Liberal columnist Molly Ivins wrote this week that the real problem with the media is not bias but laziness and bad news judgment. “Our failure is what we miss,” she contends, not that the media are supposedly pushing some liberal or conservative agenda. She’s probably right, though what news stories you think need more coverage tends to mirror your own biases.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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50 Comments
The MSM by virtually any measure has a liberal slant. For example just do a Nexis search on the number of times the press uses to term “conservative” versus “liberal.” Not even close. Before some of you knuckleheads go off on your semi-hysterical Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity rants…commentators, like editorial boards, are different than reporters writing hard news.
Let me be clear. The MSM has a 1st Amendment right to be liberal, I just wish they wouldn’t insult my intelligence and say they’re not.
Having said all that, if the media were all powerful, we wouldn’t have W as our president or Tiahrt and Brownback :-)
Ask some liberals, and they will say the the media is biased on the conservative side. You’ll get just the opposite from conservatives. I think most are well balanced.The point to this blog, though, is that we are fed what the MSM wants to feed us. They do tend for the sensational, as it sells papers, and increases ratings. For instance: The crammed highways, cars running out of gas, the general mess associated with the evacuation of Houston, in my opinion, can be directly related to the MSM. They painted such a bleak picture, that they caused a general panic condition, leading to what we are witnessing on the highways. Kind of like crying fire in a crowded theater. Why do they do this? Ratings, which=money. The main product of a capitalistic society.Can we change it? Not without changing the constitution, and I don’t think for one minute that is the answer. The press is still needed to keep a watch over government. Our job is to educate ourselve well enough that we can seperate the wheat from the chaff.
Jiminy’s Kool-Aid has obviously has a greater effect than just staining his tongue.
Liberal media, eh? It’s just funny to hear that said with conviction and a sense of aggrievement after eight years of watching Bill Clinton get savaged, and five years of W being treated with kid gloves. Or the election of 2000, where the media narrative cut against Gore and was decidedly pro-Bush. Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t, either, Jiminy. Do a ‘websearch,’ which seems to be your preferred intellectual tool as opposed to thinking.
Liberal media? How about their total submission in the face of obvious administration bullshit over the run-up to Iraq? Over the various attempts to cover up information about the signs of an impending 9/11? How about the slanted reporting of Bush’s social security intitiatives? Their total embrace of the swift boat liars and their manufactured ‘controversy’? And, now that Bush’s popularity is in the toilet bowl, can the ‘liberal’ media finally put to bed this whole ‘Bush is the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with’ frame, even though, now that he’s drinking again, he probably would be?
From my avowedly leftist perspective, there’s nothing liberal about the ‘liberal’ media. Nor is it even mainstream. I call it the ‘corporate’ media, and I think this is a far more useful term for explaining its obvious biases–and, as Molly Ivins and Philip Brownlee agree, its telling omissions.
Who owns what? That’s the question. Follow the money, and the ideological biases will come into focus.
CF: Nice try. Guess you forgot the part regarding FL in 2000 where the Nets called it for Gore even though polling in the panhandle (Bush country) was still going on for an hour? Trying to discourage Bush voters from voting? Discrimination against red-neck Riviera’s? Nah, no calls for investigations there. Try this….your theory, my facts:
But the claim that liberals are subjected to greater labeling doesn’t square with numerous studies the Media Research Center conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies demonstrated that news stories identify right-leaning think tanks and groups as “conservative” much more often than left-leaning groups are called “liberal.” One example: the group Concerned Women for America is called conservative in 41 percent of stories while the National Organization for Women was tagged as liberal only two percent of the time. (For details, see previous studies.)
Given the controversy, we checked to see if Goldberg’s observations about network news would be verified by a systematic analysis. MRC researchers used the Nexis database to discover each use of the word “liberal” and “conservative” on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News for five years, from January 1, 1997 through December 31, 2001. Each reference was examined to weed out duplicate cases or instances when the word was used in another context (such as “conservative crowd estimates” or “liberal arts colleges”). In addition, labels were eliminated if they were attributed to a news source rather than the network reporter. (See the complete description of the methodology.)
Eventually, the 2,020 records found by the Nexis search engine were pared down to 924 records containing 1,239 bona fide reporter labels. The breakdown shows Goldberg was exactly right: reporters at ABC, CBS and NBC reached for the “conservative” tag four times more often than the “liberal” label to define politicians, interest groups and policy positions. (See box.)
As Goldberg explained in Bias, “to Dan Rather and to a lot of other powerful members of the chattering class, that which is right of center is conservative. That which is left of center is middle of the road. No wonder they can’t recognize their own bias.” MRC’s new study confirms Goldberg’s worst suspicions: on ABC, conservatives received 79 percent of these labels; on NBC, 80 percent. On the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, 82 percent of the 353 ideological labels assigned by CBS’s reporters were given to conservatives, in contrast to a mere 18 percent for liberals. Conservative tags outnumbered liberal ones by wide margins during each of the five years, including both Democratic and Republican administrations and election and non-election years.
Most of these labels were used to describe general groups, not individuals. That’s what CBS’s Phil Jones was doing, for example, when he argued on the January 16, 2001 Evening News that “hard-core conservatives have created a new verb, ‘Borked,’ after 1987 Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.” Yet hundreds of ideological modifiers were used by reporters to identify individual Representatives, Senators, Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and Supreme Court Justices — and only a small fraction of these were assigned to liberals:
• U.S. Senators: Jesse Helms was labeled more than any other Senator (16 times). CBS’s Jones branded Helms an “ultra-conservative” on January 27, 1998, while on July 18, 1997, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell called the Senator a “crusty, courtly conservative.” Ted Kennedy was labeled a “liberal” eleven times, personally accounting for more than one-third of the total number of such labels of U.S. Senators (32).
The third most-tagged Senator was also a presidential candidate: Republican John McCain of Arizona was called a “conservative” eight times. On February 19, 2000, for example, ABC’s Linda Douglass insisted he had “a 17-year very conservative voting record” — even as McCain campaigned as the anti-conservative for the GOP presidential nomination.
• U.S. Representatives: Only eight House Members, all Democrats, were identified as liberals, compared with 34 who were called conservatives. The media’s conservatives included Democrats Gary Condit, Allen Boyd and Bart Stupak, all of whom have 70 percent or higher approval ratings of their lifetime voting record by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).
GOP whip Tom DeLay was the most frequently tagged (11 times). He was a “conservative hard-baller” to CBS’s Eric Engberg (January 5, 1999) while Phil Jones marveled that DeLay is “a political and religious conservative, and proud of it” (December 10, 1998). On the other hand, then-CBS weekend anchor Paula Zahn called J.C. Watts “a conservative star…a family man and conservative icon” during an October 31, 1998 Evening News profile.
• Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates: Only one reporter, NBC’s Lisa Myers, used “liberal” to describe Democratic candidate Bill Bradley (Sept. 25, 1999), and no network reporter labeled Vice President Al Gore as liberal during the entire 1999-2000 election cycle. In contrast, then-Governor George W. Bush was called a conservative 19 times. On August 14, 1999, for example, NBC’s David Bloom defined Bush as “a tax-cutting, anti-abortion, pro-business, pro-school vouchers conservative.” Reporters included Bush’s “compassionate” modifier on six of those 19 labels, but CBS’s Bill Whitaker tried to discredit that concept on August 3, 2000: “The compassion often obscures the conservative, but it’s there.”
GOP Vice Presidential nominee Dick Cheney’s conservatism was portrayed as scandalous during the week before the 2000 GOP convention. Dan Rather referred to Cheney’s “hard-line conservative congressional voting record” (July 26, 2000) while NBC’s Andrea Mitchell castigated Cheney’s votes as “mainstream, perhaps, for a conservative Republican in 1980, but not for this day and age” (July 30, 2000). Cheney’s Democratic counterpart Joe Lieberman was called a centrist or moderate eight times but never liberal, despite having been awarded a 95 percent approval rating from the liberal ADA in 1999.
• Supreme Court Justices: Conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and William Rehnquist were each labeled 13 times, while John Paul Stevens was labeled as liberal seven times. There were few flourishes in these labels, although CBS’s Jones insisted on calling Chief Justice Rehnquist “a conservative Republican at heart” as the latter was set to preside at Clinton’s impeachment trial (January 14, 1999).
Very few of these 1,239 labels were wrongly applied, and terms such as “liberal” and “conservative” are a fine shorthand way to tell viewers where a politician, group or policy falls in the American political landscape. But the lopsided way that network reporters applied these labels to conservatives and not liberals over the past five years confirms Goldberg’s observation that network reporters generally regard conservatives as having alien and eccentric views that need to be labeled, while liberal beliefs require no special identification.
Not long ago the Eagle reported that the white house had created a list of the newspapers who were critical of it’s coverage.
The media is biased, but it’s the truth they are biased against.
The following story is an example of what we dont’ hear. The article discusses the plight of reporters in Iraq. The injustice of the administration to call people enemy combatants and hold them with no charges.
More reporters have been killed “accidently” in Iraq than in any other war. It’s almost like they are targeted by us. Which keeps any real news from coming out of Iraq.http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB112674252518941221,00.html
There was supposed to be a hearing on September 15th. I can’t find one news article in all the web that discusses what happened, if it was even held.
When the media ignores the issues for whatever reason it leaves us to believe the worst.It also gives the administration a nod that this behavior is okay.
“The media” cannot be labelled either liberal or conservative. It can be labelled lazy/inaccurate and interested only in sales.
Examples: Last year in Flordia there were some shark attacks. No more, no less than average. But, the media “frenzy” whipped it up into some “savage shark feeding” when it was nothing.
Historically, the Spanish American war was promulgated by false reporting by William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, since he publicly stated that a war was good for circulation. His newspapers blatantly lied about the Maine being sunk by a mine, when it was an internal coal explosion.
Lesser know, the great “Windshield Pitting Pheonomenon of Seattle” in the late 1950’s. People happened to look AT their windshields instead of thru them, and noticed pits in the glass. The more media coverage, the more reports. Media reports of Russian nuclear or secret weapons, UFO’s, etc., were all brought in.
1989 Loma Prieta (San Francisco area) earthquake…all news stories showed one broken bridge and flames…with the suggestion left that the entire Bay Area was destroyed–not true at all.
The point to all this, the “media” does not have an enviable record for accuracy or true perspective. That innaccuracy commonly gets referred to as a liberal and/or conservative bias. Not true, it is just laziness and profit.
The point is not how many times “the media” attacks one party or the other. “The Media” is like children playing copy cat in 3rd grade..one story gets attention, so everyone else copies it. Regardless of truth, accuracy or common sense.
Another example, the media hype on race being the reason for the “delay” of Katrina assistance. Once mentioned, it became a “story”, whether true or not.
Profit, not truth, drives “the media”, and the sooner we recognize that, and refuse to take what is printed/reported as fact, the better off we all will be.
Jiminy,
You can take that boilerplate tripe about ‘media bias’ you cut and pasted from the MRC site and stuff it. The only claims I’ll respond to are the ones YOU make. If some left-wing think tank wanted to pay me for a point-by-point refutation, I’d offer one.
As for the allegation of media bias in prematurely calling Florida for Gore, networks do that ALL THE TIME based on exit polling. And in fact, Gore DID receive more votes than W in Florida, so the exit polls were technically correct, although they obviously didn’t predict the winner because of the ensuing controversy and the discarding of votes.
Jiminy, try harder next time, and do your OWN work.
Israel wanted Bush, made it happen, and it’s easy to see why.
Recount Ohio
PS…I use “the media” in quotes to emphasize it is not one entity, as so many people want to claim. It is not one group with one agenda, but a lot of different radio stations, television stations (and networks) and, of course, print such as newspapers and magazines.Since they all report on much the same events, there is a common perception “the media” is one. That oversimplifies things, since some ARE left biased, others lean right wing. As such, it is innaccurate and false to imply that “the media” is conservative, liberal, Jewish or anything else. There is no commonality of ownership, just a commonality of desire for profit. The will print/air whatever attracts audiences and thus advertising dollars.
Ray,Dead on. Great post. Profits drive the media, not politics…or truth.
Jimmy,This is just a blog. If you’re gonna write a book, call Vantage Press. And find an editor.
JimBob–
Ann Coulter said while waiting for an interview that “we’ve got the government and now we’ve got the media.”
Even Annthrax Coulter, the most vicious and vituperative spit-flecked hysterical shill for the right has stated that “we’ve got the media.”
On the other side of the political spectrum (the thinking end), Noam Chomsky has said that news organizations are big corporations run by big corporations to sell advertising for big corporations.
How could they be anything but conservative?
NBC owned by GE. GE was headed by the ultra-conservative Jack Welsh. ABC is owned by Disney, and protecting their corporate interests is no “mickey mouse” deal. Only CBS has maintained some independence by setting up its own corporation.
FOX of course is the worst of all. Owned by uber-kkkonservative Rupert Murdoch, he tapped Roges F*CKING Ailes to head the News Dept. This is the guy that taught how to smear opponents with slanders that would make Machivelli blush.
Oh, but the media is “liberal” all right. And we’re winning in Iraq too. And the economy is getting better. And people love their president (37 percent approval) too.
Jimmy,
One good thing that Bush has done?
I know you can do it.
C’mon, big boy. Don’t let your fans down . . .
Galahad.
He can chop wood.
Galahad.
Does he still have feet?
Galahad.
He can ride a bike.
Galahad.
Delete the one about the bike.
Galahad,
He can define “sovereignty” { Not the correct way, but the funny way }.
Galahad,
Knock it off, I’m thinking, I’m thinking.
Didn’t figure you’d like the facts….you like your little theories. Life’s tough.
Is that why people call the Wichita Eagle, the Wichita Beagle, because it is a dog of a paper, or they call it the Morning Journal of Misinformation.
I like the Wichita Eagle, don’t get me wrong, but the only thing I read is the local news.
The lie that the media at large is “liberal” is largely due to mindless folks like Bisoni.
(Word to the wise Bisoni? If Rush farts it aint Guy Lombardo)
Of course the media is LIBERAL. It is LIBERAL because it is not conservative! Ya know, the whole “with us or against us thing”. There is no middle ground! So until the whole media becomes the mouthpiece that right wing talk radio has become for bush, well hell yeah they are liberal!
As to lies of omission; where is the so-called liberal media in reporting the death toll of IRAQUIS in Iraq? Also, I seem to remember far and wide coverage of the impeachment witch hunt brought against President Clinton. It was on every station. Where is the coverage that impeachment proceedings have been pursued against bush? The “liberal” media gave us every detail of President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions. Why do we not hear more about the failure of intelligence that launched a 300 billion dollar war?
The media is not liberal. The media is corporate. The media reports what SELLS! And sadly Americans at large are too ill-informed or uninvolved to care about anything important.(Married President has illicit affair with intern! WOW everyone can relate to that! It has all the substance and importance of a soap opera.)
(President is ill informed or deliberately mis-uses intellignece to launch a war. Hmmmmm that requires investigation and some thinking on the part of the viewer. It’s complicated. Can you put it in a sound bite between “survivor” and “desperate housewives”?)I submit that the media is thus by default CONSERVATIVE. They sell what will fatten the bottom line.
JR,Being a corporation does not necessarily make it conservative. A media outlet owned by a corporation does not necessarily make it a conservative outlet.What you appear to be claiming is that any business that is in business to make money is conservative.Huh?Sorry, amigo, that makes no sense at all. Making money knows no politics…it’s capitalism. That’s an American way.The Los Angeles Times has a distinct liberal bent to it, as does the Kansas City Star, because the majority of their readers have a liberal bent. Most mid-west, small town papers are conservative, as are most mid-west small town people. While it is true that papers are in the business of making money, they will not make money if they don’t cater to their readers wishes. Supply and demand: If there’s no demand, what’s there to supply?
Hey all,As someone who used to work there, I can tell you this; there is no such thing as “the media.” That’s McLuhan’s invention.What there is is a collection of people from all different social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with a vast array of opinions, who constantly disagree with one another. The only thing they have in common is that they write, edit or shoot pictures or film for a wide variety of news organizations. There is no collective bias or collective anything else! Each reporter carries his own bias, just as we all do, but with the great number of people involved, those biases tend to cancel each other out. For there to be some sort of “Biased Media,” all, or at least most, of these people would have to agree on something. Believe me, unless it’s on something so stunningly obvious that none of them can avoid it, they aren’t about to agree on anything!
Okay, Jimmy–
You admit defeat.
I know it wasn’t easy for you, but it takes a big man to say, “I don’t know.”
That’s why Bush never says it. Wait, he did say it once, when he was asked what mistake he had ever made.
You can’t come up with a single good thing that Bush has accomplished in five years.
I’m so glad that I’m not a conservative and having to live a lie like you people do.
You know in your heart he’s incompetent if not wholly corrupt, but you “sugar over the devil himself” if you think you stand to gain by it.
Pathetic.
Good post, JR. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but you’ve got it exactly right.
Anything that isn’t American Pravda “our great leader knows what’s best for us” is not conservative, hence liberal.
“Not all conservatives are stupid. But stupid people are invariable conservative.”
It’s easier than thinking . . .
Jimmy,CF seems to be just another unredeemable diehard who is “stuck on stupid” [hat tip to General Honore for that wonderful phrase!] over the 2000 election, despite even the media recounts that also show Bush won. Of course the media hid its results in 2 column inches on page 37 under the headline “Bush wins in fake recount.” ;)
Note that CF didn’t dispute the facts you mentioned. His only complaint is that the facts are openly available on the Internet and you had the audacity to actually use a few of them.
Interesting how they ask for proof of the obvious and then stomp off in a hissy fit when you provide it.
JM,Polls of reporters show that they are overwhelmingly liberal/leftist, as are their editors — by their own admission. Yes, controversy sells, so under the smoke screen of being “even-handed”, and being inherently too lazy to sort through real issues, they always create some “controversy” by finding some crackpot to complain that the government isn’t spoon feeding him or his favorite victim group — or whatever the leftist cause du jour is.
This is exactly what the General meant when he told a reporter (who wanted controversy instead of plain facts) that the reporter was “stuck on stupid.” The military knows how to stay focused while the media ankle biters slither about, self-servingly creating “controversy.”
Sum1,The outrageous and completely unsupportable accusation that our soldiers are purposely shooting reporters has been tried before and doesn’t get any traction even in the MSM. It’s too crazy a notion even for them. The WSJ article in your link makes it clear that Western reporters are so afraid of the terrorists that they hire Iraqis – who are also afraid of being killed by the terrorists.
” The Iraqi [reporters] travel around the country far more than the Westerners and are routinely targeted by insurgents or involved in accidental shootings by Americans.”So the article clearly says that it is the terrorists who are purposely targeting reporters.
The article says nothing about US troops regularly or purposely targeting people known to be merely reporters. Instead, the article is about an Iraqi “reporter” for CBS being detained because he was captured with explosives after the terrorist he was with was shot.
“CBS describes [this "reporter"] as a timid young man who was so afraid of coming into contact with insurgents that he was warned at least once that he would be fired unless he went into the field more often.”
Of course, the terrorists make the Iraqi “reporters” help them do their dirty work, so the “reporters” get caught carrying explosives, ammo, and other terrorist equipment. If they get injured when the terrorists get shot at, how is that our soldiers’ fault? How exactly is a soldier in an urban firefight supposed to know that one person in a group of terrorists might actually be a bona-fide reporter? When they catch someone carrying explosives and a camera, they would be foolish to treat him as anything but dangerous.
So who is to blame here — the soldiers who did NOT shoot him for being with terrorists, or CBS for threatening to fire him if he didn’t stupidly put himself in harms way by actively helping terrorists?
Haven’t seen you here before, Doo-Doo. Welcome.
Stomping off in a hissy fit, eh? You can kiss my ass. Unlike you, I had more important things to do than surf internet kiddie porn while waiting for someone, ANYONE, to reply to my post.
If one counts the 57,700 voters illegally dumped from the voting rolls by Katherine Harris, Gore wins. If the recount isn’t stopped by a bogus SCOTUS ‘equal protection’ ruling that because different counties have different standards for accepting ballots, that W would be divested of his 14th Amendment rights, Gore wins. Considering that the ‘overvotes’ were far more likely to be counted for Bush than for Gore, that 537-vote ‘victory’ is, well, a joke. And everyone knows it. Bush lost the vote and won the fight on the ground afterwards. Duh.
As for ’stuck on stupid,’ I’d say that’s more apropos for lickspittle apologists like you who robotically continue the fool’s errand of defending an ‘administration’ that has botched every one of its responsibilities.
And now that Bush is drinking again, I’d say you have your work cut out for you. It’s going to be a long three years, Doo-Doo.
Dooda, I will believe the reporters are targeted until there is a credible investigation that they aren’t.
I’ve kept up with this subject from one of the first reporters that were accidently shot by us because his camera was mistaken for a weapons launcher.
Jimmy i find it amusing you don’t want to “list” one good thing Bush has done.
You dont’ seem to realize that if a reporter can not report on the news. If media can not go out inthe field to get the stories and have to rely on the official stories. Than people like me will never believe the reports that come out of Iraq.
It’s coming out that the evoting machines were rigged. They had a backdoor where votes could be pushed in. Ohio had a machine that registered more votes for Bush than were voted in the precinct. I dont’ believe that was a fluke, it was just one that got by.
Good things Bush has done:1. No Gore
2. No Kerry
3. No Te-Raay-Sa (Praise, GOD!)
4. No partial birth abortion
5. John Roberts
6. Lower taxes
7. Raising revenue ($260B this year alone)
8. No terrorist attacks since 9/11 brought on by feckless Clinton policy
9. Howard Dean, Chairman DNC
10. Better grades than John Kerry at Yale.
11. Driving Bizarro Bush (Galahad) and CF nuts because they can’t beat this “idiot” to save their lives :-)
Jimmy, that list is laughable. Does raising revenue count if the deficit has hit a record.
Lowering taxes for the rich.
You need to find some credible issues.
Okay, thanks for numbering your points, Jimmy.
1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11 are totally bogus. You know it, I know it, so I’m not going to respond.
The hypothetical “well, at least it’s not as bad as the Dems” is just really wearing thin.
“Raising revenue–260 billion this year alone.” Where did you get that figure? Arthur Anderson’s Enron division of accounting? GW’s administration has grown federal spending an elephantine 33 percent in 4 years!
The CBO recently studied gov’t budget projections and found–”that the $331 billion budget deficit projected for the current budget year would rise to $370 billion by 2009, the year Bush has promised to cut the deficit to at least $260 billion. Bush promised to cut the deficit in half from a projection in February 2004 of a $521 billion deficit for 2009.
By 2015, the deficit would hit $640 billion under CBO’s study.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/09/10/news/politics/15_34_369_9_05.txt
Partial birth abortion. Okay, I don’t know or care enough about that issue to know if Bush did anything or not. So I’ll give you that one.
Five years of “hard work,” and the only thing you die-hard Bush boot-licks have to show for it is tax cuts, deficits, and a victory on partial birth abortion.
Hoo boy . . .
But at least Exxon Mobile and Halliburton are doing well.
So capitalists of the world, rejoice!
BTW, CF–
Dooda is just another name for PUNY. Also, Cat4, Ahmad, Scribe, Question, Wendy, Mike and so many others I can’t keep track of them all.
You haven’t learned to recognize him by the lingering odor of stale dog sh*t?
Galahad,
Indeed. The devious Wingnut mind goes on playing its perverted little games. I do, however, miss the extended missives of Puny. Show us what you got, punk-ass!
Jiminy,
‘Lower taxes,’ eh? Maybe if you’re a billionaire. But for the rest of us, the Alternative Minimum tax has the upper end of the middle class paying MORE in taxes than it did before. Bush sticks it up the ass of middle class Wingnuts and they beg for more.
If I may be permitted to mix a metaphor, it’s kind of funny to watch the wings come off the administration. Too bad all of us are in the plane with him.
Galahad is just another name for Tracy, Gary C. and Gary Calles
Hey Galahad,I think Jimmy’a point was that Bush, whatever else he may or may not be, is not Clinton! The reactionaries just couldn’t stand being apoplectic over a successful liberal for another four years!
Galahad, name one foreign policy issue that the Dems have been proven correct on (don’t even try Iraq) in the post World War II era.
Vietnam.
And by ‘Dems,’ I mean the McGovern wing of the party, NOT the Jackson/McNamara.
Wrong again, Puny–I only blog under one name, this one.
What are you this time, a black Ba’hai lesbian overseas professor in Sanskrit studies?
No, you’re still just an overweight white boy stuck in a dead end job living in a small room in mom’s basement.
But you have a dream, that someday you’ll be rich . . . as rich as Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh (two other unattractive white guys), and all those cool dudes and hot babes that ridiculed you in high school will just have to suck up the tax cuts you give yourself as you circulate among the power-players in your cherry red Corvette convertable with the W sticker on the bumper.
Heh . . . such a pathetic loser.
Well, unlike you, Jimmy, I don’t have a little Clinton bobble head that I pray to every night.
Clinton made some monumental foreign policy screw-ups. Exhibit A is NAFTA. He and especially Al Gore gave lip service to alternative energy, and as far as I can tell, not much progress was made there, although at least they didn’t actively RIDICULE it like Bush/Cheney do.
“Al Gore wants to give you a tax break if you put a solar panel on your roof” W. would say in his campaign speeches to a hearty round of boo’s.
The limited military presence working with the UN to stop genocide in Bosnia and the Balkans proved to be worthwhile. We stablized the region, brought Slobedon Milosevic to trial, and didn’t lose a single American soldier in the process.
Clinton’s strikes against Al Qaeda were on the right track. Unfortunately, the Republicans howled like wolves at the moon that Clinton was “wagging the dog” to divert attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandel.
So much for “support our effort against terrorism.”
Clinton’s sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq had many bad side effects. But it DID have the good effect of keeping him powerless and UNARMED, as Bush’s ridiculous military invasion proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Clinton’s policy to keep Saddam “in a box” had worked and was working.
Clinton re-established the democratically elected president of Haiti, Aristide, after he was overthrown by a coup. That gave the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere a chance to actually make some improvements.
Not long after Bush took power, the Ton Ton Macoutes (rich Haitians’ private militia) were back with their guns and BushCo. was forcing Aristide on a plane destined for an undisclosed location.
So much for “fighting for democracy.”
If you’re going to say Clinton et al. made a lot of mistakes in foreign policy, count me in.
But the one mistake they DIDN’T make was invading a country in the mid-east on false pretenses, resulting in 2000 dead soldiers and 1.5 billion a week in costs.
Remember when Bush said he was “a uniter, not a divider.”
100,000 protestors marched on the White House yesterday.
This has been another public service announcement brought to you by the “reality-based” community.
So you couldn’t think of one, either. Didn’t think so :-)
My data mining software’s syntax identification module shows 96% probability that Galahad uses other names here, and his claim that several other names being used here are the same person show only a 7% probability that they are all the same person. There is, however, a 94% probability that three of them are the same person.
Back on subject – -Media owners like a profit. Advertisers prefer Liberals.Liberals are so easily duped into the purchase of products that are not in their best interests.
Jimmy–
I listed three:
Clinton’s policy toward the Balkans conflict, his policy of containment of Saddam’s Iraq, his re-establishment of Aristide in Haiti and his strikes against Al Qaeda.
Thanks to increased vigilance at the millenium celebrations for instance, the terrorist Ahmed Ressam was caught with a car full of explosives heading for L. A.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/trail/inside/cron.html
But you won’t hear that listening to Rush . . .
Puny–R. D. Liebshitter, Nazi holocaust survivor and abortion foe.
Add Trell to his list of names.
POS
Make that four, Jimmy.
Galahad,You want the one truly good thing Bush has done? Okay, he’s made the stupidity of the reactionary right so inescapably obvious that even his former Republican supporters in congress are now bailing! Now that’s an accomplishment we can all be proud of!
Those who don’t believe in the leftist slant of the media are fools!
The Color of Cornell’s Crime – Unmasking the Face of IthacomptonBy: CHRIS MENZELPublished on: Sunday, September 18 @ 09:37:30 CDT.
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Send to a friend.”The reality is that race and other characteristics are related, including criminal behavior… The villains of the peace are the tiny percentage of the black community who prey on both blacks and whites and have made black synonymous with crime.” — Walter Williams, Ideas On Liberty, April 2001.
The Dark Underbelly of Violent Crime
Crime Alert—August 19, 2005: The Ithaca Police Department is investigating a strong-armed robbery that occurred at approximately 11:45 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 18, 2005, in the Collegetown area.… The victim reported that his attackers were three to four males in their late teens or early 20s, and at least one of the attackers was wearing a long white T-shirt.
Crime Alert—August 29, 2005: The Ithaca Police Department is investigating a robbery/assault that occurred in the 300 block of College Avenue on Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2005, at approximately 1:30 a.m. The female student victim was walking with friends when she was assaulted by a group of females. The suspects reportedly punched the victim several times and tore her clothing… The victim reported that the group who assaulted her were several black females and one white female. The victim further described one of her attackers as being a heavy-set black female wearing glasses and having braids in her hair.
Crime Alert—August 30, 2005: The Ithaca Police Department is investigating a strong armed robbery that occurred at approximately 1:30 a.m., Aug. 29, near the intersection of Campus Road and Mary Ann Wood Drive, below West Avenue. The male victim was walking on Campus Road when he was approached by two male subjects. The victim reported that one subject asked him a question, then both physically assaulted him, taking the duffel bag he was carrying. The suspects were last seen running east on Campus Road. The victim described his attackers as being two black males, both approximately 5 feet 9 inches tall and approximately 17 years of age.
Cornell University students were sent the preceding crime alerts as the end of August ushered in a crime wave high above Cayuga’s waters. In a September 6 article in the Daily Sun, Ithaca Police Department Lt. Tim Williams admitted “Typically we don’t see as many [crimes in Collegetown] in such a short period of time.” Williams’ advice to Cornell students was to use “common sense” and “always be cognizant of your surroundings, be aware of the people around you.”
What exactly are “common sense” precautions? What “people” should we be aware are around us? The unspoken answer to these questions (as well as the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room) is this: watch out for gangs of black thugs.
And why was the race of the attackers given for the second and third assaults but not for the first? Did the last two crime alerts not receive their politically correct filtering? If students and citizens are to be protected, they should have all available information describing the attackers—especially what they look like.
The awful truth is that 90 percent of the approximate 1,700,000 interracial violent crimes reported each year involve black perpetrators and white victims. Using data obtained from the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics, The New Century Foundation produced a ground-breaking study, The Color of Crime, which revealed the great disparities in crime rates among the various races.
Other interesting findings of the study include:Blacks are as much more dangerous than whites as men are more dangerous than womenBlacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate. Hispanics commit violent crimes at approximately three times the white rate, and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rateThere is more black-on-white than black-on-black violent crimeHispanics are a hate crime victim category but not a perpetrator category. Hispanic offenders are classified as white, which inflates the white offense rate and gives the impression that Hispanics commit no hate crimes.If all of these numbers are correct, then why don’t we hear more about black-on-white crime from the media? The answer is because it would be deemed politically incorrect and racist to point out a minority’s shortcomings (i.e. a 70% illegitimacy rate, grossly disproportionate assault, murder, rape, and armed robbery rates, etc). Who’s to blame the media though? Such a gross detail of violence would most definitely spark NAACP backlash or Jesse Jackson tongue-lashings.
It is also common-knowledge that, regardless of one’s race, greater precaution is taken when traveling through black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods. In the words of prominent black economist Walter Williams, “I carry two friends with me when I go into New York [city]. And my friends are… Smith & Wesson.” So what is stopping people from realizing this and calling a spade a spade? The answer is nothing except the hesitation to “perpetuate stereotypes” and the possibility of being termed a racist because of it.
In 1998, the horrific murder of a black man who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck shocked the nation. This violence was certainly out of hate and those men responsible were dealt with the most appropriate way: they were put to death. This story was broadcast nationwide and many vigils held for the victim, James Byrd.
But how many national stories and vigils were held for the four whites who were brutally raped and murdered by blacks in Wichita in 2000? Why does nobody know about them? This is equally as bad as Byrd’s death yet it was not made national news. The reason is because the victims were white and the guilty parties were black. Had the prosecution gone national, as Byrd’s murderers’ trial did, then there would have been cries of racism, planting evidence, and white-hate at every street corner, at every news station, and from every Ithacite’s mouth.
It is a fact that blacks are more violent then whites. They also commit more “hate crimes”, despite what is commonly believed. The media propagates this behavior by rejoicing in reports of white-on-black violence and sweeping under the rug the rampant black-on-white violence. Everyone agrees that crime is a pressing issue, yet nobody will take the initiative to stop it.
Until the black community accepts that a problem exists and the media reports crime in an honest way, we will be left walking the streets being told by the authorities that tiny Asian girls and thuggish black males should be treated with equal suspicion. Just remember to be safe and carry your Smith & Wesson.
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