Slanted Reporting

[andrewducker]

If there's a liberal bias to the media, why have I seen numerous articles saying "Michael Moore booed at the Oscars" and not one saying "Michael Moore cheered at the Oscars"? After all, both happened.

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Because just by being banal or merely rubbish you can get applauded at the Oscar's.

News = interesting, non-standard occurrences.

That's why most headlines run in the format:

"4 soldiers killed in Iraq"

not

"599,996 soldiers not killed in Iraq"

even while both events actually happened.

bland opinion

[mysticlegacy.livejournal.com]

The conservatives would say it's a liberal media for reporting it at all, and the liberals would say it's a conservative media for not reporting from the liberal standpoint.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Having watched it, I think the Boos far outwighed the cheers. He went down like a lead balloon. And while I admire him for standing up for his principles and alienating a lot of his peers, I thought Adrian Brody's speech far more weighty, intelligent and destined to be remembered for longer by those who were there. Sometimes a simple, heartfelt message has far more impact than an empty rhetoric.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The statement about the liberal media is honestly (in the US at least) nothing more than right wing propaganda. Not only is the vast majority of mass media now owned by a very few very rich and generally highly conservative people like Rupert Murdoch, but an examination of talk shows and talk radio clearly shows that right wingers like Rush Limbugh far outnumber left wing commentators. California is an exceedingly liberal state and LA is an exceedingly liberal city, and yet on talk radio in LA right wing commentators outnumber left wing ones 20 to 1.

Sadly, wrt talk radio and shows like Donahue, the problem started in the 1980s, when the then Democrat controlled congress pass a bill eliminating the previous FCC standards that demanded equal time for differing political viewpoints. Soon after that law was eliminated well-funded right wingers dominated such shows.

The way in which US mass media has changed in the last 40 years is both fascinating and terrifying. I would definitely agree that the mass media was liberal in the 1960s and early 1970s, but as various laws prohibiting corporation from owning more than X number of stations or newspapers or more than X% in any city have been whittled away (mostly in the 1980s) the face of American media has changed and now it is a right wing face that exists solely to support that status quo.

Listening to the television news reports of the protest I went to on Thursday and comparing them with the realities I saw greatly bothered me.