When The Shoe Is On The Other Foot

No person is entirely objective. No honest person claims to be. In the field of journalism, some of the people who claim to be objective are not, and some people simply admit their biases and go on from there. I have no problem with a reporter being biased as long as he is honest about where he is coming from. Tilted journalism occurs on both sides of the aisle. It is, however, interesting to see how far left of center most journalists have moved in the last thirty years. Up until the early 1990’s, there was one point of view being put forward–it began with The New York Times and continued through the three major television networks’ nightly news. When Rush Limbaugh began his national radio show, things began to change–conservative viewpoints were being heard. The monopoly was over. Fox News is actually slightly right of center, but is always being attacked as right wing. Actually CNN is so far left of center that it seems as if the center has moved. We will never have totally centered news–what we actually need is balance. A new network is attempting to bring that balance, and the cries of those in fear of losing their monopoly are getting loud.

Yesterday The New York Post posted an article about Sinclair Broadcasting, a network which forced its news anchors to read a promotional statement on air about fake news. The gist of the statement was that Sinclair was not going to be fake news and was going to endeavor to be fair and objective. The reaction by other media was telling.

The article reports:

Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said that Sinclair appeared to running “Pravda-style propaganda” that he likened to the old Soviet Union. “So here you have an entire broadcasting system running a propaganda clip.

“People will say, ‘Oh, look at the conservatives reading their scripts,’ [but] it’s actually got nothing to do with conservatives, it’s Trumpian and it does smack of … state-run media for an autocrat,” Scarborough said.

The promo video did have one big booster: Trump tweeted his support.

One Sinclair insider said a news anchor at one station had objected when he read the script and said he felt “uncomfortable.”

Does anyone remember President Obama’s JournoList? On July 25, 2010, The Daily Caller posted an article about the JournoList.

The article reports:

In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded Journolist, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.

But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.

In a key episode, Journolist members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

…Yet Journolist’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.

Journolist’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.

Aren’t these some of the same people who are going crazy because Sinclair Broadcasting spoke out against fake news? Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.

 

 

The Things Many Of Us Didn’t Know

You can’t change history, and ‘what if’s’ are somewhat useless, but on February 4th, Larry Elder posted a very interesting article in the Toronto Sun. The article reveals one way the media bias in America has impacted our nation.

The article is titled, “Had the ‘news’ media done its job, Obama would not have become president.” That is a very interesting thought. I somewhat disagree in that I believe the media considered it their job to discredit anyone who said anything negative about then Senator Obama and acted accordingly–so in their minds they were doing their job.

The article reports the first obvious example of the media omitting something that might have been relevant:

A photojournalist withheld publication of a 2005 photograph of a smiling then-Sen. Barack Obama with a beaming Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic, anti-white leader of the Nation of Islam.

The occasion was a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. The photographer, Askia Muhammad, said that almost immediately after he took the picture a CBC staffer called and said, “We have to have the picture back.”

Muhammad later surrendered the disk with the photo to Farrakhan’s chief of staff. “I gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy,” Muhammad said in an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire. “But after the (presidential) nomination was secured and all the way up until the inauguration; then for eight years after he was President, it was kept under cover.”

Harvard Law School professor emeritus and lifelong liberal Alan Dershowitz says he would not have campaigned for Obama had he been aware of this photograph. Dershowitz says: “Louis Farrakhan is a virulent anti-Semite. He’s called Judaism a ‘gutter religion.’ He’s anti-American. He is a horrible, horrible human being.

Example number two:

Obama’s longtime association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ would likely have derailed his candidacy had media pounced on this as they did the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape. But for Fox News’ coverage of Wright and the videotapes of his fiery sermons, the other major media would have avoided or downplayed Obama’s 20-year association with a pastor who gave fiery sermons critical of America and who had a longtime friendship with Farrakhan.

Ezra Klein, then with The Washington Post, set up a private internet forum he called JournoList, which served as an online gathering place for several hundred like-minded (aka liberal) reporters. When the Jeremiah Wright scandal broke, several reporters on the “J-List” literally schemed of ways to deflect attention from the scandal.

Not an encouraging picture of a supposedly unbiased media.

The third example:

Then there’s the Los Angeles Times, which, to this day, has not and will not publish even a transcript of the “Khalidi tapes.” Rashid Khalidi, an Obama friend and a University of Chicago Palestinian-American professor of Middle East studies, had a going-away party to celebrate his new post at Columbia University. Someone gave the Los Angeles Times a videotape of this 2003 event that Obama attended, where he reminisced about their friendship in a tribute to the professor.

Khalidi was an outspoken supporter of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But what he said and what others said at this farewell party, we will never know. Were attendees bashing Israel? Did Obama bash Israel? The Times says it promised the unnamed source who provided the videotape not to air or reproduce the tape. The paper, whose editorial board endorsed Obama, claims it simply kept its promise to a source. If a tape could have ended Trump’s 2016 campaign, would the LA Times, whose editorial board twice endorsed Obama and considered Trump a danger to the world, have sat on it?

Whether or not this information would have mattered to the voters is not clear. What is clear is that each one of these events was an indication of the policies Senator Obama would embrace as President. Under President Obama we had eight years of very strained relationships with a number of our allies–the Churchill bust that was sent back to England, and the horrific treatment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during one of his visits when he was ignored then asked to leave by the back door of the White House are just two examples.

Under President Trump our relationship with Israel and Britain have improved. We are regaining the respect that our country lost under President Obama. We are no longer ‘leading from behind’ (which makes no sense anyway), but taking our place in the family of nations as a supporter of freedom and a voice for the exploited.