I was a communications major in college..... I worked in the broadcast media writing drive time news for the largest radio station in the market. I learned a lot.....
1. Errors come from "re-writing" the news to make it sound better.... not because of any political agenda.
2. The agenda for major broadcast media (ABC, NBC, CBS,PBS and later CNN) has ALWAYS been apolitical. It has ALWAYS been focused on what sells.... good video, controversy, celebrities, etc..
3. As the 4th estate, many journalists saw it as there duty to question the government.... But if it was their duty, the broadcast media, rarely lived up to it.... but occasionally there were flashes of credibility... those who dared question the status quo in the tradition of Edward R. Murrow... but very few.
4. Fox News, languishing in obscurity despite the massive deep pockets of their owners, looked around for a "hook" to attract viewers. What they found were the right wing demagogues and commentators whose livings was rooted on the great "liberal" news bias which was running "the" media... In short, the media that kept bring all that bad, and anti-government news to them every night. So Fox adopted a conscious policy to politicize their "news" broadcasts to attract this relatively small, but highly motivated minority of viewers. This was not, I believe, driven by any philosophical agenda, on the contrary, it was driven by the same superficial "marketing" which drove the other outlets... "What sells" in other words.
So where did all this "liberal" bias hysteria come from? The short version is that during the Johnson years, some journalists began to question the b.s. being published by the government, ironically at the time, the otherwise liberal LBJ....in regards to Viet Nam.
Many Americans, The "greatest Generation" who had devoted their lives to the defense of their country felt betrayed by this criticism of their government and the lines were drawn across the political landscape. And across the media.
Nixon and his infamous running mate Spiro Agnew, played to this generation in the great "Silent Majority" campaign strategy. Sound politics.... and it worked. People who really did not want to believe that their government was lying and manipulating them..... that the Viet Nam war WAS really a struggle for freedom such as WW II was....
But how to explain the news to the contrary that kept washing across their TV screens every night? News of the war mishandling, South Vietnamese corruption and the inherent nationalist popularity of the Viet Cong. The TET offensive, coming as it did after the government had long declared the war was being won.... this crap HAD to be explained away.
And so was born the great "Liberal Bias" theory. All this bad stuff was not really happening.... it was just the biased liberal news media which was, presumably, making it all up.
It worked and Nixon was elected and the war went on. And as it went on, so did, inevitably, the bad news. By now, it was an automatic response... all is well... it's just the Liberal Media at work..... right up to the last days of Watergate when even the most die-hard Republicans gave up on Nixon.
But the legacy remained.... of the great liberal news bias.... at least in the minds of the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world looking for their own "hook" to popularity....
Enter Fox News and the era of a marketing strategy based on this inherently ludicrous belief…. “Ludicrous” you say? Of course, it is “ludicrous”…. Look at the vast numbers of media outlets supposedly under the “leftist” cabal but owned by international, profit making conglomerates. Is it even marginally credible they are ALL biased and Fox is not? Of course not.
The other commercial media is scared to death of this bias thing, never real to begin with, and they go to painful extents to always present a counter viewpoint to any news which puts the government or a political personality in a bad light. Want to hear what the relatively unknown Obama has to say about the war? You will also HAVE to listen in equal length to McCain’s explanation of his views that you have been hearing for years. We can’t have “bias“, can we?
The purpose of this digression cum hijack was to offer my opinion on why someone would cite an obviously opinionated and sarcastic You Tube spoof of McCain as an example of the biased “news media”….. (you will note the video specifically references itself as a response to a YouTube video spoofing Obama…. An example of hard nosed, un-biased journalism presumably).
As a student of the media, I have tried for years and years to explain this to those whose refer to this “liberal bias” myth… but rarely do I succeed in reversing this biggest of the “big lies”…… but I will continue to try.
Such a …… no, I am NOT going to say it!
-KC
But they do it, and they are believed. No should or shouldn't about it.
Well, yeah! If we watch it, or read it, it's gotta be true, right?
