Media Bias

I am a registered independent, but over the past several years I've been forced to defend people and situations on the right much, much more often than on the left. This has been particularly true with President Bush. I don't think he's a great president, but he has been given an extremely unfair shake in the media since day one. Now, of course I realize that all presidents get attacked in the media, but come on, Pres. Bush has taken the cake by far. I know many would say, "Well, he's deserved it," but this isn't a just/reasoned criticism of policies, these are ad hominem attacks, biased reporting, and even fabrications. But, this post isn't about Bush, it's about the media in general.

I've been telling everyone I know for years that the media is extremely biased, hence why I read between 8 and 12 sources a day. I get a bigger picture this way, but still hardly a full picture. The problem is that 99% of Americans don't have the time or simply don't care to sift through 8+ sources for their news. This results in most people not fully understanding what's going on in the world, which only further expands the cycle of ignorance our society is in (still better than much of the world though).

Case in point: Recently, the Democratic Governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer has announced his resignation from office as a result of his involvement in a prostitution ring. Well, I've been paying attention to the news coverage (of course) and I've only seen a seldom few instances of him being identified as a Democrat, whereas when Senator Larry Craig had his scandal, a big 'R' was plastered next to his name whenever possible. Newsbusters.org has covered this quite nicely as they point out that, "In a total of seven Spitzer-related segments on Wednesday’s "Today" show and one interview with Barack Obama, where the scandal was mentioned, not one anchor, reporter, guest, talking head or on-screen graphic mentioned Spitzer's party affiliation." The "Today" show never mentioned his party on Tuesday either. They're not the only ones, CNN, CBS, ABC, etc (even FOX) never mentioned his party yesterday either, that I saw. To drive the point home that the media is not getting the actual message out about many things, I was watching a YouTube video about Hillary Clinton (that's another story) and started reading the comments afterward (usually a bad idea) and came across the following two comments:

FrenziedRaldo25 (2 hours ago) Show Hide

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Thats a pretty ironic comment considering your Republican buddy Eliot Spitzer just resigned thanks to his Prostitution ring scandal.

theyellowdart88 (1 hour ago) Show Hide

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Uh, Eliot Spitzer is a democrat.

Wow. Now, I know that a lot of people may not have known the guy's party, but to be "sure" that you're so right about it to post it as an attack on someone else?

This next item is one of the worst instances of media bias that I have ever seen. There is no doubt Islamophobia exists in this world, but it also just so happens that over 10,000 reported terrorist attacks have been committed by Muslims since 9/11/2001. All other terrorist attacks by non-Muslims is very minimal. Look, the vast majority of Muslims (especially American Muslims--thanks to thorough assimilation) are peaceful human beings just like every other group. I think most people understand this too, yet there is a big push in European media to "prove" that Islamophobia is widespread and growing. So, to "prove" this, a Dutch news station, 101tv, set up a scenario where a woman dressed in western clothing would walk down the sidewalk and drop some groceries. They filmed her being helped by multiple passersby. But then, they had her dress up in a Burqa (the head-to-toe cloth worn by many Muslim women) and they showed ::gasp!:: no one helping her out!!! Can you believe it?? Well, it turns out that another news crew happened to be in the area and filmed most of the episode. Guess what they saw....many people helping the Burqa-clad woman! Complete and pure fabrication. The video link is below, as shown by the real news crew. It's not in english, but it's self-explanatory.

Fake Dutch Video