Three Way News
Your Source. For everything. Really.
Contributors
- Hammer
- Jambo
- Libby Mae
Current Poll
Recurring features
Hammer's Favorites
- Dobson v. Sponge-Bob
- Calvin, the nest egg
- Pat's predictions
- Bachmann spins Cupertino
- 205 atheists assume the bench
- Fox spins Oil for Food
- Fact check: highest taxed state
- Gen. Myers v. Reality
- Janice Rogers Brown
- Killing Field
- Kline hates Big Bird
- Vote Luca Brasi!
- Cornyn's Stalinist Supreme Court
- Rumsfeld's hidden metrics
Jambo's Favories
- Dolphin research updates
- We all shine on
- If you have to write...
- Columnist NY Times should have
- Truth about taxes
- Fourth of July
- Movie objects
- Lost in supermarket
- Dysfunctional Farmer Labor party
- Punks you hated
- Some preacher from east
- Winning issues
Monday, September 25, 2006
Why we're not buying a "liberal press"
Word leaked out this weekend about a document called the National Intelligence Estimate (Hammer writes about it below) which is a consensus perspective of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that essentially says the war in Iraq has made the US less secure and hindered rather than helped America's fight against global terrorism. How would a liberal newspaper present this story? Certainly not the way the Strib did with its article titled Terror report sets off partisan security scrap. The first error is missing what exactly is "the news" in this event. The news is not that Democrats and Republicans are arguing about the report, the news is the report itself and what it says about the state of the war on terror. In a way that's not even a conservative bias problem, it's just poor journalism. A neutral headline might be something like "Intelligence report raises questions about effect of Iraq war." A liberal headline might be "Intelligence agencies agree Bush botching war on terror."
But the conservative bias comes in as soon as the article starts. Does the article describe and analyze what is in the report? Does it start with the text of the report? No, it begins "The White House on Sunday sharply disagreed with..." WTF? Why is the very first line the president's talking points rather than the report itself? Or if this is a liberal paper why not start with Democrats using the report to criticize Bush? The report itself isn't explained until the 3rd paragraph and even then the explanation is short and followed directly by a White House spokesman disputing the report. That is followed by paragraphs 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in which we hear form Bush, Cheney, and John Negroponte. The report itself is not mentioned in that span and it's not until paragraph 10 that we hear from the first Democrat. While the start of the article is on the front page the Democrats are relegated to page A10. After them we get 9 more paragraphs from Republicans.
So let's recap. Headline misses the real news, article starts with White House spin, ignores substance of a report that makes Bush look bad, and devotes twice much space to Republican comments than Democrats'. I've said it before, I'll say it again, "Liberal press my ass!"
This sort of bias is subtle but it occurs all the time. Be on the lookout for it and make sure the perpetrators get called on it.
1 Comments:
Slight clarification. There actually was a short story about the NIE on Sunday, but it was buried on page 6 or 7. It's also not on their website so no surprise if you didn't see it.
I remember because REW and I read it over and said, "how the heck is this not front page news?"
