Press feels it's gone easy on Bush

A press corps that is growing increasingly liberal is inclined to believe that President Bush has gotten an easy ride from the news media, according to a poll released yesterday

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/05/24/press_feels_its_gone_easy_on_bush/

--
"Gone 'easy?!?' How about complicit." WRH

LOL how come we saw that one coming in 2000 and not in 2004?? We must be psychics!

I don't want the media bending back over, swinging the pendulum wildly in the opposite direction. I'll be satisfied with a simple return to some semblance of objectivity. When the Bush cabal lies, call it a lie. When they train our soldiers to torture, and support their use of torture, let's call it torture.

And when Stupidhead says something stupid, let's not clean it up anymore, mmmkay? It's not the job of the press to make this moron look competent, so just drop the bootlicking and apple polishing.

we enable 8 years of investigations into all aspects of Clinton's life by running with every rumor and innuendo leaked by the Special Prosecutor's office, lets at least cover some of the allegations related to *'s AWOL and insider trading.

dust off of that forgotten work and see how it could be reinstituted.

Not many Helen Thomases out there. The press corps definitely kissed Bush's *** all these years.

Think they will get tough with less than six months until the election? I'd like to see it.

I just knew it! Those idiots!

They are all going to start crying in their beer, comforting each other, and all that crap.

Give them no sympathy. They deserve almost as much blame as Jeb in Florida and the neocons.

They are fucking ENABLERS!

God, I hate the press.

1)Most of the Media is controlled by the Right Wing.

Now that it seems that BushCo is huge trouble and in a free fall the Media doesn't wish to be obviously seen as the Neo Fascist's Propaganda Wing.

Prove that statement 1) is incorrect, please.

as have other alternative media outlets - e.g. INDEPENDENTs. Perhaps they're just making a business decision to try to regain some market share they've been losing to outlets that, you know - tell the truth!

I heard Amy Goodman say in a recent speech - "You have to ask yourself the question: If this was state controlled media, would it be any different?"

david

Edit: Grammar (stupid!)

The press gave b*sh a blank check with his Iraq war. They never asked him tough questions and almost seemed to cheer him on. This shows me that big media/press is not at all interested in being left or right - they are primarily intertested in sensationalism. Going to war was sensational. The fact that WMDs have not been found is sensational. The prison abuse/torture is sensational. The press will always encourage sensationalism because it is good for ratings. Secondary to this might invole some of the conflicts of interest that a big media conglomerate might have, but the sensationalism sometimes trumps this because bigger ratings mean bigger money and they will not always censor themselves completely in these cases.

The trouble now with this blank check given to b*sh is that he got greedy and he has over drawn the press's accounts! WHoops! b*sh is such a fuck-up.

But I don't think it trumps political interests. For the last three years, the media has ignored dozens of potential 'sensational' scandals within the * administration. They ran with every little rumor during Clinton's terms, but until recently they ignored even verified facts about *.

"What you're seeing is a profession that is majority moderate, but more liberal than conservative. What's different here is that the trend line is more liberal," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "We clearly need to think about getting more conservatives in the newsroom."

WTF????

When has a liberal journalist/reporter ever given gw* a ride?

And in all seriousness, I am looking for y'all to enlighten me.

Time and time again I have heard conservative pundits complain about how LIBERAL the media is.

Where are they getting that from? I read Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" and I have never understood this train of thought.

does question something that the Bush administration wrong.

They lie a lot.


A whole lot.

that these pundits go by poll numbers like the ones cited in this article and not the actual percentage of liberal-leaning articles that actually make it into the paper/nightly news.

1. Conflating cultural vs. political liberalism. Yes, the media lean to a liberal view of certain issues like abortion and gay rights. They also lean to uncritical support of Bush's election theft, destructive tax cuts, Iraq invasion, and all the horrible results for the last 4 years.
2. Conflating entertainment and news media. Fox TV, for example, carries the liberal-leaning Simpsons whereas Fox News shills for Bush nonstop. While the entertainment media are undoubtedly liberal leaning in a cultural sense, the news media are undoubtedly NOT liberal in a political sense.

His boys turned liberal into a dirty word partly by defining "liberal" as "licentious"--an obsolete definition--by deliberately making political liberalism tantamount to social licentiousness.

Thus, anyone who sticks up for the little guy is smeared with the same broad brush the neocons use to paint prostitutes and snowbirds...

in other words they're just badder, LOL!!

a good press' goal would be to give as much honest information as
possible, then let the reader decide. I think the real beef the Right
has with the press is when it tells too much. What Conservatives call
bias is actually lack of it.

Conservatives need and want to simplify issues, therefore controlling the
amount of info that gets out is necessary to promote their world view.
They are out of touch with reality, dreaming about some return to
the good old days and a past that never actually existed like they want
to think it did. Too much information interfers with that fantasy.

Heavens to Betsy. SAy it ain't so!!

so when are they going to start doing their job?

btw, welcome to DU

:hi:

I'm sensing a new paradygm.

I'd love to see them come out of their coma and actually report some real news instead of constantly pandering to the right!

Never were. Reporters are looking for what will give them a boost. They look for the story that will give them some exposure, that will look good on their clip tape or demo or the articles sent with their resume. It's a race from Podunk to Big Apple in as few steps as possible. Most reporters really are the whores that folks describe them in these DU forums.

If they start reporting the truth, it's because this season the truth pays.

What is so wonderful now, is that so many regular folk have become the reporters. The Internet will be the reason 2004 will not be like 2000. The internet also provides a great place for real, professional yet caring reporters can find a mass audience. The integrety and function of the internet will also become target #1 for the dienfranchised Neocons and freep brown-shirts, so remember to copy everything. Keep hard copies.

My mom was one of the non-whores -- an actual investigative journalist working in Baton Rouge, LA.

You know what she got for doing her job and uncovering the truth?

Blacklisted.

She cost a few crooked Higher Education officials in Louisiana their job, several for bribery and kickbacks. After the last one, she was called into her editor's office -- she worked for The Advocate -- and told her work was "substandard" and that she could either quit or be fired.

She walked. Four days later, she won the top prize for investigate journalism in the Southeastern conference (I forget the exact association, but it was pretty significant). Clearly, her work was anything but substandard.

Unfortunately, once she quit the Advocate, she never worked as a journalist again. Every time she got an offer, from up and down the Eastern seaboard (including some big papers and a couple of magazines), her old boss would scuttle her chances by lying about her work habits, her personality, and the reason she left. Since she never could get proof of his words, she couldn't sue him, and hasn't written professionally since.

One more reason I despise the media...

I'm the spelling police. It's paradigm. I'm sorry I'm so anal.

you know, separate the reporters from the editors from the executives.

perhaps that may give some insight was to why the news that makes it into the newspaper on newscast doesn't seem to reflect the poll numbers of "national journalists" (34% liberal, 7% conservative).

whereas only 24% of the sheeple can see that fact. That's scary.

LOTS OF IT

This is good news for Rove, then. He'll get to kick things up a notch if the press begins adding more "conservative" points of view in the name of "fairness."

:scared:

I'm watching out my window for winged bovines.

The proof is in the pudding, and just about now their pudding smells like something else x(

I am sick to death of the "liberal" application to anything that is NOT fundamentalist or "the world is EITHER OR" by the right-wing machine!!! They are full of crap and they know it,...with their clear obsession to only allow moral relativity to apply to themselves!!!

OH!!! GRRRRRR!!!!!!

:argh:

I don't WANT a "liberal media"-just an unbiased, objective media; anything less is a danger to democracy!

facts.

Fact: Outing a CIA agent is a crime. Somebody connected to the White House allowed this to happen.

Fact: LIES were in Bush's speech's on the state of the nation.

It's not interepretation. Some things are facts. WE want more facts and not this bs, let's get the other side, Larry. The other side is lying. I want facts. I want you to tell the other side that if it's a lie it's a FRIGGING lie.

IF he's not wearing any clothes, I don't want you tell me that "some" believe he is wearing a three piece suit.

he was dining with some journalists and they all admitted to having been chicken about investigative journalism on all the WMD stuff that was out invthe public domain. They wouldn't do investigative journalism because they were afraid of being called "unpatriotic" after 9-11.

they created this monster!

:argh:

How much of this crap do they expect us to put up with? They're simply making an argument to shill for the neocons even more than they already do.

The pitiful part is, some people will actually BELIEVE the press is "becoming more liberal".

The PRESS throws out trashy "entertainment", and then "judges" it on the news. "Liberal morals" only means fewer no-no's. Then we have to hear the talking heads pontificate about Janet's boobie for the next 3 weeks. THAT AIN'T "LIBERAL" in the sense they're trying to make it mean "politics".

These idiots have overused the word "liberal" so much, they have NO IDEA what it means. And they've made sure that millions of Americans are confused about what it means as well! It's their game.

:kick::kick::kick:

but not much.

It would have been nice to have avoided that little dust up in Iraq. A functioning national press corps would have helped us stay out of that.

press's BS. These whores are just bowing to the inexorable truth that the BFEE has muscled the press into a cheerleading squad and now the public is growing more disillusioned as Iraq turns into a nightmare.

Craig Unger's "House of Bush House of Saud" documents how the Press was forced to cheerlead for Bush in campaign 2000 instead of ask hard questions. If you asked hard questions you were chastised or denied access. This is exactly what Reagan did in the 80's. The whore media is deathly afraid of being given a cold shoulder.

What gets me is how few press people fought this dynamic they just cheered the bullshit on all the way into this shithouse mess in Iraq. :grr: :grr:

Boston
Monday May 24th
Department of DUH!

Now will they start actually doing their Jobs, or keep runing scared?

Don't bet on actual coverage.

if he did half the shit AWOL has gotten away with.

Clinton would have been impeached and serving time by now if he did *any* of the shit AWOL has gotten away with. John Dean, in his book "Worse than Watergate" has outlined *only* 11 impeachable offenses commited by AWOL. And that was published before news broke about the war crimes committed by AWOL and his henchmen at Abu Ghareb and elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Gitmo). By my count, it's more like several dozen impeachable offenses. We have to rid this country of the Repukes in Congress as well next November, and put the finishing touches on it two years later.

BTW, what is this administration doing about retrieving the $40 million in our taxpayer money it paid to that Iranian double-agent AWOL and his cronies used to sell us the lemonade which led to the Iraqi quagmire?

And where, oh, where, oh where is Ken Lay????????

:puke:

w/out congressional approval? This didn't even make it into Dean's book.

Let's just call that one Number Twelve.

:wtf:

Major networks

He had been well rehearsed... and the audience was very friendly, applause on cue (cards?)lol. He said nothing new - except they are tearing down the prison (so it can dissapear?)Same ol rhetoric!
BTW, welcome to DU!
:hi:

at that press dinner tells me all I need to know about the press and where its priorities are.

I still want to know who laughed. There has to be a videotape of it somewhere.

of the decade.

The reason why only 22% of journalists DESCRIBED THEMSELVES as liberal while 34% will do so today if asked is that you could get killed for being a public liberal back in the Newt Gingrich-dominated year of 1995.

Being called a liberal in 1995 was like being called a Jew in Nazi Germany and many people ran away from the label including journalists.

Today, the neocons have made the word liberal seem like a synonym for 'not a crazy murderous asshole' and many are finding the courage to embrace this intentionally demonized status once more.

Here is something I wrote about how the word 'liberal' was intentionally and successfully demonized by conservatives, those very clever bastards:

HOW 'LIBERALS' IN THE USA BECAME LIKE JEWS IN GERMANY>

Ever since the US lost the Vietnam War, its cultural atmosphere here has been very similar to post-WWI Germany. The hyper-nationalist German people were told by their generals in the summer of 1918 that they were handily winning World War I. But a few short months later, they were suddenly informed by their civilian politicians that they had lost miserably. Germans were stunned and angry as the victorious Allies raped them economically and their orderly society imploded into chaos. They looked around to find who among them had betrayed them and robbed them of their much-deserved victory over their inferiors. They demonized, assaulted, and killed Jews, labor unionists, socialists, Gypsies, and homosexuals.

The same scapegoating climate bloomed in the US after Nixon was disgraced in the press and the Vietnam War was revealed to be a quagmire of atrocities which had also ruined the economy. The Republicans have cleverly exploited this petulant atmosphere of entitlement denied to bring us to where we are today, mired in a culture war against liberals, feminists, blacks, homosexuals, and dangerous Middle Eastern foreigners, pretty much the same targets as the Nazis.

The post-WWII image Americans embraced as Slayers of the Nazi Dragon who were soon to add a notch for the defeat of Communism to their sword of Christian virtue was shattered by the leaked Pentagon Papers which tarnished the bishops of bombs and bullets. The Watergate scandal which ended the papacy of Richard Nixon with his resignation from the presidency to prevent his impeachment severely polarized the national schism between law-and-order conservatives and social justice-marching liberals that the Vietnam war had inflamed.

Since the press (as news media were referred to before Americans had stopped reading newspapers for information) had successfully revealed enough of the White House and Pentagon’s deceit, incompetence, and corruption to actually mobilize public opinion, journalists were also demonized for ‘causing’ the failure of American Christian dominance against the godless Red Menace by their carelessly pulling back a tiny corner of the curtain of secrecy which cloaks the secret government really running the US war machine. This was rudeness taken to the level of sacrilage; the Great White Father must never be challenged lest ruin bring down the entire nation, not just the undeserving poor.

Consequently, conservatives added a new commandment to the previous ten. The anti-communist Red Scare which had been used to persecute populists, unionists, and minorities since the 1930s now became total intolerance of any criticism of the US government similar to the Sedition Act of 1798 which actually made it a crime to criticize the government. Instead using legislation, conservative Republicans and TV evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell filled the media with condemnation for members of the ‘Blame America First’ club. The infallibility of the American presidential papacy was being re-established. And ‘prying greedy’ journalists ‘who lost the war for us’ learned to avoid drawing attention to themselves lest they be the nail sticking up that gets hammered down.

The deification of Ronald Reagan and his status as the ‘Teflon President’ was accomplished by exploiting the American public’s right wing-stoked disdain for journalists who dared to ask appropriately hard questions of a senile ill-informed figure-head performing the necessary public functions of office while the real power was wielded in secrecy by former CIA director and now vice-president George H.W.Bush.

Reagan had ‘likeability’ and conservatives were enraged when journalists were so rude as to ask him for explanations of the corporate-friendly and anti-poor policies he promoted and their effect on people’s lives.

This anti-journalist and anti-intellectual sentiment was used as cover for the rolling back of the Great Society and New Deal policies that provided an economic safety net for the millions of Americans who were left out in the streets and farms to starve by unregulated robber baron capitalism.

Today's Bush is now the public figurehead and once again the vice-president, now Dick Cheney, is the hidden president in his undisclosed location. George W. Bush's 'likeability' combined with the free pass from the self-neutered press gives impunity to a White House which ignores the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, international treaties and alliances yet wins public approval by calling this “not asking for permission to defend America.” One can easily imagine George W. Bush in front of a mirror imitating Clint Eastwood’s delivery as the renegade cop Dirt Harry challenging a captured criminal to “go ahead, make my day” just before the court-appointed president challenged Iraqi freedom fighters to “bring it on.” The cowboy presidency of Reagan has morphed into the rule-breaking cop who listens to no one to get his man as the crowd goes wild.

Ever wonder why 'liberal' became a swear word? Now you know. It is the Republican power structure’s synonym for ‘Jew.’

The mere fact that Ann Coulter’s columns calling for liberals to be shot are not only published but that she is also featured prominently on Fox TV News is warning enough
that a large market for this venomous frame of mind is being created and exploited quite successfully.

A lot of these spoiled pansies wouldn't know what do with out and the word suffer is foreign to them, they wouldn't know what things like that were if it slapped in the face.

In ways I kind of hope they keep it going up for a while longer, but only to help them in their learning experience. I am calculating that we are headed for a very big fall, and I suspect that many of them could be on the bottom when the whole thing goes splat.