The MSM is Not Biased!

No, the MSM is lazy, arrogant, cowardly, and biased!

That's a joke but it's not. Bernard Goldberg is right to say that if you imagine a giant media cabal to distort the news for partisan advantage, you're wrong. And you come off as black-helicopterish.

The real problem is that media folk have many faults that just happen to augment their biases. The best example a guy could hope for is the current blog takedown of Petula Dvorak's WaPo piece, "Antiwar Rally Will Be a First for Many."

In this news piece, Dvorak discuses the appearance of one Patrice Cuddy, who will balance out the professional protesters at the Antiwar rally in D.C.:

Because of that sharp focus, they will be joined by novice protesters such as Patrice Cuddy, 56. Interviewed by phone yesterday, the former public school teacher in Olathe, Kan., said she had to pull off her gardening gloves each time a neighbor interrupted her yardwork to ask about joining the bus she had chartered to go to the nation’s capital.

You know, a middle-aged Kansas woman, who's not political, but Gosh Darn it! has decided she has to speak out against the war.

Fine. But as Spacecraft Blog finds out, with a few minutes on Google(r), This woman is a little more connected than the average retired Kansas schoolteacher: years of advocacy and an A.N.S.W.E.R. email address.

Assuming that the proxy servers at the Washington Post do not block Google, one can claim bias or laziness; I claim the dreaded combination.

I posit that Ms. Dvorak would check out a source who spouted wildly pro-Administration quotes. She would Google, check up to make certain that no Rovian stooge was leading her astray. Yet, a little laziness here helps the cause.

Stop The Bleating has access to this mysterious Google tool as well. He finds even more:

[S]he says openly, on her blog at Greater Kansas City Democracy for America: "I have been in the streets since the beginning of this war . . . " And she advises her readers at Kansas City IndyMedia (where she has been posting since at least February of '03) : "If you ever get an opportunity to go to one of these big rallies, DO IT! A Total rave thing without the drugs and alcohol."
[...]
From reviewing websites (and the Google caches of websites) to which Cuddy-Lamoree has posted messages, she comes across as, well, pretty "out there" from my perspective, but not a complete, raving, America-hating psychotic. Although there's plenty of typical, progressive, anti-Bush, anti-corporate rhetoric mixed in with her stuff, and she thinks Fahrenheit 9/11 was a "state of the art-documentary film!"

That's laziness and no small amount of arrogance directed at the bumptious, bucolic residents of Kansas. What about those other, scurrilous charges I made? Let's look at another story, and a takedown of the Associated Press Wire Service! The takedown comes from Protein Wisdom.

Jennifer Kerr of the AP writes under the headline "Thousands of Anti-War Demonstrators March in Washington, London; Rallies Planned in LA, Rome"

Jeff Goldstein starts with the headline. Yes 2,000 is technically "Thousands" but...

the phrase “rallied by the thousands” is suggestive of a bit more than the bare minimum at which “thousands” is even pluralized.

None of these stories, including Kerr's will tell you the roots of A.N.S.W.E.R. in the Stalinist Workers' World Party, or the extremely radical backgrounds of the organizers.

Two things happen in this section that are worth pointing out—first, that we’re not told a thing about Becker, nor are we told about International ANSWER, a hard-left group that supports the insurgency, other than they are “anti-war” and helped organize the day of “protest, song, and remembrance of the dead”; and second, Cindy Sheehan’s role in the protest is presented in a way that is curiously passive—a sure sign that her credibility and influence is finally waning. Kerr presents her as the grieving mother of a dead soldier, carefully avoiding any of the attendant controversy Sheehan’s public statements in the wake of her celebrity may have attached to the anti-war cause.

This is cowardice. They will NOT break from the groupthink of their 60's inculcated peers and publish inculpatory material about the antiwar crowd.
Lazy. Arrogant. Cowardly. Biased. The whole package.

Media and Blogging Posted by John Kranz at September 24, 2005 11:00 PM