Liberal Bias In The Media?

Who would have thought it?
Is anyone surprised by the fact that journalists give money to liberals and the far left at a rate nine to every one journalist who gives to a republican or conservative cause:

MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

Read the entire story here.

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More On Bias At The BBC

As noted in yesterday's post on bias of the Beeb, the BBC's internal report on its bias is in fact posted today. The report, "From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century," is posted in pdf sections at the BBC Trust Website here. I've downloaded it but have only had time to skim it. There is a good piece from today's Telegraph - from people who have read the report - likening it to an alcoholic's first realization that he may in fact have a wee bit of a drinking problem:

When it comes to accusations of Left-liberal bias, the BBC is a bit like an alcoholic. People have been sniggering about his drinking for years; he pretends not to notice. There have been complaints; he brushes them aside. Throwing up at that wedding reception? Someone spiked the punch.

Propositioning the boss's wife? That was a joke. But, deep down, the drunk knows he has a problem. More to the point, he knows that everyone else knows. So, nervously, he's prepared to admit that he might be a little too fond of the sauce.

Yesterday, the BBC Trust published From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, an 81-page report with the subtitle "Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st century".

That's a bit like the late Boris Yeltsin talking about safeguarding his sobriety. It is, however, the first time that the corporation has attempted to address the question, so we should read the report carefully.

The first reaction is to sigh with relief. The report acknowledges that "mainstream opinion" was wrong to attack monetarism, to belittle Euro-sceptics as small-minded and blinkered, and to assume that multi-culturalism would solve the problems of immigration.

Justin Webb, the BBC's Washington correspondent, is quoted as saying that "in the tone of what we say about America, we have a tendency to scorn and deride." (Would "we" in this instance mean Matt Frei, I wonder?) Roger Mosey, former head of BBC television news, says he has "some sympathies with what Janet Daley says generally about a liberal/pinko agenda".

Stephen Whittle, a former controller of the BBC's editorial policy, says that its journalists work within a straitjacket of unchallenged liberal assumptions.

You're telling me. A few years ago, I wrote a column called "Beebwatch" for this newspaper. That involved listening to hours of BBC output every day. It was a maddening experience. I simply could not believe the ease with which representatives of Lefty pressure groups commandeered segments of Woman's Hour and Today, their soprano nagging accompanied by pizzicato clucks from the friendly interviewer.

I was outraged and, like many outraged people, became a raging bore on the subject. After the column finished, I worried whether I might have exaggerated the problem.
But then I met Robin Aitken, a BBC reporter for 25 years, who reckons that during his time on Today, The Money Programme and Breakfast News he couldn't have formed a cricket team from Tory sympathisers at the BBC.

His book Can We Trust the BBC? argues that the Left-liberal culture at White City is basically intact. Aitken, admittedly, is a Conservative, so perhaps he would say that. But Rod Liddle, former editor of Today, definitely isn't, and in The Spectator last month he listed the groups that the BBC thinks it's OK to be horrible about: evangelical Christians, the Countryside Alliance, multi-national corporations, supporters of Israel.

Ah yes, Israel. One of the few BBC journalists criticised in yesterday's report was Barbara Plett, who burst into tears when Yasser Arafat was airlifted out of his compound and then boasted about it in an article. She was caught red-handed, in other words; the incident became famous and so the report produces her as a burnt offering.

In contrast, we are told only that "a BBC News presenter" was unwise to write an article in the Daily Mirror entitled "Why the World Needs Hillary". That means you, Gavin Esler, though I had to use Google to find out.

Which brings us to the real reason this document has appeared. Google, YouTube, Al-Jazeera, Fox News: all these outlets provide competition for the BBC. The report acknowledges as much, referring in typical Beeb style to the "alternative vision" of Al-Jazeera, but to Fox's "avowedly opinionated" stance. Suddenly, the BBC finds that its reputation for impartiality has become its unique selling point, the only thing standing between it and privatisation.

Time to panic. For years, the corporation has ignored the little voice in its head that says impartiality went out of the window with Margaret Thatcher; it could afford to, because its critics had no redress and few media outlets.

But now anyone can mock the BBC on a blog or YouTube, or watch an excellent internet channel, 18 Doughty Street, founded by centre-Right entrepreneurs: the BBC report calls it "a harbinger of partisan television", but the truth is that, because it operates outside an ideological straitjacket, it is less partisan than, say, Radio 4.

This report is a step in the right direction. But, as anyone who has ever dealt with an alcoholic will confirm, it is best not to get your hopes up. Nothing will happen without a desire to change; and I don't think Auntie is ready to come off the sauce.

Read the entire story here. Actually this is not the first attempt to address the problem. There is the Balen Report on anti-Israeli, pro-Arab bias that the BBC was allowed to unconscionably spend 200,000 pounds in taxpayer funds in a successful effort to suppress the contents in the face of the British equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act challenge. That rather outrageous act is still in the courts as we speak, but there seems no mention of it in this BBC Report made public. That alone suggests that the Telegraph may be right, that the Beeb may know it has a drinking problem, but is not yet ready to admit how destructive it is, and not yet ready to fix it.

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Dennis On Harry

Do enjoy Dennis Miller giving his opinion of Harry Reid:




I personally think that he lets Harry off far too lightly.

Harry Reid has been an incredibly destructive force in the War on Terror. His default position has to try and criticize and tear down whatever President Bush has proposed - assuming the polls suggest that doing so will increase the chance of Democrats gaining in political power with the next election. I think that a lot of the blood our soldiers will spill this summer can be directly laid at the hands of Reid, as well as Pelosi and Murtha. Harry Reid has clearly placed national security and America's place in the world secondary to political gain. He is an incredible hypocrite who is governed by polls and easilly manipulated by the far left fringe of the Democratic Party. In short, Harry Reid is an odious and unprinicpled individual who, in a sane world, would not be the Democrat's highest leader in the Senate. He would not be a Senator, and he is certainly not a leader. Indeed, his leadership skills being what they are, the only reason for anyone to follow Harry Reid is only out of sheer curiosity.

(H/T USA Partisan)

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The Far Left's Inquisition To Insure Ideological Purity

Its been clear for at least the past year that the boast of the far left cliques - George Soros's MoveOn.org, Kos, Michael Moore, etc., - that they "own the Democratic party" is not mere talk. Their initial success was the creation of wildly popular websites, particularly the Daily Kos and Huffington Post. They followed that success with raising money for Howard Dean's presidential run. And then came the purging of Joe Lieberman from the ranks of the Democratic Party. Now, every elected Democrat listens to what the far left has to say, even to the extent that MoveOn.org and other major anti-war groups meet with the Congressional Democratic leadership on a daily basis. For a Democrat not to toe the new far left's line is to come under intense pressure and to court electoral defeat in the next primary - including defeat in the Presidential primary.

This far left coup has worked a very distinct change to the terms of debate in modern politics. There is an exceptional article in The New Republic, "The Left's New Machine" by Johnathan Chait in which he thoroughly documents and analyzes this change. As he concludes, the new far left has no concern for intellecutal honesty. They are solely concerned with defeating conservatism and destroying George Bush. For the new far left, the ends justify any means. One aspect of this dispensing with intellectual honesty is that new far left does not belive in free speech and does not accept any principled dissenting voices. So vociferous is their attack on any who do not parrot their meme that Joe Klein, a classical hard left opinion columnist for Time Magazine, has devoted his latest column to complaining about this internecine inquisition:

A strange thing happened to me the day the House of Representatives voted to pass the Iraq-war-funding bill. Congresswoman Jane Harman of California called as the debate was taking place. "Look, I would love to have cast a vote against Bush on this," she told me. "We need a new strategy, and I hope we can force one in September. But I flew into Baghdad [with 150 young soldiers recently]. To vote against this bill was to vote against giving them the equipment... they need. I couldn't do that." I posted what Harman said on Swampland, the political blog at Time.com, along with my opinion that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had changed their positions and voted against the funding for the worst possible reason: presidential politics.

And then Harman changed her position. After we spoke, she voted against the funding. The next day, I was blasted by a number of left-wing bloggers: Klein screwed up! I had quoted Harman in the past tense—common usage for politicians who know their words will appear after a vote takes place. That was sloppy and... suspicious! Proof that you just can't trust the mainstream media. On Eschaton, a blog that specializes in media bashing, I was given the coveted "Wanker of the Day" award. Eventually, Harman got wind of this and called, unbidden, to apologize for misleading me, saying I had quoted her correctly but she had changed her mind to reflect the sentiments of her constituents. I published her statement and still got hammered by bloggers and Swampland commenters for "stalking" Harman into an apology, for not checking her vote in the Congressional Record, for being a "water boy for the right wing" and many other riffs unfit to print.

This is not the first time this kind of free-range lunacy has been visited upon me. Indeed, it happens, oh, once a week to each of us who post on Swampland (Karen Tumulty, Jay Carney and Ana Marie Cox are the others). A reasonable reader might ask, Why are the left-wing bloggers attacking you? . . .

First, let me say that I really enjoy blogging. It's a brilliant format for keeping readers up to date on the things I care about—and for exchanging information with them. . . . I've found that some great reporting takes place in the blogosphere: Juan Cole's Iraq updates are invaluable, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo did serious muckraking about the U.S. attorneys scandal, and Ezra Klein (no relation) is excellent on health care. I love linking to smart work by others, something you just can't do in a print column.

But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable. Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics.

And that is precisely the danger here. Fury begets fury. Poison from the right-wing talk shows seeped into the Republican Party's bloodstream and sent that party off the deep end. Limbaugh's show—where Dick Cheney frequently expatiates—has become the voice of the Republican establishment. The same could happen to the Democrats. The spitballs aimed at me don't matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right—in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration.

Read the entire story here. As you can tell from the above, Joe Klein is himself far left. I note as an aside that his attempt to claim that the new far left is only aping what has gone on with moderates and conservatives is particularly disingenuous. Regardless of what labels and adjectives Mr. Klein may apply to conservatives and libertarians, there is nothing among those groups that even remotely resembles what is going on today with the new far left. Conservatives and libertarians, even those who express stongly held views that Mr. Klein finds distasteful, have never jettisoned anlayisis or intellectual honesty, nor have they conducted an inquisition of the type going on today in the left wing.

That aside, what set's Mr. Kline, a classical liberal, apart from the new far left of Kos, MoveOn.org, et al, is that Klein believes in analysis and intellectual honesty - misguided though his inellect may be. And that is what makes him a traitor to the cause of the new far left.

Klein can contiue doing what he does at Time Magazine - at least as long as he can stomach the attacks from the new far left - with little concern for his future. The same is not true of any Democratic office holder. It does not matter whether a Democrat in his campaign for the '06 election promised to support the war effort or to legislate against a precipitous withdrawal. They better now vote against the war effort or they will face implacable opposition from the new far left. That, coupled with the jettisoning of inellectual honesty from the terms of debate, has worked a fundamental change to the paradigm of modern politics for liberals, moderates and conservatives alike.

(H/T Steve Halter)

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Looking Up the BBC's Knickers

Robin Aitken, 25 years a BBC reporter, takes a long look up the BBC's knickers and tells us what he finds in his new book - Can We Trust The BBC? A hint -- Mr. Aitken tells us in advance that the view is decidedly not pretty. I am waiting for his book to hit the bookstores.

From my own personal standpoint, I have great respect for the BBC and all that the organization does as a whole, but by the same token, I believe that the BBC News Division is a cancer on the U.K. - and everywhere else it is shown in the world. I can recall sitting in a flat outside London a few years ago, just before the Iraq War began, and having my jaw drop in disbelief at just how far left the BBC news was in what it chose to report and how it reported it.

What makes the BBC news division truly objectionable is that it operates without having to compete in the marketplace. All citizens of Britain fund it, and it operates distinctly to the left of center, expousing both directly and by omission, a firm belief in multiculturalism and related views. Unlike PBS in America, which has more then once been threatened with funding cuts when it has strayed even a little out of the political mainstream, the BBC is a monolith that operates without adult supervision. It has worked a sea change in driving Britain to the socialist and multicultural left in the past half century, and it has done so on the public tit. It has never been challenged. Perhaps that will change with Mr. Aitken's new book.

Although there is tremendous publicity in the U.K. surrounding this book, the BBC has put a lid on it, refusing to comment or grant an interview with its former reporter. As Mr. Aitken states, in an article on 18 Doughty Street:

Funny that not one of them seems to want to cross swords with an obscure reporter who has had the temerity to point out that the Corporation’s claim to impartiality is a Big Lie. And that if word was to get out about just how unfair, one-sided and biased most BBC programmes are there could be consequences. The Corporation’s cherished reputation might be irreparably damaged.

One can only hope that this leads to a groundswell at the grass roots level. In Britain of the past twenty years, it is not that there has been a silent majority of moderates and conservatives, it is that there has been a silenced majority. The first step towards normality in the U.K. involves, almost out of necessity, taking a very serious look at spinning off the BBC news division and letting it operate in the free market.

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Mentally and Emotionally Deficient . . . And Proud of It

Well, I am mentally and emotionally deficient according to certain psychiatrists who would label me a conservative. Their research, they claim, shows all conservatives to be mentally and emotionally deficient. But according to the Iron Shrink, that may be a suspect diagnosis.

Psychology Today recently offered an entirely uncritical account of two studies that characterize mainstream American conservatives as mentally and emotionally deficient. Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition (John Jost et al., 2003) and Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later (Jack & Jeanne Block, 2006) defamed conservatives and were treated as gospel.

PT wasn’t the first to endorse the studies, and it won’t be the last. They have gained favorable treatment in both the professional literature and the mass media. But beneath a thin veneer of integrity, these studies are a morass of furious political ideology, circular reasoning, self-serving definitions, and a baffling degree of confirmation bias. Consider some of the sentiments tucked away in the footnotes and references:
. . . .
. . . Last year, our professional journals contained nearly 700 articles on the topic of cultural competence, which reportedly eschews maliciousness and degradation. Conservatives are excluded from that protection because – make no mistake about it – these “studies” are a shameless attempt to shape politics by vilifying the left’s ideological opponents. . .

Read the whole post here.

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IN THE U.K., THE LIBERAL WORLD ON ITS HEAD

The WSJ shines a spotlight on the radicalized left of the U.K., and there curious acceptance and promotion of radical Islam. The author begins with Red Ken, the Mayor of London, who seems to run his own foreign policy in support of a revolving door of dictators and radical islamists.

The other day Ken Livingstone, the mayor of my hometown of London, organized a conference on Islam and the West. It was a carefully rigged affair in which handpicked speaker after handpicked speaker stood up and announced that the democracies were to blame for the tidal wave of murder sweeping the world.
. . . .
. . . [C]ommentators for the BBC and nearly every newspaper here describe Mr. Livingstone as one of the most left-wing politicians in British public life. Hardly any of them notice the weirdness of an apparent socialist pandering to a reactionary strain of Islam, pushing its arguments and accepting its dictates.

Mr. Livingstone's not alone. After suicide bombers massacred Londoners on July 7, 2005, leftish rather than conservative papers held British foreign policy responsible for the slaughters on the transport network. ("Blair's Bombs," ran the headline in my own leftish New Statesman.) In any university, you are more likely to hear campaigns for the rights of Muslim women derided by postmodernists than by crusty conservative dons. Our Stop the War coalition is an alliance of the white far left and the Islamist far right, and George Galloway, its leader, and the first allegedly "far left" member to be elected to the British Parliament in 50 years, is an admirer of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah.

I could go on with specific examples, but the crucial point is the pervasive European attitude to the Iraq catastrophe. As al Qaeda, the Baathists and Shiite Islamists slaughter thousands, there is virtually no sense that their successes are our defeats. Iraqi socialists and trade unionists I know are close to despair. They turn for support to Europe, the home of liberalism, feminism and socialism, and find that rich democrats, liberals and feminists won't help them or even acknowledge their existence.

And as the author goes onto point, at the root of this suicidal rush of leftist lemmings is multiculturalism and moral equivalency.

In Europe and North America extreme versions of multiculturalism and identity politics have left a poisonous legacy. Far too many liberal-minded people think that is somehow culturally imperialist to criticize reactionary movements and ideas--as long as they aren't European or American reactionary movements. This delusion is everywhere. Until very recently our Labour government was allowing its dealings with Britain's Muslim minority to be controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood--even though he had said that "death was too good" for Salman Rushdie, who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.

I could not concur more with this author's assessment. If you want to see this suicidal mindset in action, please see my post here. And it also dovetails with Niall Ferguson's article today as to why the world hates America.

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NYT DEFINES SUPPORTING THE TROOPS

The New York Times takes the low road to give us their definition of what the democratic mantra, "support the troops" means, at least among the anti-war liberal elite. All soldiers -- and soldier's families -- know when they sign up that they face extended periods away from home. There is no guarantee of a rotation policy out of a combat zone to come home and be with one's family during wartime. That is an aberration growing out of Vietnam. Further, during long deployments, military families always will band together for support. What the NYT does is cherrypick occaisions where that system breaks down in this front page NYT hit piece -- which is utterly disgusting in its content. The clear message being conveyed is that if you "really care" about soldiers, you will bring them home so that they can be with their families. What utter craven scum they are to print this trash.

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PERVASIVE BIAS AT THE BBC

The BBC is a profoundly influential opponent of nearly everything conservatives believe . . ."

This is an excellent article by a Robin Aitken, a reporter with the the BBC for thirty years. The BBC is very influential in Britain and, increasingly so, in the United States. Anyone other then a hardcore leftist who has watched or listened to the BBC over the past ten years has to be amazed at their incredible slant on the news -- made all the more unpalatable by the fact that they are publicly funded and so do not have to compete in the marketplace. It is so over the top that the NYT pales in comparison..

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