John McCain and the Discovery Institute

I guess you live in Taiwan, like it says by your name, so I guess you don't know - the media here in America regularly attacks Democrats for things Republicans get a pass for (for instance, Nancy Pelosi getting a government plane for official travel, even though the last Speaker of the House, a Republican, did too). They're much harder on Democrats than they are on Republicans. For instance, in 2000, it was widely and inaccurately reported that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, while on the other hand, George Bush's fictional proficiency in Spanish was reported without question. The idea that McCain represents some kind of individualist "maverick" making headaches for Bush is another media fabrication. As Media Matters for America reported,

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...the media seem so enamored with the image of McCain as the "maverick," that they have defended it even when the facts show otherwise. As Media Matters noted, the March 13 edition of ABCNews.com's The Note attacked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for "writ[ing] with selective facts that John McCain is not a maverick, a moderate, nor a straight talker," but provided no facts to support its argument. Krugman, on the other hand, cited McCain's vote to extend Bush's 2003 tax cuts, his hawkish stance on the Iraq war, and his position on a controversial South Dakota abortion ban, which, Krugman wrote, "makes no sense."

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Recently, McCain indicated that he is currying the favor of the same Christian conservatives who supported Bush in the 2000 presidential race and who McCain denounced at the time.

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McCain gets a pass because he's right-of-center, just as Guliani gets a pass for the Kerik scandal, Mitt Romney and Sam Brownback each get a pass for their constant flip-flops on social issues (remember where we get that term, "flip-flop"? From the constant media portrayals of John Kerry, a Democract, as inconstant, based on the fact that, occasionally, he appeared to change his mind?) and, of course, the Bush Administration gets a pass for basically everything they've ever done.The idea that the mainstream media that makes sweethearts out of every Republican and conservative would "pounce" on one of them is laughable at best. Why this happens in a media industry that is predominantly liberal and Democrat is a question I leave to you.

I'm not sure why you're confused. We're just talking about two basic statements of fact:1) The media applies a double standard to coverage of politicians, where Republicans are given a pass for behaviors Democrats are challenged on, and a narrative of Republican strength and Democratic weakness is repeated even in situations where the facts don't support that narrative; and2) Reporters, editors, anchors, and other media figures are far more likely to be personally liberal and vote Democratic than to be conservative or vote Republican.I don't understand why you're confused. Yes, people in the media are more likely to be liberals than conservatives. Far more likely. And, yes, the media is far, far more likely to report charitably on Republicans and conservatives than Democratic liberals, even to the point where the media manufactures controversies to undermine Democrats.So, my title is correct. The idea of a media establishment that slants the news with a liberal bias, misrepresents the issues in ways beneficial to liberals, and invents scandals to submarine promising Republican candidates is mythical. Those are the things that the media does to Democrats.

I'm sure smug aphorisms make you feel nice and comfortable, but that's demonstratively untrue.

Tell me how to proceed with such an analysis. It's pretty clear that no amount of examples is going to prove it to you. How would you weight one misrepresentation over another?

How would I give you reason to believe that? How many examples, for instance, would I have to provide for you to believe they represent the whole?I'm asking because I'm trying to establish your burden of proof before I try to go meet it. Does that really strike you as unreasonable? You'd expect that an institution as important as the media would largely focus on doing their job - which is reporting events accurately, not reading from RNC press releases and drumming up manufactured controversies at the expense of Democrats.Here's the thing - I've given a handful of examples, as you say, of bias against Democrats by the ostensibly "liberal media." You've replied with the fact that conservatives, by and large, assert that the media has a bias against Republicans.How about you provide some examples, for once, and we'll see if they're actually misrepresentations - or accurate reporting falsely called misrepresentation by partisan conservatives?

As I said - you'll have to develop your own explanation for the facts. Personally? I think it's nothing more than overcorrection. Media figures know they are personally liberal, and so, on the job, they overcorrect to the right to avoid charges of bias - unwittingly, then, introducing exactly the opposite bias.Why? What's your explanation? If media figures are so thoroughly liberal, why the extensive, systemic bias against liberals and Democrats?

Because they're fucking boring and they don't make good TV. It has nothing to do with "bias", and I think equating salacious television designed to attract eyeballs with factual distortion by the news media - whose purpose, ostensibly, is to inform - is ludicrous on the face of it. Are you not counting police incidents, or something? I hear about those all the time. Can you support your assertion that it "happens quite frequently"? I don't believe enough private people carry firearms for it to happen all that frequently, and it's not clear what would be newsworthy about a policeman, say, drawing his pistol during an arrest, since it happens that way every single time. So, you were just asking for something you knew couldn't be delivered. Fair enough.

They don't check their facts. Why else would noted liberal Lou Dobbs be repeated, weeks after it was debunked, the idea that Nancy Pelosi demanded an enormous luxury plane upon taking office as Speaker of the House?It's a made-up story. Completely fabricated. And Dobbs is no right-wing ideologue. Why would he flog a story he knew was false?

Then it sounds like there's plenty of TV coming out of Hollywood that conservatives can get behind. Where do you think those shows were made? The moon? So where's the bias? Sure. But is it any surprise that most TV will go for the easy sell and present salacious content? I resent, by the way, the implication that if a TV show has a bunch of sex and violence that it's somehow "liberal." "Liberal" is not a synonym for "reprehensible", even if conservatives use it that way. I don't follow crime stories all that much. Five incidents in a month, nationwide, aren't "quite frequently" to me. I don't see this as evidence of underreporting of gun issues. I probably could. Or do you think you have the corner on crank contrarianism around here? Absent any guidelines about how to proceed, which you admit you don't know how to provide, I don't see how that discussion winds up anywhere but an argument about whether or not I'm cherry-picking, or whether or not you are.And I don't see how showing examples of bias towards both sides, tit for tat, proves anything but your point. Absent a guideline for how to pick and reject examples, we can go back and forth all day with my examples of anti-liberal bias and your examples that you think are of bias against conservatives, and I don't see what that would prove.

Lol! That's the made-up story - that the story was based solely on forgeries!The truth of the matter is that the documents were never established as forgeries, nor were they the actual foundation of the CBS story. The whole issue was just another right-wing manufactured controversy. Lol! Fact-checking like false claims that a typewriter couldn't kern text in the 1960's? Ten minutes speaking to anybody older than 30 would have "checked" that fact.But, no. The cravenly media turned on their competitors at the behest of half-assed arguments from the right wing nutosphere and repeated false claims as truth - like they did with the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" claims, which were all eventually proven false.Forging government documents is a serious crime, of course. Can you think of the guy that they eventually arrested for forging the documents?No, of course you can't - because no one did it. Once the story was sufficiently clouded by the right wing noise machine, and CBS folded as everyone turned on them, the wingnuts had what they wanted - too much noise about the story for people to remember the actual truth of the claims - Bush was proven not to have met his ANG service requirements, but by the time that was established, people were tired of the whole issue.And, like you, the only thing they remembered were the false allegations of "forged documents."But, hey, you know. Liberal media! Lol!

Not common ones, but they weren't unknown, at least not according to office machine experts.And, of course, this doesn't even get into the explanation that the documents were retyped versions of originals, something that the government quite commonly does.

If that's true, then where's all the liberal bias? Why the flogging of made-up stories about Democrats? Why the double standard that benefits conservatives and Republicans?For instance, reporters commonly question whether or not Bill Clinton's marital proclivities will harm Hillary Clinton's career, or whether or not Hillary would be as successful as she is now if she hadn't married into success. But where's the questioning of Rudy Guliani, who divorced one of his wives at a press conference? Where's the wondering if John McCain would have been successful in politics if he hadn't divorced his first wife to marry into money? (Why is it that John Kerry is the only politician the media have accused of doing that?)Sure, reporters may tend to vote Democratic. But the fact that the media is biased against Democrats can't really be questioned, as far as I can see. And it's worth remembering that editors and media conglomerate owners are really the ones who determine the content of media, and to a large degree, those people are Republicans and conservatives.

Right, but I already addressed the anecdote issue with Subbie. Why would I reply again to something I already addressed? Then why don't you try to address the questions Subbie couldn't? Or, like him, are you simply setting an impossible standard of proof? I still don't understand what you think is self-contradictory. At least three legitimate explanations have been provided to you for why a media that employs liberals would be biased against Democrats, and the best part is none of them are even mutually exclusive.It seems like the onus of proof is on you to show how there's anything contradictory here. Plus you have the burden of explaining why a supposedly "liberal media" so unquestioningly accepts the misrepresentations of a conservative administration and his political noise machine. Anyway, wasn't it you who pointed out the sweetheart treatment John McCain gets from the so-called liberal media? Add that to the sweetheart treatment of Rudy Guliani, Sam Brownback, Mitt Romney - the entire GOP 2008 roster - and it seems like you've done about half the work in proving my point for me.I think the burden is yours, to explain your self-contradictory position that the media that treats the entire GOP presidential stable so well is somehow "liberal". How does that make any sense?

What kind of data are you asking for that wouldn't just be an enumeration of examples? How are we going to objectively measure "liberalness" or "conservativeness" or "misrepresentation-ness"? If it's the system that is biased, AO, then the politics of the journalists themselves are irrelevant - the system will bias against liberals, regardless.Your contention that a poll of journalist voting habits somehow disproves that the things Media Matters chronicles even happened is ridiculous. How can I present something when I don't even know what you're asking for? Your request for "data" is insufficiently specific, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that you have no interest in specifying what data you would find sufficient - because no amount of data would be sufficient to you.I'll try yet another time to arrive at some kind of agreement with you, though it's obvious that it will be fruitless. Tell me what kind of data would be necessary to substantiate my position to you.

I don't know how we would judge "favorableness" to one side or another. Or how we could control for the possibility that Republicans, for instance, simply do more things that make them look bad. I mean, if one Democrat is involved in a bribery scandal involving $100,000 found in his freezer - but 20 Republicans are involved in a bribery scandal involving multiple millions of dollars shaken down from Indian casinos, and the media reports on both stories with equal time and interest - is that fair and balanced? Or is that false balance, slanted against Democrats?I'd say it's the latter, because the Republican scandal is a fundamentally larger and more important one. So increased media coverage of the Republican scandal would be warranted in my view, but one could easily make the argument "bribery is bribery; the greater focus on Republicans doing it is proof that the media is biased against Republicans." Additionally, I don't know how we would judge whether or not a source was biased. I mean, if the media really is slanting the news in favor of conservatives and Republicans, any source that pointed that out would fall under your classification of a "biased source." If we're going to reject as biased every source that comes to a conclusion other than "the media is balanced", then you're simply choosing your conclusion at the outset.I'm not trying to weasel out of providing data. I'm simply trying to explain why the only polling done on this issue is usually about how journalists vote - that's a really simple kind of poll to do. The fundamentally false idea is that this translates into some kind of indication of pervasive media bias.