw their own informed conclusion.

Well clearly that ship has sailed …

We now have more propaganda than hard, objective news.  The growth of the Internet – which should have increased access to facts – has been largely co-opted to reflect agendas more than facts, and to shape public opinion rather than inform. 

Talk radio is largely conservative.  Broadcast news is largely liberal.  Cable news networks are as well, except for Fox News which in fairness is pretty straight up on its news shows.  (Not to be confused with its opinion/commentary shows like O’Reilly and Hannity).   Newspapers are also largely liberal, except for the Wall Street Journal which seems to be the last bastion of objective news reporting.  And most online media is overwhelmingly liberal.

None of this would be cause for concern except a lot of people think when they see or hear something reported as news that it’s actually true and without bias. 

That’s sad.  And dangerous.  Especially when some in the media aren’t even trying to be honest about what they’re reporting. 

Unfortunately, that’s what we have today.  Most of the liberal media are unabashedly in the tank for Obama and the Democrats; they apparently have no reservations about skewing the news, or tampering with the facts, to advance their agenda.

A perfect case is the recent whoopla over the jobless rate dipping below 8%.  The liberal media used that as proof that Obama’s plans were working.   Obama and Michelle went on talk shows and gave interviews to anyone and everyone to take credit.  It was banner headlines in print, online, and the lead story on major networks.

Only one problem.  It wasn’t true.  Worse yet, everybody knew it, except the general public. 

Policy wonks in the Obama administration knew it was an error because California – the 8^th largest economy in the world – had missed a week in reporting its figures. The media knew that fact.  Hell, even Jack Welch made a point of telling everyone the 7.8% number was bogus. 

Today, the “seasonally adjusted” number came in.  Claims jumped from the previously reported 46,000 up to 388,000, almost entirely because of the hiccup in California everybody knew about.  This wiped out the “biggest drop in 4 months” story and then some. 

Do you think that’s going to get a lot of coverage? 

Also, a new Gallup poll was released yesterday showing Romney with now a 6 point lead over Obama among likely voters nationwide. 

If you watched Fox News, you already knew this.  But if you didn’t … well that’s because it didn’t fit someone else’s agenda.  A swing of about 11 or more points over a few weeks?  You’d think that would be news – but guess again.    

As to Tuesday’s debate – if you watched it as I did – you probably concluded that at worst it was a draw.  Both scored some points, but there were no knockouts. 

Nonetheless, the lead story in most of the media the next day was that Obama “won” among surveyed “undecideds.”   However, on some sites there was additional detail from those surveys that drilled down on who won on certain topics. 

Net/net, in most cases Romney won decisively on all the key issues such as jobs, the economy and other things of interest to most voters – sometimes by a margin of 10-11 points.   Obama won on seeming to be more interested in the person asking the question, and he certainly seemed a lot more energized, and aggressive, than in the first debate.   

So, in the last debate among the surveyed undecideds, Romney actually “won” on substance; Obama “won” on style. 

Didn’t see a lot of reporting on that either, did you? 

Look, there’s only so much anybody can spin stuff before it unravels.  We’re getting to that point very quickly.  Between the misreporting, under-reporting, and conscious withholding of critical information, the media in general is starting to lose control.  The more flagrant they act – such as Candy Crowley’s mishandling of the last debate to give Obama more time, shut down Romney, and then introduce a misstatement to support Obama (an error she later publicly conceded) – the more obvious their bias becomes to everyone. 

So right now you have Obama and most of the media running against Romney.  That’s no secret.  They are fully on the Obama bandwagon and aren’t even pretending to be fair. 

The good news is that Romney appears to be winning so far. 

So maybe the public is indeed a lot smarter – and less gullible – than most of the media thinks they are.