Journalism at its Yellowest
Posted by: Not The Only One in Ron Paul, 2012 Presidential Race, New Hampshire, Free State Project, Hypocrisy, Media, 2008 Presidential RaceOne of the reasons I quit journalism after seven years in the business was because I got tired of defending journalism and the biased, unethical things that reporters and editors would do on an almost daily basis. Sure, some offenses are more defensible than others, but they still contradict what journalists say they actually do.
One of my biggest pet peeves is, during election time, when newspapers publish a list of which candidates they endorse in the upcoming race. Often this is a list of political candidates who have purchased the most advertising space from a particular newspaper. In some cases, an editorial would run explaining why the newspaper had endorsed the candidate.
At the Queens Courier, the first newspaper at which I worked, candidates were able to bribe the publisher to publish an article smearing their opponents with less than flattering information that was ancient history and had no relevance whatsoever aside from the fact that a candidate had paid for said article to be published.
How can the editorial board of any newspaper say with a straight face that they are unbiased when they clearly make no effort to hide their bias and publish a list of the candidates they support? How many people actually go out and vote for a candidate simply because their newspaper endorses them? Is it any surprise that journalism has lost most if not all of the credibility this profession once had?Today, people openly acknowledge the mainstream media as having either a ring-wing bias or a liberal bias, or just plain laziness. Some bloggers and political pundits even go as so far as to predict how a particular mainstream news source will cover a particular story based on that source’s particular bias. How much of a joke is media bias in the U.S.? Accuracy in Media, an organization which fancies itself as a mainstream media watchdog and accuses other news sources as biased, published a venomous hit piece on the Ron Paul campaign and the Free State Project in New Hampshire.
“One is tempted to laugh at some of this, except for the fact that young people disillusioned with American society and government are being drawn into the “guns and weed” philosophy and leaving their families. It’s much the same thing that happened with the New Left, the SDS and the Weather Underground in the 1960s. I have talked to a distraught mother who says her daughter was brainwashed into joining the Ron Paul movement. “I just wonder if the voters know what kind of political groups are backing Ron Paul’s campaign,” she tells me.”
These are young people who have “dropped out,” to use the vernacular of LSD guru Timothy Leary, but are dropping back in through the Ron Paul campaign. They have certainly become cannon fodder for the Ron Paul Revolution. Ron Paul is their Messiah, with Gary Johnson, the libertarian former New Mexico Governor and drug legalization advocate, waiting in the wings. The “Next Ron Paul,” as he has been called, has openly talked about the joys of smoking marijuana.”
In this article, the author seems to identify the civilian ownership of firearms, open marijuana use and gay discos as the biggest threats America faces today. He continues to link marijuana smoking to going off on a killing spree, a farfetched accusation I seem to recall from a more famous piece of anti-cannabis propaganda. Scroll to the bottom of the page and read the reaction in the comments of many of the people who read this embarrassing excuse for objective journalism. Some people felt the bias was so blatant and the accusations so outrageous they thought it was originally published by the Onion a parody newspaper which mocks the mainstream media.How can one expect a media watchdog group to be a credible source for detecting bias in other news organizations when their own writers can’t be bothered to stay objective when writing articles?This subject comes to mind because a few months ago, the Union Leader, the largest daily newspaper in New Hampshire, endorsed Newt Gingrich for the 2012 Presidential Primary. Gingrich came in fourth place in the New Hampshire primary, prompting Ron Paul to actually thank the newspaper for not endorsing him.
I think the fact that most Granite Staters decided to vote with their conscience and ignore whoever the Union Leader endorsed is very telling of the weakening impact editorial endorsements actually have on the average voter. One of the other reasons I quit journalism (besides the ridiculously low pay) was because I began to notice that my own bias was seeping into my articles; my laziness and lack of research began degrading the quality of my reporting. I realized I was suddenly becoming exactly like every other journalist I’d ever criticized for sloppy work or blatant bias. I’ve covered stories when the people involved actually took me aside and thanked me for a previous story, because I was the only reporter (including one from the New York Times) to take the time to get the facts straight.
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February 2nd, 2012 at 12:38 pm
When I caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief. The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.” I recalled a piece I read in my research on Obama on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close). A later passage in Obama’s speech, when he hailed the way his country’s energy future has been transformed by the miracle of shale gas, met with a storm of applause. Not only would this give the US energy security for decades, creating 600,000 jobs, but it could now go all out to exploit its gas and oil reserves (more applause). Yet this was the man who in 2008 couldn’t stop talking about the threat of global warming, and was elected on a pledge to make the US commit to cutting its CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by 80 per cent within 40 years. Even more telling than his audience’s response to this, however, was what happened when Obama referred briefly to the need to develop “clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes”. But no mention now of vast numbers of wind turbines – those props beside which he constantly chose to be filmed back in 2008. No harking back to his boast that “renewable energy” would create “four million jobs”. And even to this sole fleeting reminder of what, four years ago, was his flagship policy the response of Congress was a deafening silence. A few months after Obama entered the White House, I suggested here (I’m Not The Only One) that the slogan on which he was elected – “Yes we can” – seemed to have changed to “No we can’t”. It was already obvious that, having won election as an ideal Hollywood version of what “the first black President” should look and sound like, he was in reality no more than a vacuum. His speech last week was as weaselly as any politician’s performance could be, not least in its references to the sub-prime scandal.
But on no issue has this been more obvious than political America’s wholesale retreat from the great fantasy of global warming.