Media Bias Explained
The Brody File read some great analysis on media bias from Peter Wehner, who is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
It’s a must read. Full link is here but an excerpt is below.
What explains this? (liberal media bias)
A combination of factors, I think. One is the rise of Fox News. For decades progressives had a monopoly on news, which meant they were content to slant the news but not routinely cross the line into advocacy. But now that Fox News has offered not only a different perspective, but a popular one, journalists may feel they must, in order to compensate for their loss of influence, increase their liberal advocacy.
A second factor is Barack Obama. He is liberal, Ivy League, and a person of color. That is simply too powerful of a combination for the elite media to resist. (If Obama were conservative, Ivy League, and a person of color, he would be a marked man, as Clarence Thomas has been.) Mr. Obama touches the media’s erogenous zone in ways that no other president, even JFK, ever has. One gets to sense that journalists not only like Mr. Obama; they are in awe of him. They want to impress him and please him and are afraid of being rebuked by him. (It is very much how my 3rd grade son views his teacher.) Being a bright fellow, Mr. Obama understands this, which is why from time to time he transitions from being president to being media critic. He issues marching orders to the elite media–and a stunningly high number of journalists salute and do as they are told.
A third factor is that more and more “objective” journalists seem to feel that liberalism is synonymous with social justice and they want to be in the midst of the fight to advance it. Hence we see people like Bob Schieffer and Tom Brokaw–who once upon a time would have actually tried to keep their biases reasonably in check–frame the issue over gun control as if we’re in Selma in 1965. It’s all rather silly–efforts to manufacture melodrama usually are–but I suppose there’s something emotionally satisfying about trying to recapture, over and over again, the moral moment that was the civil rights era.