Scott Beauchamp has exposed the propensity for people to believe what they want to believe. In his case, the left wants to believe the military is bad, the war is wrong, and we’re losing.
A great article by Randall Hoven at the American Thinker examines the growing discovery of media lies and biases. Click through for the full ist, but here’s his summation.
I conclude with a few observations.
These offenses have been going on for years, long before the internet. But there does seems to be a rise in the number of reported offenses in recent years. Did the number of offenses go up, or did the fraction of discovered offenses go up?
In a good number of these cases, the errors were caught by non-journalists, sometimes communicating over the internet.
If it is “too good to be true”, or just too politically correct to be true, take it with a grain of salt - several grains, apparently, if from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, CNN or Reuters.
The Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize just ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.
If this is the visible part of the iceberg, just how big is the iceberg?
His list touches on most of the media elite faux pas that seem to be easily forgotten or forgiven (okay for Nina Totenberg…she’s on NPR, and they are not only sans bias, but also sans soul!). He covers everything from Photo doctoring to full fabrication.
Somehow in this culture we’ve set the media up as this infallible entity which can do no wrong. As Randall comments at the beginning of his piece, it was Matt Drudge that mainstreamed this new media revolution, where stories were given to the masses to fact check, verify, or debunk. The media has had a stranglehold on information that they have beknighted themselves as the only worthy interpreters of; they gave it to us after they filtered it and decided what we should see as important. Now we have access to primary data…we can make the news…we can interpret it, because now anyone can summarize the news.
So we’ve established major media outlets mess up, and to call back: at least 90% of major media donates to Democrats. Who do you think the bias is going to help?
H/T: Michelle Malkin
Journalism: More than ever, not what you think « Likelihood of Success - August 19th, 2007 : 8pm