Here is a very good bit on media bias from Michael S. Malone. Mr. Malone is a veteran reporter and spends his essay explaining how appalled he is at the one-sided coverage of this election campaign. But it isn’t just an expose. He has an opinion about where the roots of the problem lie - and that is with editors.
The gist of his complaint is this: there is nothing wrong with the savaging of McCain and especially Palin by the media. That’s par for the course. What’s outrageous is the absolute lack of same against the other side.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.
Yes, I completely agree. Mrs. Palin has not been treated unfairly, and as voters we are anyway entitled to know if she was, say, corrupt enough to order someone fired for having divorced her sister.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
Hear, hear - and it’s about bloody time a media insider came out and said it. That’s the crux of my objection too. Like Malone, I don’t mind so much that the media scrutinizes Palin and McCain with a fine-toothed comb. Hell - I applaud it. That’s their job, and in an ideal world such scrutiny would act as a filter, making sure that at the very least people who want to be president worked really hard at keeping their corruption manageable. But this filter completely fails to function when Obama and Biden are not similarly scrutinized.
Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.
So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?
The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.
This is convincing. In a world as competitive as newspaper reporting, surely anyone, no matter how leftist, is ready to make a name for himself by doing the dirty work on the Obama campaign. If there is systematic media bias (and it’s become as good as impossible to deny that there is during this campaign), then it must come from the editors.
An interesting read. Go have a look.