By Dave Andrusko
I agree that you can easily spend way too much time pointing out media bias. It’s not like showing chapter and verse will change the galley proofs of the pro-abortion book that is printed, page by page, in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post. But it is useful to periodically remind ourselves what we are up against. In so doing, let’s talk about two recent articles.
Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, combined the results of a Pew survey which showed more and more people feel the media is biased with his own email to the Post to make some useful observations.
As Pexton points out only 46% of those in the Pew poll thought that coverage of Romney and Obama is fair; that figure was 60% in 2008.
“A great deal of this shift has been among Republicans,” he writes. “Four years ago, 48 percent of Republicans thought coverage of McCain was fair. Now only 38 percent think coverage of Romney is fair. In 2008, 39 percent of Republicans said coverage of Obama was fair. Now only 30 percent feel this way.”
Lots of people, and not just Republicans and conservatives have written Pexton to complain that the Post goes easy on Obama. Has the Post
earned that distrust? Not according to Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, who said it just seems that way because critics aren’t aware of what a bang-up job the Post has done along the way.
“We’ve been covering Barack Obama aggressively for years,” Brauchli said. “We’ve only been covering Mitt Romney deeply since he became the Republican nominee.” Part of that deep coverage has been stories that were both under-sourced and blown all out of proportion.
Yesterday the New York Times’s David Carr lectured pro-life Mitt Romney against the futility of arguing bias. Carr conflates actions which have not redounded to Romney’s benefit with bias on the part of news outlets like, for example, the Times.
The Times counts it as a day lost when it has not eviscerated Romney and covered up for pro-abortion President Barack Obama. So Point One: even if one concedes (whatever the action) is was not helpful to Romney that conveniently misses that the impact is always exaggerated by the Times which simultaneously blithefully ignores the panoply of mistakes the President makes as not worth covering. To describe this as “Tired Cries of Bias” on Romney’s part (as does the Times headline) is to avoid the truth that the Times’s coverage is ridiculously skewed in the President’s favor.
This has the double-barrel effect of making it very difficult for Romney to get track and greases the skids for Obama to slide past his many shortcomings. And that hurts, not because it appears in the Times but because a lot of local papers pick up stories from the newspaper!
Final thought. A particularly irksome reality for those who see real bias at the Post is that “the columnists who appear in print and online in news positions,” Pexton writes, “almost to a person write from left of center.” And if there is pro-lifer among them, with one exception, I’ve yet to read them.
”The Post should first be about news without slant,” Pexton concludes. “If The Post wants to wrap its news in commentary, fine, but shouldn’t some of those voices then be conservative?”
To which we would add, shouldn’t some of them be pro-life?