November, 2007
The Blue-Bleeding Media
Bryan Griffin
The real reason for print media’s declining popularity is its inherent liberal bias
On July 30th, 2007, a major breakthrough took place. A breakthrough that few saw coming, but many found shocking. New York Times Op-Ed contributors Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, admittedly “harsh criticizers of the Bush administration” wrote an article entitled “A War We Just Might Win” in which they made numerous concessions to the possibility of a stable Iraq, secure country, and successful war. After nearly seven years of reporting the Iraq war as a failure from the start and burying glimmers of success in the 17th and 18th pages of the paper, The New York Times, as well as numerous other media outlets are admitting that the Iraqi objective may just be one that took time and patience to achieve.
Recently, there has been a flood of nostalgia for the printed media. Books, newspapers, and to some extent magazines have declined in readership and use to the prospects of the multi-faceted world wide web, accessible from any computer, Blackberry, Sidekick, or iPhone. I see the switch more in terms of whether those who wish to be current on worldly affairs choose to have it told to them, by a reading a newspaper or watching a TV news show, or researching for themselves exactly what is happening around the world, through the internet. And while some argue that the current trend is due to the American public’s loss of attention span, maturity, and literacy, the truth lies in the facts that the published and televised media sources are angled and often push unwanted agendas into the public’s face.
The drive-by media is that which reflects what it feels will “sell a story” into their stories, sometimes covering the truth and losing the true meaning of journalism. Journalism requires a news source to be unbiased, and accurately report events with distributed and equal coverage. As is more often than not the case today, however, major media sources are exaggerating and sometimes even falsifying their coverage of stories, usually liberal, onto the front page to sell a paper, and shoving whatever contradicts that agenda into the back section of the paper or cutting it from the TV lineup. A bias does not have to be stated, but can be gathered from the purposeful absence of a story, fact, or differing viewpoint.
The death of the print media has been its own doing, a victim of its own biased demise. The American public is fed up with the liberal agenda pushed by the majority of American big-city news sources, and is ready to gather the facts for themselves. The media handles the war like an already lost cause, and ignorantly claims that the American public agrees, consistently jabbing at the President and at the pretenses of the war in any and all possible ways.
Just the other day I was browsing through an article by the Associated Press about the “New Seven Wonders”, a subject far from American party politics, and the author smeared his unwanted opinion right through the middle of the piece by mentioning the Statue of Liberty and then quickly following up with, “which lost the vote due to strong hatred of America because of the current Iraq War.”
It doesn’t surprise me that my generation leans to the left, with the amount of liberal propaganda thrown onto TV, magazines, and newspaper headlines. They, just as the media tells them to, refuse to acknowledge that this attempt to restore democracy to a part of the world riddled in oppression could work because it didn’t happen in a decade, when our last two successful installations of democracy, took well over a decade each, and produced two of the most successful and thriving countries today: Japan and Germany. And we STILL have troops in both countries.
I do not pity the dying media because it is inherently flawed; the American public will no longer put up with a single-sourced news outlet, and I do not blame them. Despite the “polls”, another tool of the agenda-driven media, I know that the American population is not staunchly as anti-war and anti-Bush as the media likes to claim. The polls are a tool the media uses to only reaffirm their own legitimacy, and can never truly be bias free, with variables as manipulative as number, socioeconomic status, and overall response; not to mention all gathered data will be preedited by the media before reaching public eyes. And please, argue that Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts are just as biased, but then that’s just it: they are conservative talk show hosts, and don’t pretend to be an unbiased news source. Sure, argue that a media source can lean right, too, but this is just my point, bias exists! Both ways! But the majority of the media bleeds liberalism and I know that just as large of a majority of Americans will stand behind me in this statement and the refusal to continue to accept such biased journalism when we can use the internet and the globalization of communication to gather the true, unbiased facts for ourselves. And the facts stand: the Iraqi government has actually passed more legislation than has the current congress elected from 2006.