One litmus test I have for whether individual Democrats, liberals and progressives have integrity and can be trusted is whether they will admit that the left-leaning bias in the mainstream media is wrong and intolerable….and is real. It is amazing and depressing how few pass that test. For until liberals demand fairness and objectivity from journalists, the chances that the mainstream media will see the importance of reforming and actually following their own codes of ethics are nil.
The self-exiled Barry Deutsch, a perceptive and intelligent leftist cartoonist/blogger (it’s a good blog) who once was a prolific commenter here, flunked the test repeatedly, which I found perplexing. Barry is an honest man. Why couldn’t he see it? Was it because his own bias is so strong that what the news media produced as slanted reporting seemed fair and accurate to his similarly slanted worldview? Was it that he is so far left that the news media seemed conservative to him, so the frequent, throbbingly obvious examples of the news media being left-biased—the cheerleading for Obama’s election, the relentless savaging of Sarah Palin, the open lobbying for the ACA, climate change legislation, gay marriage and gun control, the embargoes on coverage of scandals that would have attracted Watergate-level scrutiny in a GOP administration, like the IRS scandal, and much more) didn’t compute?
I still don’t have an answer, and Barry is gone, without ever supplying me with a plausible answer.
I have to think, however, that even Barry would have a hard time denying this example, neatly flagged by Elizabeth Rice Foley. She writes, on Instapundit this afternoon:
“Donald Trump’s last minute decision to change the venue of a political rally in Mobile, Alabama has caused some outlets in the mainstream media to fully reveal their inability to report simple facts without mind-numbing spin. CNN, to their credit, seems to have (mostly) resisted the urge with “30,000 turn out for Trump’s Alabama pep rally“:
The event was previously planned to be held at the nearby Civic Center but was moved to the 43,000-seat Ladd-Peebles Stadium — a venue normally home to high school football games — to accommodate the crowd. The City of Mobile confirmed late Friday that 30,000 people attended.
“At least CNN accurately reported the 30,000 attendance. But they failed to mention that Trump’s campaign team altered the venue late Thursday from Mobile’s approximately 2,000 seat Civic Center to the 40,000 Ladd-Peebles Stadium. Notice also that the CNN reporter couldn’t help but snark that the stadium was “a venue normally home to high school games.” While the stadium does host some of the bigger local high school football playoff games (and high school football is very big in Alabama), it is actually principally a college football venue, being the home stadium of the University of South Alabama football team and the GoDaddy Bowl.
The New York Times, as usual, couldn’t resist spinning and twisting the facts in its effort to make Trump (as with all things GOP) look as bad as possible, its headline reading “Donald Trump Fails to Fill Alabama Stadium, But Fans’ Zeal is Undiminished”:
Before Donald J. Trump arrived at a college football stadium here on Friday evening, the colorful guessing games that often accompany his campaign were very much in the air.
Would Mr. Trump actually fill all of the tens of thousands of seats at Ladd-Peebles Stadium, the home field for the University of South Alabama Jaguars? How would one of the largest cities in one of the country’s most conservative states respond to a candidate whose bombast and brashness can sometimes seem limitless? Would Mr. Trump wear a “Make America Great Again” baseball hat, perhaps to conceal the effects of the wilting Gulf Coast heat and humidity on his much-remarked-upon mane?
As usual, the answers — no, loudly and yes — came amid the trademark gusto of both Mr. Trump’s personality and his evolving campaign for the presidency.
“Now I know how the great Billy Graham felt, because this is the same feeling,” Mr. Trump, referring to the celebrated evangelist, thundered from a stage built for the night’s rally, where the vast stretches of empty seats indicated that attendance had fallen short of the more than 30,000 people he had predicted.
“Aside from the fact that the New York Times reporter, Alan Blinder (apt name), didn’t realize that his piece had asked three questions but proceeded to answer only two “no, loudly and yes,” he answered his initial, irrelevant question about filling the stadium “no.” Mr. Blinder felt the need to go even further and “report” that there were “vast stretches of empty seats” and that “attendance had fallen short of the more than 30,000 people he had predicted.”
“The title of the New York Times’ piece and its failure to mention the last-minute venue change leaves the reader with the distinct impression that Trump had planned a rally in a large stadium all along, and had miserably and embarrassingly failed to fill it. This, of course, is 180 degrees from the actual truth. Can you imagine how the Times would have slobbered all over itself if Hillary Clinton had scheduled a rally in a 2,000 seat venue and, due to overwhelming interest, had changed the venue at the last minute to a 40,000 seat stadium, filling 30,000 of the seats? The Times would have been so excited it would have wet itself.
“Look, whether you’re a fan of Trump or not isn’t the point here. The point is that, love him or hate him, the man is drawing unexpectedly large crowds, which is something no other Democrat or GOP candidate is doing. When reporters can’t seem to report this simple fact accurately, we all realize (once again) that we are being treated like little children who need to be “protected” by those who think they know better.”
Exactly.
In case anyone has missed my many posts about the man, I fervently wish Donald Trump would crawl into the crack in the Earth he emerged from and stop messing with our vital leadership selection process for his own amusement and the enhancement of his “brand.” But he has done nowhere near the damage—well, yet—to the nation and its governance as the arrogant journalists who constantly manipulate what the public reads and hears about the nation and the world to advance their favorite Democrats and to press their own often juvenile agendas.
Go ahead, anybody. Defend the Times in this case. Call it an aberration. Argue that the news media isn’t biased.
My red pencil waits.
Ethics Alarms 
No argument here, point well taken.
You pass!
What more do you expect from the New York Slimes?
Minor quibble with Foley’s article: the “no, loudly and yes” bit actually does answer all three questions (the “loudly” answers the “How” question).
But never mind that, we have bigger problems. The attendance at Trump’s latest rally exceeded Trump’s own expectations by 1,400%! And to top it off, the media is actively lying about it! What is going on?
Hold the red pencil: just pondering … how do we know for sure that Trump’s minions (I hate to use that word now that Universal Studios has branded them as adorable) didn’t reserve the stadium in the first place, pulling a neat bait-and-switch on the media?
We don’t, but in the absence of evidence, the Times should not be assuming that, right? Facts, not “we bet this is true.”
You already know what I think about media bias so I will address another subject. Donald Trump even though he is a loudmouth and mega egotist, he has forced the other Republican candidates to begin to address important national issues they’d probably not want to bring up. So I say hurray for Donald for doing that!!
Except they are being forced to do it on his terms, not theirs. The 14th Amendment debate made them all look like idiots.
I didn’t see the slant for the longest time — until I became a gun owner and developed my own independent knowledge on the subject.
Knowing the objective facts on that one important subject threw the news media’s mendacity into high relief, and once I started to see what they were doing, I couldn’t unsee it. It’s unusual when they *don’t* lie or twist the truth for partisan (i.e., liberal/progressive/left) purposes.
What makes media bias so tough to recognize is that you have to know more than what they’re telling you. You’re not likely to have the faintest idea that the Old Media mainstream is twisting almost everything they report if all you know about politics and current events is what they say about it. And if you lean politically to the left anyway, it’s going to be even harder to spot (much less admit), because your favorite partisan sources and the supposedly objective news both feed right into your own preferred view. It’s confirmation bias to the nth power.
That’s how it works. Any time you are well-informed on any topic, this reality comes crashing through—the news media seldom gets any story right, often misunderstands, and slants whether they have the facts straight or not. This is not a profession that tends to attract the best and the brightest, either, which is why they should stick to the facts as closely as possible.
Let’s be honest, the NYT would have waxed euphoric had HRC nearly filled the 2,000 seat venue with “wildly enthusiastic [paid] volunteers.”
Hillary nearly maxes prominent Public Venue: 98% seats filled
An interesting analogy comes to mind. A couple of years ago, some idiot went up in a balloon to some ridiculous altitude like 130,000 feet, jumped out, and claimed he had broken the sound barrier while free-falling. This was dutifully reported by all…that is ALL…of the news media. There is a minor problem with the story…when he jumped, he was still in the atmosphere (roughly 25 miles). There is a thing called terminal velocity, largely governed by the mass and density of the human body. The record is 321 miles per hour, with a sky-diver going through all sorts of gyrations to achieve that speed. On average, it’s about 110-125 miles an hour, and ALL speeds are well short of the speed of sound. None of this was reported, by ANYBODY. No sudden “Guess what?” by either the liberal or conservative press. What happened to “checking your facts”? Back in the ’50’s, this story never would have been reported in the first place.
Reporters are all liberal arts majors, by definition. Science is too hard.
Yeah, but you would have thought, obviously erroneously, that SOMEBODY would have called a sky-diver or paratrooper and asked if it was possible.
Nope. Never interview a paratrooper about one of their jumps. They’re all 1,450 mph, parachute barely opened, hit the ground like a meteor, jumped into hurricane strength winds from an aircraft that was either 1) banking at 90°, 2) on fire, 3) plummeting to the earth, or 4) piloted by Captain Kangaroo usually above a drop zone made out of concrete and imbedded with broken glass, gravel and hungry alligators.
We’re all liars. All of us.
But really, I did have a jump once where my legs tangled in the risers because we were flying too fast so when I hit the wind I tumbled *into* the deploying suspension lines. I managed to get my legs untangled and myself righted before I realized I was going to land on the edge of a swamp (this was Fort Polk, LA) where there we’re alligators, I cannot speak to their level of hunger however.
and that’s as close to the truth as I can recollect of that particular jump.
Most tank drivers are liars, also. My son, the Airborne Ranger brought this to my attention. We had a good laugh about it.