The snorters might want to believe otherwise, but research says they are dead wrong.
A study done in 1981 by S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, then professors with George Washington University and Smith College, respectively, culminated in a book called “The Media Elite,” which is referred to as “the most widely quoted media study of the 1980s and remains a landmark today.”
The subjects were 240 journalists from the major television outlets, popular newspapers and magazines. In the 1964 presidential election, 94 percent voted Democrat, and by the 1976 election the number was still high at 81 percent.
In his 1996 book, “Feeding the Beast: The White House versus the Press,” Kenneth Walsh, reporter for U.S. News and World Report, polled 28 other White House correspondents from the same media pool mentioned above, and found that out of 58 votes for various candidates’ seats, 50 votes were cast for Democrats.
It would be laborious and dull to list all of the findings, but the same Democrat-voting majority held true over the years for newspaper editors, campaign journalists and TV and newspaper correspondents.
The bias seems compounded today with the increasing numbers of familial ties between those in the present administration having spouses and siblings in high-profile positions in the media. All of the positions are clearly significant enough to present story lines after selective filtering – filtering which can include not printing a story at all.
How could such discriminating filtration not be dangerous for our country?
For the biased reporting and for the non-reporting, there are plenty of topics to choose from in the last four years, including many in just the last several months.
The first prominent subject was Obamacare. The massive media have plenty of smart people with nearly unlimited resources who would have positively served Americans had they researched and reported the details of Obamacare. They did not. Now, too late, details are dripping out, and they are ugly. Legitimate workers and taxpayers are shafted.
Later, the administration irresponsibly and actively ran guns to murdering Mexican drug cartels in a heedless operation called Fast and Furious, which resulted in at least two deaths of good American citizens: Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer Jamie Zapata.
A reader couldn’t find a story, let alone an update, about Fast and Furious in the major media if you searched 24/7 for a week.
The same omission is true for Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were slaughtered while those who had the power to intervene did not do so. Our secretary of state was absent and the president’s (that would be the commander-in-chief’s) whereabouts are a secret, but we do know he attended pricey fund raisers within hours.
The mental images of those four Americans being under siege for many hours, facing brutal deaths and wondering when help was coming, is nothing less than haunting. But what the heck? When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pressed by Congress for answers about the event that had occurred a mere four months earlier, she unashamedly and in shrill anger replied, “At this point what difference does it make?”
This scandal is not in the news, either, but I’ll bet I can name four families that could answer Clinton’s question.
There is a story in the questionable, many say illegal, acts of Kathleen Sebelius who, who as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, actively sought money from health insurers and other companies to fund the administration’s operation to influence Americans to believe Obamacare is good for us.
You are not seeing that story in the news.
The Obama administration’s snoop into the Associated Press is pretty much off the pages, while the authentically illegitimate spying on journalist James Rosen and his family lingers a bit. At this moment, the scandal making some ink or mention is the IRS, and that’s because they just keep on bleeding one more thing.
The IRS has so much wrong in its department, its scandals have scandals. Stay tuned.
Of late, we have the disclosure of expanded data-mining of every single move we make and every transaction we exercise, and as of hours ago we learned of the drones hanging around America’s air space looking at us. How long will we have any information on these?
We cannot overlook the fact that officials have lied to Congress, and much of it under oath. That issue is now barely a flicker.
Once in awhile a major newspaper will print an article about any given scandal so it can say it did its job. The problem is, such items are on page 7 or 13 or at least below the fold.
When the majority of media outlets reports information to the country based on the mindset of the journalist or reporter or the individual bias of the media outlet itself, we have a misled citizenry – which means an uninformed one, as well.
Being misinformed could arguably be worse than being uninformed. Both end badly in the state of ignorance.
What ever happened to just getting the real story … the “news?”
Did we ever?
Betty Arenson has lived in the SCV since 1968 and describes herself as a conservative who’s concerned about progressives’ politics and their impacts on the country, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She says she is unashamed to own a gun or a Bible, couldn’t care less about the color of the president’s skin, and demands that he uphold his oath to protect and follow the Constitution of the United States in its entirety. Her commentary publishes Fridays.
America: Uninformed and Ill-informed
