Over at personal responsibility a discussion has broken out about media coverage of differing smear tactics in the last presidential election.

As I’ve said, the MSM has been bashing conseratives lately because they’ve been the only public political figures of note for a long time; as soon as democrats start sticking their heads up, expect them to receive the same MSM smears. It’s about ratings and money; any aparent political agenda is just marketing.

I wish this were true. In regards to swift boat, by the time the second ad came out the MSM press had already gone into full force debunk the ad’s claims.

Contrast that with Rathergate. This was a so poorly forged document that bloggers within hours of the airing the story identified it as such. Yet left leaning news people at CBS were utterly incapable of seeing an obvious forgery despite that being integral to their job.

Difference in Coverage?

These instances do a fine job of showing what MSM bias means. We can say both had the same intention smearing a potential candidate to influence the outcome of the election with questionably true assertions.

In the example in which the democratic candidate’s reputation is impugned there is immediate skepticism within the MSM resulting in many editorials and news piece calling into question the validity of the ad. However, with the republican candidate obviously forged documents are not met with skepticism by CBS, a MSM news organization, but in fact are reported as fact. Thanks to skepticism of the right bloggers it took less than a day for them to expose the documents as fabrications.

Swift boat had to buy ad time. As such their assertions were already associated with advertisement hyperbole. Most everyone knows that statements made in commercials are to be scrutinized. Nevertheless the advertisements were scrutinized by the MSM for validity. On the other hand with Rathergate, you have a credible news source reporting on fabricated documents as true. Arguably new organizations assertions do not need to be scrutinized as carefully as advertisements because the point of such organization is to report avoiding overly biased information. Furthermore, it was not the MSM that discovered the forgery but non journalist that supported Bush.

One piece of propaganda is rightly labeled as advertisement and is heavily scrutinized by the press. Another piece of propaganda is labeled as fact and is not scrutinized by the press. Believe me the press leans left and has for quite some time.

Institutional Homogeny

It makes sense. One is more skeptical of things that violate their expectations. The converse is true as well. It’s called confirmation bias. News organizations that consist primarily of people with the same attitudes and opinions will be skeptical of things that violate those attitudes and opinions. MSM was skeptical of swifboat because it violated an expectation while they were less skeptical of Rathergate for it did not violate an expectation. Right bloggers were much less skeptical of swiftbaot but were skeptical of Rathergate.

News organizations have been packed with liberals for at least three decades. Ever since journalist decided to use their profession to do ‘good’ instead of report the news liberals have been clamoring to get in. This has had the unfortunate consequence of pushing the news towards the left. Homogeny in the newsroom has weakened the organization’s ability to perceive deception and maintain editorial neutrality. This weakness has manifested in declining readers and proliferation of talk radio and Fox News dominance.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 10:46 am and is filed under News Coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.