Media's Bias And Bed Fellows

We haven't had cable for years, so I don't often watch network news. Rather, I'll watch such things as the Strzok hearings in their entirety, and look things up from a number of sources.

However, we're at a hotel now. While in the lobby, MSNBC was playing. Supposedly, they were reporting on the Strzok hearings, which I had watched, but you wouldn't know it unless you hadn't watched it for yourself. According to MSNBC, Strzok conducted himself as a consummate professional, deftly handling himself while under attack by stuttering, stumbling Republican congressmen.

As an aside, it struck me that it must be okay to make fun of someone's speech impediment if they are Republican. One of the Republican congressmen did have a slight stutter but it wasn't all that obvious.

Other than looking for such things as a speech impediment to make fun of, there was no reason for them to have actually watched the hearings that they were reporting on because you wouldn't know they were reporting on the same hearing if you had actually watched it. They could have made that story up without spending hours watching it.

A few moments ago, in the room, NBC was reporting on the Russian nonsense, and they actually played an edited version of what was clearly a joke that Trump made several months ago when he asked the Russians to look for the email messages that Hillary couldn't find, only they reported on it as if it wasn't a joke. What? Are they that stupid, or are they so sure that we are that it doesn't matter?

I can see why people get the crazy ideas and misinformation that they believe to be facts. If they don't watch any of this stuff for themselves, and never seek alternative sources to the liberal media, I can see that they might actually come to believe this nonsense.

 

Yeah, Maine is a pretty liberal state. Not California liberal but since most of our population is in the only reasonably large city we have, and the second largest city has most of our immigrant population, Maine generally elects Democrats or RINOs.

Yet, all of Maine's most popular talk radio stations play Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Jim Bohannon, Mike Gallagher, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Howie Carr, and others - not necessarily stalwart conservatives, but certainly not rabid liberals.

Station owners, to a man, would love to give us wall-to-wall liberals, and they have tried various national liberal talk shows but they never last long. Not enough people want to listen to a liberal talk show host. Locally hosted shows tend to be focused on hunting and fishing, car repairs, or gardening. Each station has a local political show on each weekday morning, and they are all the same - hosted by a rabidly liberal Democrat who once held political office and a RINO Republican who once held political office, but 80% of the callers are conservative, and they are often dismissed as kooks. These shows only last because they all do it and there's nothing else on.

I think that liberal talk shows don't work because liberals cannot laugh at themselves, have no sense of humor, and they will never acknowledge that their guy might be wrong. When they think they are being funny, they come off as bitter or angry, and they cannot tolerate a caller who disagrees with them. Thus, liberal talk shows are boring, even to liberals.

 

Often, the bias is in what the news doesn't tell you. Probably, most of you have heard of the children who were found starving in New Mexico, and one dead. All of the news media carried the story, but with very little idea of what it was all about. ABC News, which is used by our local radio station here, suggest that it was maybe a right-wing or white supremacist cult.

Prior to the arrests, had any of you heard that the adults involved were Muslim, and that one of them was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 Trade Center bombing, as well as a character witness in the sentencing hearing of Sheikh Umar Abdul Rahman, aka the Blind Sheikh? The thinking is that they were maybe preparing these kids to be suicide bombers, although I don't know if any of them are talking.

I hadn't heard a single mainstream news outlet mention that they were Muslim until the arrests were made, and some of them still aren't. Some of them are naming the people so you can guess that they are Muslim, but do you think for one moment that if they were members of a white nationalist group, or a conservative Christian group, that this wouldn't have been front and center in the news?

Instead, they first suggested that they were white supremacists. Since they are all of Middle Eastern descent, certainly there was nothing to suggest this, yet that is what they put out there until they had to actually start naming names.

In this story, published after the arrests were made, other than the names, there is only one sentence, near the end of the story, that suggests they might be Muslim.

Had these people been white Christians, or Trump supporters, the fact that they were white Christians, or that they were known Trump supporters, would be leading the news.

 

That is what I have heard too. I don't know where the suicide bombing thing came from. I was in a rush and I suppose the identification of one of the adults as having been involved in the Trade Tower bombings put that in my head.

 

During the Democrat debates, one of the NBC newspeople keeps referring to the Democrats as "we," and as Democrat chances for victory in 2020 as "our." Along the same lines, there were no "gotcha" questions like we see in Republican debates. They were all along the lines of, "Can you tell us again why you are great?"

 

Wikipedia's editors are battling to remove Bill Clinton's links to Jeffrey Epstein while emphasizing Trump's. -- Summit News

At the time that Epstein was arrested, there was no mention on his Wikipedia page of any association with Trump, although his association with Clinton was there. That same day, Clinton's association was removed and Trump's was added.

What will happen is what usually happens at Wikipedia when there is an editor war. Someone higher up at Wikipedia will decide to lock the page at the most liberal view.

 

I use it several times a day. When it comes to anything that is not political, Wikipedia is very good.