Useful Fools

Posted By John Moore on November 16, 2008

Deborah Howell, the Washington Post media ombudsman, today wrote an article entitled “Remedying the Bias Perception”.

As you might expect from the title, it is about remedying perception, not bias.

Here is a my response=r:

Ms. Howell,

I just read your column “Remedying the Bias Perception.”

While you make some good points, you miss several things.

First, the title shows a misunderstanding of the problem. To any conservative who is aware of the issues, it isn’t a “Bias Perception,” it is bias. When the generally left-ish Saturday Night Live is running skits about the media being in the tank for Obama, it’s time to pay serious attention.

Second, you assert “The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.” Let me phrase that slightly differently with the a reasonable hypothesis: “Without the bias and outright cheerleading of the media towards Obama, he would have lost the election.” Certainly Obama ran a good campaign, but one reason is that the media simply gave him a free pass. His record was not critically examined, his questionable associations were glossed over (Rev Wright is equivalent to McCain having dedicated his autobiography to a KKK member), his past work history was unexplored. If one compares this to the treatment of Sarah Palin or George Bush, the bias is off the scale.

From your article “Journalists bristle at the thought of their coverage being viewed as unfair or unbalanced; they believe that their decisions are journalistically reasonable and that their politics do not affect how they cover and display stories. ” The journalists described would seem to believe themselves superhuman. That somehow their training magically insulates them from those very strong human traits of bias. Is it any wonder that many of the public consider journalists to be arrogant elitists, and that the approval rating of journalists rests down there with lawyers and used car salesmen?

As a conservative, I consider our most formidable opponent to be mainstream media bias. It has tilted the playing field since at least the Tet offensive.

The media in countries like Britain and Mexico are more diverse than the media in the US, and that is a good thing – for those countries.

Give up on denying bias. Go back to the days when journalists accepted their bias and part of an outlet’s brand was its political leanings. The nation would be a better place for it.

……………

Many years ago, I started listening to Radio Moscow and Radio Havana (shortwave) and that led to my interest in propaganda and bias.

I can’t tell you how many times over the years I have seen consistent bias, both in the selection of narratives, and in the framing, by the MSM – especially the TV networks and NYT, followed closely by WaPo. The following paragraphs show some personal examples from 2004…

As a VIetnam vet, during 2004 I was involved in a national group that worked alongside the much-maligned “swiftboaters.” We had information that, had it been about Bush, would have led to a media firestorm and hoards of investigative reporters demanding and analyzing records and sources. That information was almost completely ignored. It was publicly available and could have been found by any reporter seriously interested in investigating John Kerry, but instead they were all looking for Bush’s National Guard attendance records.

One example is Kerry’s Navy discharge. It was uncritically reported by the Boston Globe that John Kerry received an early honorable discharge from the Navy in 1970. This is not true, and is trivially checked. Furthermore, anyone with knowledge of the military would have been very suspicious of that report, because the normal action (the actual case here) was early release from active duty. Kerry should have been discharged in 1972 (as I was). In fact, his records show he was discharged in 1978, with no time spent on duty since 1970. A reporter should have at least looked into this anomaly – what happened with John Kerry and the Navy from 1970 to 1978? Was his honorable discharge a result of the Carter Amnesty, as suspected by Carter-era JAG officers?

This also leads to the indisputable fact that John Kerry was a sworn US Navy Officer during his time of extreme anti-war activism, including his meeting, as an activist, with the enemy (North Vietnamese, Viet Cong) in Paris. This should have been news. I do not remember a single story about it.

These are examples that I find particularly convincing because of my own personal knowledge, and hence I am sharing them with you.

Thank you for your article

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