Jaidness
03-30-2005, 03:43 PM
What Liberal Bias? Part One: Divisive comments by conservatives escape scrutiny given to comments by progressives
Media Matters for America tallied media coverage of four recent controversial statements, two by Republicans and two by Democrats, and found that the comments by Democrats received far more media scrutiny and criticism.
In the five days after Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) referenced Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany while criticizing Republican senators, his comments were reported extensively by major media outlets, including Fox News, CNN, MNSBC, the Associated Press, Roll Call, and ABC -- 19 media reports in all. In the five days after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, "We don't do Lincoln Day dinners in South Carolina. It's nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things," the media virtually ignored his remarks. Graham's statement was mentioned by CNN, Roll Call, the National Journal's CongressDaily newsletter, and the Frontrunner, which excerpted the Roll Call mention. That's it: four mentions.
When Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, reacted to President Bush's proposed 2006 budget and its planned cuts to urban development programs by mentioning the damage done to American cities by terrorist attacks, his comments set off a firestorm in the media. The day after his comment brought coverage in the Washington Post, Fox News (on two separate programs), CNN (five separate programs), and the Associated Press. In the eight days after O'Malley's comment, 25 major news reports addressed the matter.
But when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels -- formerly President Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget -- invoked the specter of acts of terrorism in describing Democratic state representatives, his comments were greeted by a collective yawn by the nation's leading news outlets. Daniels's statement that "Indiana's drive for growth and reform was car-bombed yesterday by the Indiana House minority" was covered in 15 news reports in the eight days after he made the comment. However, it was completely ignored by cable and broadcast television news; the only outlets that covered it were the Associated Press and local newspapers in Indiana and Kentucky.
While the media has largely ignored these divisive comments by prominent conservatives, conservatives in the media continue to make highly questionable comments of their own, largely without consequence.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote on his blog this week:
That American opinion leaders may have been siding with Arab terrorists may seem like startling news to many in Middle America, but nothing new to those of us who have been studying the way the press and the Democratic Party has been operating over the past three years.
[...]
[O]ver the past few years, it has been clear that while most Democrats are not openly cheering for the terrorists killing our troops, neither were they in America's corner.
Scarborough explicitly said Democrats and the press have been "siding with Arab terrorists"; that Democrats are not on America's side; and suggested that some of them are "openly cheering" for terrorists to kill American troops.
And yet this baseless, reckless, and divisive hate speech goes uncriticized. Imagine the outcry if the host of a nightly news and analysis program noted that Tim McVeigh was a Republican, as was Ted Bundy, and concluded that Republicans side with anti-American terrorists -- but hey, most of them are not serial killers. He or she would be -- rightly -- denounced as irresponsible and divisive.
Yet Joe Scarborough can publicly claim that Democrats and reporters side with terrorists -- but hey, most of them aren't "openly cheering" about it!
In ironic twist, Rush Limbaugh this week claimed that "off the wall" comments on MSNBC's Hardball explain why "nobody is watching" that show: "Scarborough has probably got the highest number they've got on that network." Of course, Hardball has significantly higher ratings than Scarborough Country, and -- as we've seen -- Scarborough takes a back seat to no one when it comes to "off the wall" comments.
Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcast Group vice president Mark Hyman used his nightly commentary segment, "The Point," to smear Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, grossly misrepresenting Dean's comments to suggest that he is a racist and to compare him to the Ku Klux Klan.
Dean, during a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, said that the Republican National Committee could only get "this many people of color in a single room ... if they had the hotel staff in here." Though perhaps hyperbolic, Dean was obviously noting the Republicans' lack of popularity among people of color. But in Mark Hyman's mind, that turned into Dean claiming that "[b]lacks are only capable of service industry jobs" -- something Dean clearly didn't say, suggest, or imply. While Hyman said this was one of Dean's "core beliefs," video clips appeared on screen -- one depicting Klansman, another showing African Americans working retail jobs.
At least one right-wing figure has drawn recent criticism for divisive comments, though, as more than 20 members of the U.S. House of Representatives criticized the "latest ethnic slurs" by "conservative gadfly" Ann Coulter. But while the members of Congress, led by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) objected to Coulter's reference to journalist Helen Thomas as an "old Arab," some of Coulter's right-wing colleagues embraced it, as Media Matters noted:
Conservative news website WorldNetDaily.com, which publishes right-wing pundit Ann Coulter's weekly syndicated column, has revised its version of Coulter's February 23 column to include her original description of Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas as an "old Arab." WorldNetDaily promoted the revision on its March 9 front page as "Coulter's original, unsanitized column."
Coulter's reference to "that old Arab Helen Thomas" appears in the version of the column that Coulter posted on her personal website, but her distributor, Universal Press Syndicate, sent out an edited version to its client publications, which referred to Thomas instead as "that dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas."
http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200503120001#1
Media Matters for America tallied media coverage of four recent controversial statements, two by Republicans and two by Democrats, and found that the comments by Democrats received far more media scrutiny and criticism.
In the five days after Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) referenced Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany while criticizing Republican senators, his comments were reported extensively by major media outlets, including Fox News, CNN, MNSBC, the Associated Press, Roll Call, and ABC -- 19 media reports in all. In the five days after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, "We don't do Lincoln Day dinners in South Carolina. It's nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things," the media virtually ignored his remarks. Graham's statement was mentioned by CNN, Roll Call, the National Journal's CongressDaily newsletter, and the Frontrunner, which excerpted the Roll Call mention. That's it: four mentions.
When Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, reacted to President Bush's proposed 2006 budget and its planned cuts to urban development programs by mentioning the damage done to American cities by terrorist attacks, his comments set off a firestorm in the media. The day after his comment brought coverage in the Washington Post, Fox News (on two separate programs), CNN (five separate programs), and the Associated Press. In the eight days after O'Malley's comment, 25 major news reports addressed the matter.
But when Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels -- formerly President Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget -- invoked the specter of acts of terrorism in describing Democratic state representatives, his comments were greeted by a collective yawn by the nation's leading news outlets. Daniels's statement that "Indiana's drive for growth and reform was car-bombed yesterday by the Indiana House minority" was covered in 15 news reports in the eight days after he made the comment. However, it was completely ignored by cable and broadcast television news; the only outlets that covered it were the Associated Press and local newspapers in Indiana and Kentucky.
While the media has largely ignored these divisive comments by prominent conservatives, conservatives in the media continue to make highly questionable comments of their own, largely without consequence.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote on his blog this week:
That American opinion leaders may have been siding with Arab terrorists may seem like startling news to many in Middle America, but nothing new to those of us who have been studying the way the press and the Democratic Party has been operating over the past three years.
[...]
[O]ver the past few years, it has been clear that while most Democrats are not openly cheering for the terrorists killing our troops, neither were they in America's corner.
Scarborough explicitly said Democrats and the press have been "siding with Arab terrorists"; that Democrats are not on America's side; and suggested that some of them are "openly cheering" for terrorists to kill American troops.
And yet this baseless, reckless, and divisive hate speech goes uncriticized. Imagine the outcry if the host of a nightly news and analysis program noted that Tim McVeigh was a Republican, as was Ted Bundy, and concluded that Republicans side with anti-American terrorists -- but hey, most of them are not serial killers. He or she would be -- rightly -- denounced as irresponsible and divisive.
Yet Joe Scarborough can publicly claim that Democrats and reporters side with terrorists -- but hey, most of them aren't "openly cheering" about it!
In ironic twist, Rush Limbaugh this week claimed that "off the wall" comments on MSNBC's Hardball explain why "nobody is watching" that show: "Scarborough has probably got the highest number they've got on that network." Of course, Hardball has significantly higher ratings than Scarborough Country, and -- as we've seen -- Scarborough takes a back seat to no one when it comes to "off the wall" comments.
Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcast Group vice president Mark Hyman used his nightly commentary segment, "The Point," to smear Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, grossly misrepresenting Dean's comments to suggest that he is a racist and to compare him to the Ku Klux Klan.
Dean, during a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, said that the Republican National Committee could only get "this many people of color in a single room ... if they had the hotel staff in here." Though perhaps hyperbolic, Dean was obviously noting the Republicans' lack of popularity among people of color. But in Mark Hyman's mind, that turned into Dean claiming that "[b]lacks are only capable of service industry jobs" -- something Dean clearly didn't say, suggest, or imply. While Hyman said this was one of Dean's "core beliefs," video clips appeared on screen -- one depicting Klansman, another showing African Americans working retail jobs.
At least one right-wing figure has drawn recent criticism for divisive comments, though, as more than 20 members of the U.S. House of Representatives criticized the "latest ethnic slurs" by "conservative gadfly" Ann Coulter. But while the members of Congress, led by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) objected to Coulter's reference to journalist Helen Thomas as an "old Arab," some of Coulter's right-wing colleagues embraced it, as Media Matters noted:
Conservative news website WorldNetDaily.com, which publishes right-wing pundit Ann Coulter's weekly syndicated column, has revised its version of Coulter's February 23 column to include her original description of Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas as an "old Arab." WorldNetDaily promoted the revision on its March 9 front page as "Coulter's original, unsanitized column."
Coulter's reference to "that old Arab Helen Thomas" appears in the version of the column that Coulter posted on her personal website, but her distributor, Universal Press Syndicate, sent out an edited version to its client publications, which referred to Thomas instead as "that dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas."
http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200503120001#1