A scorching legacy of 2008: Media Bias!

During the 2008 election, the media displayed a vacuum of interest regarding the sleazy habits and duplicitous lifestyle John Edwards was living. Despite all of the blunt indications that Edwards was a total fraud. Recall the bogus story about McCain affair that the New York Times didn't hesitate to splash across its front page, yet ended up costing the gray lady serious coin via a defamation settlement and was thoroughly debunked. The contrast in treatment is so shocking it induces a state of speechlessness. Byron York has some thoughts on the issue here. He states:

"An explosive scandal had been kept out of the press for months at a time when the man at the center was an important player in national politics. Why? 

Young thought it was because the Edwards camp so tightly controlled information that journalists weren't able to find sources to corroborate the Enquirer's reporting. While that may have been part of it, the fact was, many editors and reporters just didn't want to tell the story. 

Maybe they admired Edwards' cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth. Maybe they saw no good in exposing Edwards' sordid acts. Maybe they looked down on the National Enquirer. Or maybe they were just biased. "In the case of John Edwards," said Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, "even though it was clearly out there -- everybody in America knew about this well before CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post got into this game -- there was still a great reluctance." 

Of course, in the end the story came out anyway -- but only after the sheer weight of Edwards' corruption made the facts impossible to ignore, even for sympathetic journalists."

Nothing new is being stated here. There are a multitude of problems that these revelations generate. From a business and ethics perspective the old print media really needs to step up their game in this age of the blogosphere and quick information dissemination to the masses. How can an organization maintain credibility when tales of shameless selective reporting and bias become so transparent? Here's a bold proposition, the New York Times and other print media should assign reporters of the opposite political party to cover candidates during elections. Perhaps this would create an incentive to focus on facts first and downplay the need to cover for a candidate because of sympathy for the causes they champion. Not ever going to happen, but using a metric to maintain an adversarial element could be a healthy incentive. This only goes so far though because we saw how reporters willingly grabbed at strings to try and discredit McCain. Is a further erosion of old media and more segmentation the answer or is it unreasonable to expect a media outlet to strive for semi-objective and straight-forward political coverage? Perhaps the fact that this laundry is being aired at all is a victory unto itself.

NAVY "Corpse Man" twice. Really?

The werewolf is constantly informed by his liberal minded colleagues that President Obama has a masterful command of the English language. Really? How does a Harvard educated lawyer screw up corpsman twice? For those of you in the dark, corpsman is pronounced "core man." It's standard English. What's next the United States Marine Corpse?

The issue here is standards. Liberals lambasted Bush's Texas twang, occasional stutters, lack of flow, and mispronunciation of foreign leaders names. All fair. It looks like our current president's has a different affliction. A slavish devotion to the teleprompter(he doesn't look at the camera once), plus a detachment from the phonetic tradition of the English language, especially as it relates to the military. Not good for a commander-in-chief guiding a country in two wars. Not to nit pick, but at what point does the media narrative start to reflect how the president conducts himself? Smooth and slick, yet oddly detached, divorced from the pronunciation of common words, aloof, and slavishly devoted to the script on his teleprompter. His flaws are different than those of his predecessor, perhaps not as significant, perhaps more-so, yet a trend has emerged, how come the media is the last to notice?

Loving husband beats wife!

This Google news image of a Reuters headline is courtesy of Instapundit. It highlights the inherent bias of journalists, especially when covering politics. People aren't stupid, but reporters seem to be. As long as coverage is conducted like this, the integrity of journalism will be under fire. Could a headline be more contradictory?

The exemplified bias has contributed to the segmentation of the media/news industry and eroded the profits of old media outlets, and allowed entities like Fox News to not only be economically viable, but to thrive. From a consumer perspective, the creation of choices is good and healthy. The werewolf's only complaint is that the legacy media still pretends that its rank and file are not biased, yet the headlines and tone of the above article prove the exact opposite. Will they ever learn?