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.
