Redstate

The vast majority of media bias is unintentional. It is word choices and story choices. What is newsworthy? And how to phrase those issues?

So if someone proposes less welfare money and more non-profit and volunteer efforts, it can be described as "Mr. Smith Proposes Revitalized Civil Society" or "Mr. Smith's Bill Strips Poor and Women of Needed Money."

Both are somewhat accurate, but only one makes the headline. The lack of libertarians and social conservatives in media rooms exacerbates the problem.

I continue to disbelief any concerted effort to mislead readers. Although the AP's guide on what terms to use in the abortion debate come the closest to an outright decision to take sides in a political debate.

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Social Security Choice - Club For Growth

I tend to think that it's unintentional also. It's evident comparatively speaking but it's "unintentional" in the sense that the people doing it don't "realize" they're doing it.

There are a few noted counterexamples. Dan Froomkin comes to mind. I think his bias is deliberate. And the liberal stacking of the deck in terms of editorial writers at the big newspapers is certainly deliberate. And I certainly believe that the bias is deliberate by anyone who writes for The Nation.

To me, the liberal bias of the media is more like a kind of subtle field polarization -- you don't really notice it that much as the author, but it tends to pull stories in a certain direction. I think part of that comes from the Media's self-imposed mission of confronting power in the government, with a substantial effect added to it from the journalism professors who teach the students, post-Nixon.

I think that accounts for a lot of the antipathy toward FOX -- because it is actually much more balanced, and doesn't have so much of the leftward drift in the news culture there.

I'd also like to add that I think the polarization is becoming more powerful. During Republican administrations, especially, but this one in particular.

I think it's a fairly-commonly shared belief among most journalists today that Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration are "secretive" for instance. That's a very pejorative term in this culture, but I really don't think they're very secretive. If the media had its druthers, they'd have a reporter sitting right next to the President in the White House to report on every single decision and debate, but I think that's a relatively recent prerogative that the media has decided it has a right to.

I think that the Internet and the blogosphere and the 24/7 news cycle have magnified the problem in the short term because all of the "old media" organizations need much more "addictive" content to keep their audiences and maintain their subscription and advertising base now. And because of that, they "hit harder" and tend to debase their own content more to keep people looking. Witness what's going on right now with Katie Couric. They just fired the producer of her program because it doesn't hit hard enough to keep people from flipping the channels or going to the web.

ABCNews just won the 2007 National Headliner Award for outing Mark Foley. So if you want to claim the bias is unintentional, I hope you're on the right side of "unintentional."

Overall, it's not a "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy". It's just that the people who go into Journalism are just like the majority of other people with Liberal Arts degrees: Liberal.

There are those who look on Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima as some of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by man. I look on them and thank the perpetrators for saving millions.

I liken it to the Hall Effect.

When a perpendicular magnetic field is present, the path is curved perpendicular to the magnetic field due to the Lorentz force. The result is an asymmetric distribution of charge density across the hall element perpendicular to the 'line of sight' path the electrons would take in the absence of the magnetic field.

I don't want to overdraw the analogy, but whenever I think of liberal bias, I think of Hall-effect sensors first.

Hall effect devices produce a very low signal level and thus require amplification.

Think DailyKos, MyDD, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, Arthur O. Sulzburger, Jr., etc. and other similar amplification devices.

;)

is 'How can the government afford/pay for tax cuts?'
The government doesn't pay for anything, it just spends what it collects. Taxpayers fund the entire circus - clowns, jugglers and Congress included.
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison