Gymno

succumbing to peer pressure

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Liberal Media?

Jamison Foser has an excellent piece over at Media Matters outlining just a few examples of the myriad of ways that the mainstream media treats liberals and conservatives differently. The main structure of the article compares press coverage of Clinton "scandals" to Bush "scandals," but can easily be generalized.

In the 24 months between Jan. 1994 and Jan. 1996, long before Monica Lewinsky entered the picture and back when Whitewater was about an alleged crooked land deal, Nightline devoted 19 programs to the then-unfolding scandal and investigation, for which no Clinton White House official was ever indicted.

-snip-
But during the 24 months between Sept. 2003 and Sept. 2005, Nightline set aside just three programs to the unfolding CIA leak investigation, for which Libby, an assistant to the president, was indicted. On the night of the Libby indictments, Nightline devoted just five percent of its program to that topic.

I've been trying to imagine watching CNN side-by-side with a (reasonable, rational) conservative and comparing notes regarding where we see biases in reporting styles...so I'm looking for someone to play devil's advocate - the evidence of a conservative slant in mainstream media (most notably in reports from the White House press corps) seems pretty straight forward to me...but am I just letting my own liberal bias color my interpretations of data?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Did someone say Devil's Advocate?

~S.

3:45 PM  
Blogger Megan said...

Why yes dear, I'm pretty sure that's your alias!

8:27 AM  

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