If you had the exquisite bad luck to be awake somewhere in the Gary Cooper hours of Nov. 2, you might have heard a terrible rumbling sound in your neighborhood — the sound of approximately 54.5 million souls exploding slightly after NBC’s bloated election-map of Ohio turned red. In such a contested election in a polarized nation, this sentiment is quite understandable. What is not understandable, however, is how a majority of America’s newspeople joined this segment of the population by either giving the election the finger or sharing a tear with Democrats nationwide. Yes sir, hindsight may be 20-20, but it takes the post-mortem of the Democratic party for us to realize that Americans had been watching their televisions through the liberal-colored glasses of their anchors and reporters.
Nowhere is television news’ liberal bias more evident than in the exit polls conducted by these organizations. Polls conducted by CNN and CBS showed Kerry with a solid lead in the so-called “battleground” states, including Ohio. But when the actual vote counts came in, the discrepancy between these polls and reality were so embarrassing that the folks at CNN actually changed their data in the middle of the night to avoid looking like total goons. So why were these “”reputable”” news organizations so wrong? Like all other “”facts”” thrown around by both sides throughout the last few months, the data collected tends to support whatever conclusion the researchers wish to find.
A recent study by researchers Tim Groserclose at UCLA and Jeff Milyo at the University of Chicago yielded similar results — yet, unlike the news agencies they studied, Groserclose and Milyo looked across the board for their research. The secret to media bias, these researchers argue, lies in the think tanks news organizations use for their supporting facts in news stories. By assigning members of Congress “liberal percentage scores” based on their voting record, and then correlating these scores for the think tanks these representatives cited in their speeches, Groserclose and Milyo could gauge the bias of a news organization based on whether it chose its facts from “liberal” or “conservative” sources. Their findings? When a median liberal value could be seen as 39 percent, most TV news outlets were well above the 50 percent range. Looking at these numbers, it comes as no surprise that CBS anchor Dan Rather came under fire in the months before the election for broadcasting falsified documents relating to President George W. Bush’s military record. Of course, this study also justified Democrats’ criticisms of Fox News: “Fox News Special Report” scored a 27 percent, showing it’s just as off-center as NBC or ABC are in the opposite direction.
For college students and other disillusioned types, though, the trusted source for news during the past months was Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” Loyal viewers who consider themselves political junkies could claim that Jon Stewart mocked Democrats and Republicans equally, meanwhile having a good laugh at the electoral process that slowly drove our nation apart. With “The Daily Show,” hindsight proves illuminating as well: The day after the election, Stewart completely lost all his credibility by engaging in 30 minutes of television that placed “The Daily Show” in a position of partisan hackery second only to talk radio. Instead of the usual bipartisan mockery, viewers were treated to several angry, unfunny monologues berating “middle America” as uneducated, and mentioning that the Republican voting effort was entirely due to voters’ “ickiness around two dudes kissing.” To use his own words against him, Stewart’s postelection coverage is quite possibly “bad for America.”
But even if the “serious” media has followed Stewart into the depths of liberality, who cares? After all, national polls have found that “educated people” tend to be more left-leaning, so why shouldn’t the “”educated”” media follow suit? This faulty reasoning is similar to the mentality behind our media’s liberal fact-choosing, and shows they have lost their focus as purveyors of objective fact. To put it bluntly: Who cares if CBS or NBC makes its liberal audience happy, if the content it is broadcasting is false? CNN made its audience happy by hinting that Kerry would win the election, but it was still wrong. This problem may have something to do with the viewing public, which by and large no longer watches the news to form opinions, but rather to validate them. In this distrusting climate of opinions, the least televised news could do is attempt to present both sides equally so the Democrats don’t start to believe that the majority of the American people agrees with their views.
Conservatives learned well before the election not to trust the biased media, but it is now, after the election, that the liberals must heed the same warning: Be wary of anything touted as “fact” on any news program. Do not have faith in any agency or news program that claims to gauge public opinion. If you must watch television news to be informed, add Fox News to balance out your favorite liberal station and try to get a decent picture, or watch PBS’ “Newshour,” which the study found to be only 2-percent liberal. If we, the American people, all do what we can to distrust the news, there is a chance that in four years we might not have to put up with this shady partisan hackery, and we might have a chance to actually know what is going on in this country before it’s too late.
