Fair and Balanced Isn't

Continual conservatives complaints about the media are paying important dividends for Republicans as the media has become too frightened to give context for events and instead look to report on stories on a "fair and balanced" manner.

Instead of pointing out that in event after event that Republicans are more guilty, or push the envelope to a greater level than Democrats, the media has slunk to supplying muddled mush to the public.

Unfortunately only a few in the media have noticed. In 2004 ABC's political director Mark Halperin complained about the press pursuing an artificial balance in truth-squadding the claims and charges of the Bush and Kerry campaigns, saying that the media would usually run through an equal list of questionable statements by each candidate, giving the impression that both candidates were equally stretching the truth. Instead Halperin said that although both President Bush and Kerry distorted the truth, the Bush team has gone way beyond what Kerry has done.

The New York Review of Books outlined a similar case involving the LA Times. Ken Silverstein sent a memo to an editor on a story he wrote on voting irregularities in Missouri saying the "insistence on 'balance' is totally misleading, adding there was "a real effort on the part of the GOP...to suppress pro-Dem constituencies." The GOP complaints, by contrast, "concern isolated cases that are not going to impact the outcome of the election."

In "The Republican War on Science" (reviewed in the New York Times) author Chris Mooney wrote that "politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses, but they are almost never as guilty as the Right."

Recently stories on Jack Abramoff seem to try to mention he gave money to members of both parties, implying equal guilt yet the money and numbers of legislators involved were vastly different.

As Silverstein said, "Balanced" is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers." Not to be cynical, but Conservatives apparently figured out how to game the "fair and balanced" approach.

FOX News, Bushes join war on Christmas

With sinking poll numbers, scandals enveloping key members of the Republican Party, and the public realizing what a mistake it made in November 2004, conservatives knew there was only one thing to do - change the subject.

So it should come as no surprise that conservatives are pushing the "war on Christmas" story. John Gibson, Fox News host, wrote The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought, which of course was heavily publicized on Fox News. Bill O'Reilly didn't blame it on liberals rather "It's the far left. It's the loony left, the Kool-Aid secular progressive ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] America-haters. That's who's doing this."

A funny thing happened on the way the war on Christmas. Apparently some of the foot soldiers are Fox News employees and the President and Mrs. Bush. You see the FOX News store decided to sell "holiday ornaments" and the Bushes sent out a card with "generic season's greetings," just the type of things that conservatives blame the left. Realizing the ridiculous nature, FOX quickly changed their store description to read holiday rather than Christmas, figuring they can fool most of their readers.

One can wonder why this is all going on. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank on Countdown suggested that it merely reflected the ability of groups to raise funds by riling up their followers. Instead it is a way to change the subject. This so called war really got its first publicity last year, right during the discussion on whether the Ohio vote was on the level. This year the news returned as Bush's approval fell to record low levels.

Surprise, Surprise. With a war over Christmas easier to fight than a fight on his record, administration, or party, expect a lot more stories.

Using the Media

The recent reports that the U.S. military was paying to plant positive stories in the Iraqi media in order to promote the war efforts highlights the debate the White House and conservatives face about whether role of the media is to report the news or promote the aims of those controlling the media.

While the White House may say they are looking to build a democracy in Iraq, one has to wonder, what type of democracy? Rather than a western style democracy it looks more like a Eastern European approach where the government takes an active role in the media, no more different than what the White House attempted with PBS.

One of the amazing things about the Bush's dislike of the media is that they owe so much of their "success" to their ability to press to act as their agents. Throughout their campaign their goal was to buddy up to the press in order to generate positive stories. On the otherhand Democrats such as Al Gore and John Kerry were viewed as aloof because they weren't buddy-buddy. One only has to look at the booing by the press core of Al Gore during an early 2000 debate to show the media's true view.

So from the recount of 2000 to the media's lack of interest in the Bush National Guard story, the media was Bush's friend, yet conservatives always yelled that the media was liberal, which ended up to be a good strategy. By confusing the public and labeling the media as liberal, when the media finally woke up in 2005 conservatives bought the lie that the resulting negative stories were just more of the same from the so called liberal media.

The only thing preventing this strategy from working is that the White House lost control of the press. One might say the turning point came when the Daily Show (a comedy show) had the gall to show tape of Vice President Dick Cheney denying he said "it was pretty well confirmed" that terrorist Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi official in Prague, then show Cheney saying it. Perhaps many the media figured out that one, they were being lied to, and two, a "fake news" show was doing a better job reporting the news then they were.

So slowly the media beast has risen to look into a few stories, upsetting conservatives. Perhaps conservatives just don't understand the media. Afterall if you've grown up reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page or watching FOX News, one might think that objectivity, fairness, and accuracy play minor roles in journalism and when those traits are employed and bright lights are shown on the adminstration the resulting picture isn't pretty.