Media's Bias And Bed Fellows

I don't know if this specific photo was used to depict Israeli troops or not, and I am not going to waste time looking, because I am using this as an illustration only.


This is the sort of thing that I have seen repeatedly, particularly in the minor media, but also in the mainstream media. For example, they might show a photo of small children in what appears to be a cage, but the photo is cropped so you don't see the people holding signs, which would let you know that it was actually a photo of a prop at a protest rally.

Or they will show a picture of children lying on mats in what looks like a cage, but they won't mention that it was from a few years ago, or that it had been cropped to leave out the rest of the room, which includes more comfortable beds and other comfort items.

They might air a video that seems to show an unprovoked attack on a black man by white police officers, except that the video has been edited so that you don't see the part that might suggest that they were defending themselves.

A photo of Trump's inauguration is taken six hours before it begins, then shown alongside one of Obama's inauguration that was taken as it was going on, the obvious intent being to make it appear that there were so many more people at Obama's inauguration than at Trump's.

A sparsely attended Hillary campaign rally is cropped to make it appear that the room was packed.

Innocent scenes are photographed and cropped so as to suggest impropriety.

These are all things that I might expect a campaign to do but in recent years, this is what we're getting from the mainstream media. There has always been bias in the media, but there was a time when there were standards too. I remember an innocuous photo was printed in a newspaper several years ago of some city event, I forget what it was. But the newspaper had used photo-editing software to remove some power lines from the photo just to make for a nicer picture, and they were slammed for publishing a photo that didn't represent reality.

As I said in the start, I don't know if any media actually used the photo that I am showing here but that's the kind of thing that they do.

 

I can remember that, in 2013, Obama's federal government hired organizations formerly associated with ACORN to process medical and tax records of Americans signing up for Obamacare.

Concerns about this were largely along political lines, and since the media wasn't concerned about it, only those who were following the politics of the day were made aware of it.

On the radio today, I heard that Planned Parenthood, the SEIU, the Democrat Party, and perhaps some other left-wing organizations were given a database of compiled names and contacts for people who had signed up for Obamacare, or who might be facing fines for refusing to do so.

I don't know how much of this is true, and therein lies the problem with fake news.

The mainstream media has been repeatedly caught manipulating the news, emphasizing news that might further a left-wing agenda while ignoring that which supports a right-wing agenda, reporting half-truths, and even outright lies as fact. Nevertheless, there are those, including conservatives, who won't believe something unless it's reported in the mainstream news.

In fact, all of us are careful of who we quote or what we link to if we want to retain a sense of credibility, even amongst our friends.

Alex Jones is right a lot of the time, and when he's right, he is often one of the first to report it. Yet, he makes exaggerated claims that are not backed up by verifiable facts, and much of what he reports never does pass a reasonable fact check. So I rarely click on anything that has his name attached to it.

WorldNetDaily used to be a fairly reliable conservative news site. Yes, it was always guilty of emphasizing conservative news while de-emphasizing other viewpoints, but I can remember when they usually reported facts. But it no longer reports the news. Rather, it offers conservative opinion only, although some of it is presented as news. I read it because some of the columnists who write for WND come up with some interesting stuff, but I don't link to it as news.

Breitbart is reliable, or at least more reliable than its left-wing equivalents, but it is a conservative news site, so there is a definite bias in what news it chooses to report on. However, its stuff is about fifty percent opinion, and the left has done a pretty good job of referring to its opinion columns as news and then discrediting them for being biased.

If I link to a Breitbart article, someone will always question the source rather than read the article, despite the fact that Breitbart actually names or links to its sources, unlike most of the mainstream media, who we're just supposed to trust to tell us the truth even though they lie repeatedly. Of course, I do the same thing when someone links to the Huffington Post or Snopes.

Some of the more conservative pundits on Fox are always pointed to as if they were representative of Fox News. I am not a big fan of Fox News because of its neoconservative bias. Their reporting on the 2012 campaign was every bit as biased against Ron Paul as the mainstream media was against Trump in 2016

Fox wasn't very fair to Trump either, at least not until it became clear that he might be the Republican nominee.

An opinion column is not the news, though, and a pundit offers an opinion, not news. By their very nature, pundits and opinion columns are biased. Yet, the left will point to Hannity as being representative of the bias of Fox News, despite the fact that Hannity is a political pundit, not a news reporter.

To be fair, conservatives try to do the same thing, but they don't do it as effectively, largely because they don't have the bully pulpit of the mainstream news.

Also, on the fairness side, it is getting to be pretty hard to tell these days because so much of the news is based on political opinion, and even the words of late-night comedians are reported as news.

The difficulties that this presents to us, as people who would really just like to know what's going on, is that we don't have anywhere to turn to in order to reliably figure out what's going on other than what makes sense to us, and our own biases play into that.

I began thinking of this after hearing the ACORN thing on the radio. I can remember that there was an outcry from conservatives when Obama hired organizations that were once part of ACORN to process some of the Obamacare stuff.

But when I look for it now, it's just the conservative sites that mention it. I believe it was in the mainstream news at the time, but the other thing that they tend to do is to scrub their content. When they are forced to report something that makes them feel uncomfortable, it's not front-page news, and it later disappears from their website, so there's no digital record.

It seems to me that there would be a market for a less biased news network. I have learned a few things since then, but it seemed to me, at the time, at least, that CNN was relatively reliable when it first began. Perhaps it wasn't so reliable, because Ted Turner is a globalist, but it seemed that way to me at the time. Of course, it would have been harder to tell then, because the other networks only offered an hour of news per day.

That 24-hours of news model quickly turned into repeating the same crap over and over, however.

Why hasn't someone come up with a real news network or even a newspaper that wasn't on one side or the other? I suppose there'd always be some bias because the news is collected and reported by people, and people have biases, but if the emphasis, at the top, was on unbiased news, this could be kept to a minimum. It seems like there would be a market for that.

 

A reporter in Massachusetts had to resign after falsely reporting that the Capital Gazette newsroom shooter was wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat.

 

I have literally just come across this a few moments ago, so I haven't formed an opinion yet but AllSides seems that it might offer a few different perspectives on the news. I don't know about its fact-checking reliability yet, though.