Oh, it exists, all right. It is very, very real. But it is the exact opposite of what the whining republicans and their enablers claim. The bias actually works in favor of Republicans.
That is the finding of two Indiana University professors who analyzed network coverage of the 1992-2004 presidential campaigns.
Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, both associate professors in the Department of Telecommunications of IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, report their findings in their book, Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford University Press).
“We don’t think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they’re just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage,” said Grabe, who also is a research associate in political science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “It’s self-censorship that journalists might be imposing on themselves.”
Wow. Lenin and Goebbels were right. Lies are mighty powerful things, and if you repeat them often enough they become true, or at least are accepted as so – with the added benefit of making those who don’t believe the CW suspect.
Those are some damned fine role models you have decided to emulate, GOP. Fine roll models indeed.
Stenographers.
kind to the press. I have been reading elsewhere about how the main media outlets have become more and more responsive to Republicans during the past decades of their hegemony (and I include the Clinton years in this period given his “triangulating” and events that hampered his ability to be effective). This happens as the media begins to align to the centers of power and takes time to reset after a change in power. Discussion of this phenommena arose during the recent media efforts to paint Obama initiatives as failures when they seem, in reality, to be perceived by those outside the media as real political successes.