You covered it nicely,not much to add.
I wish we could get a daily segment,15 min,say
on Glen Becks show ,showing a same day video montage
of these liberal bias’s.
Like Newsbuster’s,but only done video style.

yahoo with a camera and an open mike

‘Open Mike’ sounds like good journalism to me

Aren’t yahoos allowed to participate in journalism? What was that item in the Bill of Rights?

the 15 seconds you’ll give them before moving on to the next hot spot

How disgusting. What is our time requirement to qualify as good consumers of the news?

That’s not how we do things at this newspaper.

I believe that

Here, every morning, some 20 smart, educated, well-read and diverse people

Unlike the yahoos, we the non-yahoos are ‘smart, educated, well-read and diverse’.

1. if you are all ‘smart, educated, well-read’ how are you ‘diverse’?

2. If you are all ‘smart’ why do you think (1) is true?

3. If you are all ‘well-read’, why do you not read the yahoos?

4. If you are all ‘educated’, that is, if the yahoos therefore are uneducated, how come they are better able to communicate with the unwashed who prefer the obsolete net to more modern ‘smart, educated, well-read and diverse’ authentic journalists who frequent the right coffee bars, I mean, who gather together every morning to re-affirm their right to protect the flow of information from the yahoos

Exit question: Why not just cop to the bias so that you can cheer all you want?

Because they don’t see it as bias, they see it as virtue. Like when KO says he might lean, like, a little left, maybe.

Exit question: Why not just cop to the bias so that you can cheer all you want?

Back in line prole !!! Introspective twaddle by serious news types is serious news…

And still passionate. I just need to choose my spots.

Nicole Brodeur

Sad but predictable… she has learned nothing…

RyanOH on August 17, 2007 at 3:11 PM

Jaibones on August 17, 2007 at 3:15 PM

Excellent points.

Can we please never mention Mitch Albom again? The lining in my stomach can only take so much.

NewsBusters has the story: MSNBC Newsroom Booed Bush State of the Union.
Joe Scarborough has pulled back the curtain on the liberal bias at MSNBC, describing an incident in which people in its newsroom ceaselessly booed President Bush during a State of…

Here, every morning, some 20 smart, educated, well-read and diverse people gather around a table and talk

There are at least four errors in this short sentence alone. And I am assuming 20 of them talk around a table every morning and are people.

Fresh off of being caught trying to pass off unfired civilian ammunition as evidence of soldiers shooting into the home of an elderly Iraqi woman, the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has been caught once again in a photography……

Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations

Forgot completely about ol’ Mitch. Speaking of journalistic integrity:

Albom was suspended from the Detroit Free Press for prewriting and submitting an article about an event that didn’t occur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Albom

The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance.

The Emperor’s New Clothes……imagine that.

HAAAAA!!!!…..perfect

But sports opinion columns (IMO) tend suffer from the same sort of bias you see elsewhere. Selena Roberts of the NYT, Rick Reilly of SI, Roger Brown of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, etc. all come readily to mind as examples of the sort of soft-headed “everyone is a victim” mentality you can get pretty much anywhere else in the press.

RyanOH on August 17, 2007 at 3:11 PM

Ryan, how could you leave out No-Talent liberal hack Mitch “Tuesdays with Morrie” Albom, from the Detroit Free Press? These days the sports pages and shows are just as full of whining liberals as any other section, which is a dramatic decline from days past.

– Straight sports reporting is largely apolitical, yeah. But sports opinion columns (IMO) tend suffer from the same sort of bias you see elsewhere. Selena Roberts of the NYT, Rick Reilly of SI, Roger Brown of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, etc. all come readily to mind as examples of the sort of soft-headed “everyone is a victim” mentality you can get pretty much anywhere else in the press.

As far as your comment about overwhelming bias and lack of objectivity, I agree with you – I think the larger problem is laziness. The supposed “layers and layers of fact-checking” don’t seem to work as intended, and it’s easier to ignore your skepticism when the thrust of the story fits your preconceived bias about the story (Rathergate, anyone?).

Being the excellent legal professional that you are I thought you knew better than to ask questions that you really don’t want to know the answers too.

Yep, you talk to much alright, but at least you told the unvarnished truth.

The Race Card on August 17, 2007 at 2:12 PM

Blah-blah-yada-yada. I talk too much.

Enjoyed the read.

Here, every morning, some 20 smart, educated, well-read and diverse people gather around a table and talk

“smart, educated, well-read and diverse” that is code for liberal elites. How diverse can they be if all 20 of them contributed to Kerry 2004 and all went to Columbia School of Journalism? How smart too?

we can and should test every assumption, challenge each other’s thinking, ask the fundamental questions those in power hope we will overlook.

Silly me. I thought thye were supposed to report facts.,

I went in on the lookout for blatant bias and lax journalistic standards. But that’s not exactly what I found. I think that many of us, myself included, stereotype the press.

Certainly journalists are overwhelmingly Democrats, if not liberal. And yes, that previously unchallenged veneer of journalistic integrity has been proved to be quite porous. Everyday, there are examples of factual and contextual errors.

A newsroom has several departments wherein there is no cause to reveal one’s political leanings. Advertising, sports and obits really don’t get into politics. And oddly enough, sports and obits are the most consistently read sections of most papers. No matter the headlines, there are people scanning scores and deaths. Also business and community sections aren’t very politically charged.

So this image of one newsroom like Seattle or MSNBC coming together in a hail Caesar cheer is rare, per my experience. Rather, what seems to happen is that the hard news and features are covered by a very homogenous group of people. But they don’t see themselves that way.

I think just like most of us show up at work planning to work hard, so do journalists. And they do work hard. Fact gathering and checking along with skip tracing and ass kissing are part of the daily fare. Then there is the pressure of writing a decent lede and story. Most Americans take pride in their work and should, as should most journalists. Everyday, we get most of our news 99% from traditional journalists. Even with the advent and revolution of citizen journalism or crowd sourcing, we still get the facts from the fact gatherers, reporters.

Then how do things get so screwed up? Why is there a palpable liberal bias in political, environmental, fiscal, educational, civic and social news?

Until recently, journalists reported on everything except themselves. Though journalism has been the silent partner for every major political and social upheaval in our history, the press rarely covers itself. For instance, civil rights era news sharply affected the country’s attitudes. The same could be said of Vietnam era reporting. Yet for as large of a role as the press played, the number of stories on its own role were minimal.

So what?

That silent partnership between social advocacy and journalism attracts a particular person. Many reporters are not driven by a desire to write. Rather they have a need to effect change.

The other thing about journalism is it a very staid and old culture. While your life went from abacus to computerized, your local paper probably got stuck somewhere around lawn darts. The culture just won’t change…because there is was no critiquing. There was no outside force compelling change. There was only one set of eyes and they were looking out at the world, never introspectively.

Technological lethargy has beene even more damning than political bias. If newspapers were not so resistant to digital interactivity then their biases would have been revealed and corrected at a less-than-tragic pace. However now the press is dealing with the dual issues of rampant political posturing and incessant scrutinization of their work.

In the newsroom I worked at, I got into more than one argument about just how fast the decline would come. The paper was scrambling to do things like implement user message boards or multimedia presentations. Other reporters actually gave me dirty looks when I recorded an interview with my mp3 player. Their mouths dropped when I was able to transcribe key portions then offer them in mp3 format as a supplement to my article. The number of people who were actually new to email made me want to cry.

The Internets can be rascally. Web interactivity presents added scrutiny. But it also opens up untapped readers. It took most papers a decade to figure this out. The lagtime was mostly due to arrogance. That arrogance stemmed from that unspoken courtship of advocacy and reporting I referred to earlier.

A revolution is well under way and the mainstream press has taken a serious hit. But citizen journalism is not perfect. There are a lot of hacks out there.

It would be silly for us to write off traditional journalism. But we should continue to push for greater transparency, innovative business models and better journalism.

Blah-blah-yada-yada. I talk too much.