The Pinocchio Press - WSJ.com

This article covers the new "fact checking" cottage industry that has sprung up. The Pinocchio Press - WSJ.com

Also be sure to check out PolitiFact Bias and Sublime Bloviations.

The News Media as Instructors not Reporters

This post from Ace of Spades HQ starts out with how the Washington Post buried a story about how Obamacare actually is going to increase the deficit, not lower it as was originally claimed. Further down Ace makes an interesting distinction about the role that the news media establishment believes they are fulfilling. His observations mesh with comments I’ve posted earlier about the Ruling Class. Ace’s analysis implicitly touches on the abandonment of any pretense of being objective. In our post-modern world these folks believe the truth is what they want it to be, especially if they believe it serves an end they feel is moral and justified. Just don’t ask them to objectively defend this position because, you know, objectivity is such a 20th century, out-of-fashion notion!

This story sums up everything that is wrong with the media, and why it is dying -- and why it should die.

The media is no longer in the information business.

They are in the instruction business.

This is an important distinction.

If you're in the information business, your stock in trade is information. You have no particular concern about how that information will be received, or interpreted, or used for making political arguments. That's not your business-- you are in the business of data, not Narrative and not the internal contents of your readers' minds.

You are not your readers' minders, nor their tutors: You stand equal to them. They are citizens are you are citizens; you have no special insight into The Truth, and they no special disadvantage in discovering The Truth.

Now, if you're in the Instruction business, things are quite different. You stand not as an equal with your readers, but as a Teacher. And, worse yet, they are Children in need of your guidance.

You cannot just offer information willy-nilly to children. …

You must be protective of Children, who are, in final analysis, incompetent (legally as well as actually) individual who need to be told what to think and how to think. You cannot give them license to think whatever they like, for they are not mature enough for that.

They haven't yet learned the skill of thinking.

Thus, everything you tell a child must be with rounded corner and soft padding. Children are dangerous, after all, to themselves and others, if not properly minded at every moment.

Why do people -- and not just strong partisans, but most anyone who isn't a diehard liberal partisan -- hate the media?

Because of this, this belief of the media that we wish or need their Instruction in ordering our lives and ordering our thoughts.

But they are determined to do just that.

…

This isn't even restricted to news -- the media's strong belief that it is the Thin Black and White Line between semi-retarded barbarians from Idiocracy and civilization is present in films and fictions, too.

Every goddamned movie is a children's movie, with a soporofic, corporate-approved Moral (don't hate strangers; be yourself!).

Even movies for adults. Especially movies for adults.

This is called "being responsible." It's also called "being condescending" and "making infantile, bad art," but they prefer "being responsible."

Jon Stewart versus Chris Wallace

I happened to find the link to Jon Stewart’s appearance on Fox’s Chris Wallace show and watched the entire interview. Before I start let me say that I’ve watched Stewart occasionally and enjoy his show. I even went to watch him when he performed at UConn several years ago and laughed at most of his material.


Overall I though Wallace did a fair job challenging Stewart’s claims about how biased Fox News is. When challenged Stewart hid behind the “I’m a comedian” shield. Although to be fair (and balanced) Stewart admitted “the bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict and laziness.” While I partly agree with his assessment I don’t agree with his denial that the mainstream news outlets don’t have their own political agenda. (See more below.)


NewsBusters’ analysis covers most of the points I would have made so instead of repeating them here I’ve provided the link.


http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/06/19/jon-stewart-tells-chris-wallace-fox-news-biased-rest-media-arent


And in the interest of being objective here is the link to PolitiFact, “a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in politics.” When you look closely they have their own bias but I’ve found some useful analyses. http://politifact.com. They take Stewart to task over his claims about Fox.


I find it interesting how much ire Fox stirs among the left. It’s almost as if they’re saying, “How dare you call yourselves fair and balanced? You’re biased!” By implication they’re saying that the mainstream news media outlets are paragons of objectivity. Stewart provides a prime example when Wallace presses him whether The New York Times is “pushing a liberal agenda.” His answer: “Do I think they're relentlessly activist? No. In a purely liberal partisan way? No, I don't.” For an analysis check out http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/20/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-says-those-who-watch-fox-news-are-most/. Their conclusion: “The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are ‘consistently’ misinformed -- a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that ‘every poll’ shows that result. So we rate his claim False.”

I’d say Stewart is too intelligent and informed to make a “mistake” like this. I think he threw this claim out to see if Wallace would challenge him on it. Unfortunately Wallace let this claim slide. I gather he was more interested in drawing Stewart out regarding the bias of other news media rather than getting bogged down in refuting Stewart’s claims about Fox.

Pajamas Media » Obama and Me

This essay presents an eloquent summary of one disillusioned former Obama supporter.

When I first heard about Obama as a rising star in the Democratic Party, a man so refreshingly different from his predecessors and contemporaries, I was intensely curious and quite favorably disposed toward the youngish, African-American legislator and author. And when I gleaned from my local newspaper that he might harbor aspirations to the White House, I found myself very much in his corner, one of his many Canadian fans. He had an effect similar to the new car smell, appropriately called “outgassing” in the trade, which is often irresistible to prospective buyers.

Naturally, I wished to learn as much as I could about the man who represented an unprecedented phenomenon on the American political scene. I soon discovered that very little of substance was known about this rara avis and so began a disciplined search for more information. Within months I had accumulated a towering stack of articles, commentaries, editorials, and diverse kinds of documentary materials, much of this stuff mere unfocused adulation and adjectival irrelevance but many of these items of a distinctly troubling nature. His autobiographies notwithstanding, I was soon caught in the grip of a profound paradox. It seemed the more I knew, the less I knew. But this “less” was more than enough to convince me, by the time he had won the Democratic nomination, that Obama was everything he presumably was not.

I had finally amassed enough documentation to determine that he was not the centrist he affected to be but a far-left ideologue, that he was a gyrating opportunist who could reverse his proclamations on a dime to suit the occasion, that he had neither knowledge of nor competence in the complexities of foreign affairs, that he was an unabashed plagiarist in his stump speeches, that there was no chance of him becoming a “post racial” president but rather a demagogue who would sharpen racial tensions, that his grasp of real-world economics was shaky to non-existent, that he was an unnervingly ignorant man (e.g. the Austrian language) as well as a showboat (e.g., the fake classical pillars), that he was associated with some of the most dubious people in the political, academic, and religious communities, and that he would waste little time putting the screws on Israel while flattering and appeasing the Islamic world.

NPR’s Rush to Judgment

The following is from an e-mail I sent to NPR in response to their coverage of the Gates incident.

NPR’s rush to judgment regarding the Gates–Cambridge Police imbroglio is a glaring example of the intellectual sloppiness and moral dishonesty that passes for journalism and reporting today. . Let’s consider:

NPR began this story by reporting that Louis Gates, a professor at Harvard, had been stopped by police as he tried to enter his own home and then was arrested by the Cambridge police for disorderly conduct. To NPR, case closed another example of white racism by police. To give emphasis to this alleged infamy, the story was coupled with the musings of a black spokesman, also totally uninformed about the event, who, nonetheless, divined what happened and saw in it, continuing evidence that racism was still rampant across America.

Sgt Crowley’s version differs markedly from this one-sided, incomplete account. Police had received a call that two black men were attempting to break in at the Gates address. Dispatched to the scene, Sgt Crowley saw a man standing inside the foyer of the house and asked him to step outside. The man refused, claiming that he lived there and when Officer Crowley asked him to step out again, the man began to scream and throw racial epithets at him. Why did the Sgt Crowley ask him to step out? Because, not knowing Mr. Gates, he had no way of knowing whether Gates was the home owner telling the truth, and thus at risk if intruders were inside, or a one of the two alleged burglars using duplicity to deceive the him.

Finally, after several requests for an ID, Gates provided Sgt Crowley with his Harvard identification. Once the police were satisfied that no one was inside and Gates was the homeowner, they were prepared to leave. Yet Mr. Gates continued his enfilade of bile and abuse, despite repeated warnings to stay inside and lower the volume. When Gates continued his rantings outside, in front of several police and bystanders, he was arrested. Even then, he was given courtesies others would have been denied: his hands were cuffed in front, not behind as is standard police procedure; he was given his cane, an unusual concession since it risks providing the detained with a weapon; and when brought to the police station, Gates was placed in a room, not a cell as he should have been.

If NPR had been committed to disinterested reporting, Crowley’s version would have been part of the original story. But, it wasn’t. NPR did run another story to give Sgt Crowley’s side, but only after a local Boston radio station had interviewed Sgt Crowley to air his side, and even here, NPR found it necessary to counter Crowley’s version with Gates and his lawyer’s refrain that Crowley was a rogue cop.

NPR’s sloppy and biased reporting was an injustice to Sgt Crowley and the Cambridge police and contributes to the pernicious lie that blacks continue to be the victims of white racism and predation.

A Slobbering Love Affair: Book Review

I have to admit the title accomplishes its goal: makes a book stand out from its competition, like a brightly designed cereal box on a grocery store shelf. (The full title is A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.) To be totally honest I did not buy the book, figuring I already knew what it was going to say. A friend loaned me her copy and insisted I read it.

While I was right in that the book just confirmed what I had knew about the media's strong leftist bias I was appalled at how flagrantly and shamelessly the media campaigned for Obama. In many cases there were no attempts to even pretend reporting was unbiased. A former CBS reporter and ten-time Emmy winner, Goldberg shares comments his peers said to him when he pointed out some of their blatant favoritism. At one point one colleague who was guilty of such favoritism says, "It is what it is." (!)

Goldberg also stitches together a nice timeline of the election, showing how the media favored Obama over his Democrat primary rivals such as Hilary Clinton. He also explains how the media at first was friendly to John McCain during the Republican primaries because McCain was the most liberal of the Republican candidates but then turned negative when he became the hurdle for Obama's ascendancy to God-hood, I mean the Presidency.

He doesn't spare the Republicans of blame, pointing out their prolifigate spending during the Bush era (or error as I've seen on bumper stickers). Goldberg also has no kind words for Bush's role in the Republican debacle of the 2008 election.

Goldberg does a nice job detailing their sins but, like other conservative critics of media bias, struggles for an explanation why. They are filled with a mixture of rage and confusion while yearning to return to the good old days where the truth and objectivity meant something. As a result his prescription amounts to a taking a teaspoon of common sense. The problem is that a teaspoon of common sense is no match for the erosion and undermining of objectivity. Such common sense didn’t prevent the current situation.

I believe we're seeing the natural consequence of decades of relativism – the belief that there is no objective truth -- as applied to journalism. Thanks in part to the effects of postmodernism where any attempt to defend objectivity was dismissed by merely representing white European, outdated thinking, collective truth has replaced objective truth. By collective truth I mean if enough people believe something and their motive is to "help people" then no criticism is necessary or allowed. And when challenged one’s rebuttal consists of “It is what it is": a proclamation that there is no debate. It’s deuces wild. You can do, or say, what you want with impunity and without shame, as long as it’s for a “good (i.e., liberal) cause.”

If Republicans and conservatives want to combat the media’s bias they’re going to need to better understand the philosophical issues that underlie this bias. Meanwhile the love affair continues unabated as Obama aggressively expands the role of government into even more sectors of the economy.