For years, I’ve thought that the media had a liberal bias. Of course, everyone just said I was “crazy” or imagining it all. And then Fox News came into being, and so the liberals started screaming about their biased coverage. Sooooo… it’s OK to think that Fox News is a hyperbolic right-wing mouthpiece, yet also think that CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post are paragons of totally impartial and completely objective journalism, and that anyone that disagrees with that is crazy? Yeah, that makes sense.
However, thanks to this year’s election, I can finally prove that it’s not just me: here are two editorials by professional journalists (one from Orson Scott Card here and the other by Michael S. Malone here) that are disgusted not only with the media bias of the 2008 election, but also other incidents.
Malone in particular is pretty peeved about the coverage of the Lebanon War from a couple of years ago. And he’s got a point. Mainstream media sources couldn’t stop reporting on every single thing the IDF did, while at the same time they deliberately chose to ignore the torrent of missiles launched by Hezbollah into northern Israel. Some poor Palestinian kid falls off his bike and CNN can’t get cameras there fast enough to document “Israel’s brutality”, yet hundreds of Israelis are killed by missiles fired from civilian areas in Lebanon and CNN can’t be bothered.
But yeah, the media’s not biased. Not at all.