Unfairly Balanced
Unfairly Balanced
An article in this morning’s Washington Post — headlined “Partisan Social Security Claims Questioned” — makes one of the mainstream media’s favorite arguments: both sides are wrong. The piece reviews the arguments made by Bush and his opponents about Social Security privatization and asserts that both sides are making arguments that are “flawed.”
It’s a convenient journalistic formula but the article fails to back it up.
The article addresses only two claims made by opponents of privatization. First, it examines the claim made by Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-NV) that Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security would cost “$4.9 trillion over a 20 year period starting in 2009.” The article claims that Cheney’s estimate that private accounts would cost “trillions of dollars” is “probably the most honest” because these things are hard to predict. Of course, Cheney’s estimate is not in conflict with Reid’s claim.
Second, the piece examines the claim by opponents that privatization “would benefit Wall Street.” The article doesn’t even attempt to dispute this claim. It merely notes that Bush’s plan aims to “hold down administrative costs” that would go to Wall Street and quotes a budget expert saying he didn’t think the fees would be so high that Wall Street “would salivate.”
Meanwhile, the article reveals serious flaws in claims being advanced by Bush to support the plan: that Social Security is going bankrupt, that private accounts would offer greater returns and that private accounts offer individuals greater freedom.
The liberal media strikes again.
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Last evening the headline was even more “balanced sounding”; something like “Both sides distort the issues” After reading the article, I wondered what the editor was thinking; other than never offer one-sided criticism of the administration.
February 27th, 2005 at 11:35 amThe Media is the lap dog of the left and all of you libs know it!
February 27th, 2005 at 12:12 pmThe liberal media just bends over for Democrats all the time. The liberal media never ever writes a word of criticism of Democratic positions. The liberal media hates George Bush.
February 27th, 2005 at 12:43 pmNow that we have all the lies out of the way can we discuss reality?
got the same sense when reading this article. your presentation only clarified it. thank you leslie
February 27th, 2005 at 12:44 pmVaughn, wake up man! You cannot honestly watch the mainstream media(ABC, NBC, CBS, PMSNBC, and the COMMIE NEWS NETWORK) and come away with anything other than a sense of total liberal bias! I could sit here and list hundreds of examples, but I am sure all of you libs know them already.(Rathergate, the Halprin memo, etc.)I am a proud conservative, and if the MSM is on my side then they sure have me fooled!
February 27th, 2005 at 1:58 pmThe problem with claims of media bias is that humans naturally look for things that confirm or disconfirm preexisting values and beliefs. When conservatives watch the MSM and see something that challenges those beliefs, they scream liberal bias. When liberals watch the MSM and see something they don’t like, they scream conservative bias. If it was even possible for the MSM to be perfectly free of bias, liberals and conservatives would still claim it was biased because it did not conform to their preexisting values. There in lies the problem of claiming the MSM is on one side or the other. Apart from FOX, which clearly has a bias towards conservatives, the MSM is not on anyone’s side. They have biases that go in both directions, thus providing perpetual fresh evidence that the media is biased in one direction or the other.
February 27th, 2005 at 3:03 pmThe media’s motivations are far more complex than the false Left-Right dichotomy proposed here. Judd is correct in his analysis of the Washington Post piece but I would not ascribe it to ideological bias so quickly. It is probably the result of sloppiness and is therefore a quality issue, not a bias issue.
The media are interested in making money and that creates time pressures that often reduce the quality of the reporting and writing. The media is more likely to be sloppy and superficial than ideological. It doesn’t make profit sense otherwise. Why deliberately alienate a portion of your potential customer base if you are in the BROADcast industry?
The reason liberals are currently so upset with the media is that we have an administration that is particularly adept as manipulating the weaknesses of the media. The Bush Administration and their Republican allies recognize that they only have to muddy the water enough so that an issue sneaks past the blinkered radars of the media. Then they can define the issue in their terms. Given the advantages that the Republicans have reaped from this strategy, they have little to complain about. Democrats, on the other hand, have not mastered the art of media manipulation to the same degree.
It’s not a pretty situation and the truth is usually the victim. However, blame the system and its reliance on the profit motive rather than ascribing it to any clear ideological bias (unless, as in the case of FOX, that bias makes money - remember, however, that FOX also shows “The Simpsons” and Rupert Murdoch is Michael Moore’s book publisher).
February 27th, 2005 at 5:39 pm