One hesitates to discuss media bias. So many writers have
written so many articles and books about the bias of the American
mainstream media that one feels that the prejudice is so deeply ingrained that
it no longer responds to criticism.
Still, one soldiers on, because giving up does not feel
right. Besides, of the alternative explanations, one is better than the others.
Peter Wehner asks whether the mainstream media is cynically
manipulating the news in order to advance the candidates and agenda it prefers?
Or do journalists really believe in their heart of hearts that they are
purveying facts objectively?
Wehner compares press coverage of the September 11 terrorist
attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens with coverage of the Valerie
Plame kerfuffle.
Benghazi was a monumental failure:
The
September 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi. We witnessed a
massive failure at three different stages. The first is that the U.S.
ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and others asked for additional
protection because of their fears of terrorist attacks. Those requests were
denied—and Mr. Stevens became the first American ambassador to be murdered in
more than 30 years, along with three others. The second failure was not
assisting former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty when they were under
attack (both were killed). The third failure was that the administration misled
the American people about the causes of the attack long after it was clear to
many people that their narrative was false.
Wehner then states the obvious:
In the
Benghazi story, we have four dead Americans. A lack of security that borders on
criminal negligence. No apparent effort was made to save the lives of Messrs.
Woods and Doherty, despite their pleas. The Obama administration, including the
president, gave false and misleading accounts of what happened despite mounting
evidence to the contrary. And the person who was wrongly accused of inciting
the attacks by making a crude YouTube video is now in prison. Yet the press
has, for the most part, treated this story with ambivalence and reluctance.
If
the exact same incidents had occurred in the exact same order, and if it had
happened during the watch of a conservative president, it would be a treated as
a scandal. An epic one, in fact. The coverage, starting on September 12 and
starting with Mr. Friedman’s newspaper, would have been nonstop, ferociously
negative, and the pressure put on the president and his administration would
have been crushing. Jon Stewart, the moral conscience of an increasing number
of journalists, wouldn’t have let this story die.
He then describes the media-generated hysteria
that surrounded the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity:
It’s
not that it hasn’t been covered; it’s that the coverage has lacked anything
like the intensity and passion that you would have seen had this occurred
during the presidency of, say, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. I have the
advantage of having worked in the Reagan administration during Iran-contra and
the Bush White House during the Patrick Fitzgerald leak investigation—and there
is simply no comparison when it comes to how the press treated these stories.
The juxtaposition with the Fitzgerald investigation is particularly damning to
the media. Journalists were obsessed by that story, which turned out to be much
ado about nothing—Mr. Fitzgerald decided early on there were no grounds to
prosecute Richard Armitage for the leak of Valerie Plame’s name—and obsessed in
particular with destroying the life of the very good man who was the architect
of George W. Bush’s two presidential victories (thankfully they failed in their
effort to knee-cap Karl Rove).
Wehner observes:
They
appear to be completely blind to their biases and double standards. If you gave
them sodium pentothal, they would say they were being objective. Self-examination,
it turns out, is harder than self-justification. And of course being surrounded
with people who share and reinforce your presuppositions and worldview doesn’t
help matters.
In some ways I think it would be better if they were
perfectly cynical and were consciously slanting the news. Pretending to have
integrity is better than not having any at all.
If this is not true they might simply see themselves as propagandists using their power to destroy those who disagree with them.
If neither of these is true, they have been brainwashed to
the point where they believe that they are being objective and fair. They really believe that the Valerie Plame scandal was an unmitigated horror while the
Benghazi terrorist attack was, in Tom Friedman’s words, a “tragedy.”
Adding it all up I would rather think of them as cynical. At
least then they would know that they are being dishonest.
Good article Media bias
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