26 January 2008
Confirming the obvious
Via Hot Air —
[source]
Jim A. Kuypers, assistant professor of communication in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, reveals a disturbing world of media bias in his new book Bush’s War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2006).
Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.� In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.� In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution� in the conclusion.
“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,� said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.�
[…]
This goes beyond reporting alternate points of view. “In short,� Kupyers explained, “if someone were relying only on the mainstream media for information, they would have no idea what the president actually said. It was as if the press were reporting on a different speech.�
Honestly, I haven’t noticed this so much because I had long previously disregarded Old Media reporting on such subjects. I found it far better to go online, because webloggers, unlike the reality based community, likes to link to original sources to avoid this kind of transcription bias.
I thought I would also mention that I think that, once again, there’s little deliberateness in this kind of thing. I would bet money that most (if not virtually all) of the people who do this kind of misleading reporting do so because this is really what they hear, being unable to process information in way other than matching it to their pre-formed narrative. Every experience I have with journalists in real life encourages me to believe that they are really that mentally incompetent.
Couldn't they have touched that up better?
Via Hot Air —
Old Media conspires with disinformation from Hamas yet again.
The Hamas legislators pretend to suffer from a power outage, while you can see that it’s daytime by the light coming in the curtained window and open door. The orginal caption on this picture from Time read
Blackout
The Israeli embargo has left the Gaza Strip without electricity. To emphasize its plight the Palestinian Parliament met by candlelight on Tuesday.
Not technically wrong, but a tad misleading, I would say.
UPDATE: The original caption actually did read “Tuesday night”, but was silently ‘corrected’ later.
When we use a word ...
Via WizBang via The Horse’s Mouth —
CNN has told top Dem strategists James Carville, Paul Begala, and Robert Zimmerman — who are CNN mainstays but are all Hillary supporters — that they will not be doing any more political analysis on the network until the Democratic primary has reached a conclusion. […]
Sam Feist, CNN’s political director, also confirmed the decision to me. “As we got closer to the voting, we made a decision to make sure that all the analysts that are on are non-aligned,” Feist said, adding that the decision had been made around the start of December. “Carville and Begala are two of the best analysts around and we look forward to seeing them on CNN plenty of times in the future, once the nominating process has ended.”
“Non-aligned” meaning “aligned with the Democratic Party”.