“Media is dead, and long live new media, which is all of you,” the democrat said to the crowd of bloggers. “For better or worse, and I argue that it’s mostly for better.”
Of course, it’s difficult to take seriously anyone who doesn’t know “media” is a plural noun and should take a plural verb. But I digress.
Do you agree with Polis’ comments?
Advertisements
I think media can safely be considered a plural noun that’s been singularized. But I digress too.
To answer your question, I would ask this: How much investigation did the mass media do about the (Illinois) Born-Alive Infants Protection Act issue? That would be where Obama claimed he voted against it because it was anti-Roe v. Wade…but he was lying, and it passed a couple years after he was out of the Illinois state senate.
That’s information that I knew before the election, but did the average American know it? Did they learn it from network news or from the major newspapers?
Here’s the text of the bill:
http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/legisnet92/sbgroups/sb/920SB1095LV.html
As far as I could tell (I don’t have a TV, but I keep up with the NYT and sometimes run across others), the mass media swallowed anything Obama was willing to tell them about his votes there, and otherwise they didn’t care. Pro-life bloggers, meanwhile, exposed the truth.
As long as the media continue to be in the tank for the Democrats, they’re bound to lose half their audience. This is just one issue, but it’s illustrative of the way everything was treating during the election. For another illustration, consider the moral equivalence drawn between Rev. Wright (Obama’s pastor for 20 years) and Rev. Hagee (who endorsed McCain, but otherwise had no connection with him).
Understand that I’m not heavily pro-Republican here. I’m heavily pro-life, and Obama is the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had. And I suspect that’s because the mass media largely covered up the fact.
So that’s my take on it. What’s yours, Jim? In particular, do you think the media did a good job of covering Obama’s stand on abortion?
The mainstream media covered the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act issue fairly steadily for months. I haven’t done a content analysis of the coverage, but a simple Google news search will show you the vast number of MSM stories that address the controversy.
I won’t argue that the professional media are not left leaning. Research has shown the majority of professional journalists are Democrats. But I don’t think you can argue controversial issues concerning Obama were simply glossed over.
On another note, my friend Jack Lail at the Knoxville New Sentinel wrote a blog post related to the topic of my last post. His is titled “Journalism is not a federal earmark.”
Hmmmm. 185 articles. Good coverage, then? Compare:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=mccain+hagee&btnG=Search+Archives&ned=us&hl=en
Which of those *should* have been a bigger story? Granted, this story was even bigger:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=obama+%22jeremiah+wright%22&btnG=Search+Archives&hl=en&ned=us
What would you, as a journalist, say about the fact that those two stories (Obama-Wright and McCain-Hagee) seem to have been covered so much more extensively than Obama and the Illinois version of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act?