Saturday, June 04, 2005

Why so many reporters are willing to believe the absolute worst about America's current government and its motives

There is an unspoken but real impulse in today's media to see themselves as "independent" of America, even above America, not so much because they are superior to America but because America is so egregiously flawed
writes L. Brent Bozell, III (thanks to Gregory and J Wierzbicki for a number of links).
It is their role to shed light on America's failings. They're not keen at being seen as Americans. They choke at the idea of wearing flag pins. ABC boss David Westin tried so hard to be above America that he wanted to stay neutral on the question of whether our Pentagon is a legitimate target for terrorists.

It explains why so many reporters are willing to believe the absolute worst about our current government and its motives. So disdainful have they become that they are silent when fellow journalists claim — without a shred of evidence — that American soldiers are engaging in targeting and assassinating journalists hostile to America's foreign policy aims.

…Orville Schell, dean of the graduate school of journalism at Berkeley, … expressed the dominant media ethos well: "What we need is a news service that doesn't belong to any country." They want a People's Republic of Medialand, a stateless organization of anti-war activists — the journalistic equivalent of the United Nations, Amnesty International, and a World Court of Public Opinion rolled into one.

I have heard from many soldiers who have seen the way the American media have ignored their medal-winning heroes while they made household names of the sliver of sickos at Abu Ghraib; who have seen the media spend weeks laboring over the minutest "mistreatment" of the Koran; who have seen their rebuilding deeds and anti-insurgent victories ignored while media outlets tout the efficiency and well-organized nature of insurgent violence.

I suspect that if you were to ask them about the proposed People's Republic of Medialand, they would respond: Yes, please leave and form your own country. And who would you find to defend you when some insurgents decided to overtake you by force? Probably us.

Adds David Limbaugh,
[The Left's] knee-jerk response to the Gitmo reports was to presume American culpability
while Larry Elder says
For those still in denial about leftist bias in mainstream news, these must be tough times. … The Newsweek affair and the AP story serve as a window into how many in mainstream media view our country. They celebrate the welfare state, consider health care a right, while downplaying the worldwide threat posed by extremist Islam.
Responding to Democratic fears about the terrible (and growing) menace of conservative viewpoints in the media, Jeff Jacoby writes
"Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats," [a New York Times] story acknowledged. "Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic."

What [John] Kerry and the others object to is not that there are only conservative voices to be heard in media circles these days, but that there are any such voices. The right-of-center Fox News cannot hold a candle to the combined left-of-center output of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and PBS. Scaife, Bradley, and Olin money helps leverage Republican messages, but its impact is dwarfed by the Ford, Rockefeller, Pew, Heinz, Turner, MacArthur, Carnegie, and Soros fortunes. The Washington Times is conservative? Yes, but The Washington Post is liberal — and its circulation is eight times as large.

No comments: