In this post, I want to discuss the media bias surrounding the hundreds of Tea Party protests across the country in 2009. If I wanted to go in depth, the stories are plentiful, the examples are rich, and the political conclusions are varied; all I will do today is point out examples of bias, and not conclude anything about the news media and the increase in commentary and poor journalism.
As one blog put it: “Like a pair of 13-year-old boys who just learned a dirty word”, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Marie Cox repeatedly used an offensive oral sex slang term to describe the protesters, using the sexual pun of “teabag” 51 times in 13 minutes. MSNBC’s Rachel Garofalo then called protesters racists and “a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks” as “Keith Olbermann smiled approvingly”.
I recognize that these broadcasters are commentators - they do not have any responsibility to tell the truth, just their opinion, even if it involves verbal sexual obscenity. But by ANY journalistic standard, what is wrong is the use of such terms in hard news reporting – when journalists abandon neutrality and become commentators trying to spin the news.
David Shuster is no commentator, but a daily newscaster for MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews which is “a syndicated weekly news program” according to MSNBC. Here, he offers an opinion on the tax day protests across America in the news program in a video in which he intentionally uses sexual metaphors to discredit the subjects of his news report.
The host of Hardball during interviews blasts this opposition to Obama's policies as a racist movement by gun-toting Americans.
Or how about Anderson Cooper, the respected newscaster from CNN?
Bad journalism? OUTRAGEOUS journalism.
ABC's Dan Harris in a news report reports that the protests were "cheered on by Fox News", "designed", "not a real grassroots phenomenon", and "orchestrated by people fronting for corporate interests". How can a news agency pretend to report the news while effectively only launching political allegations based on opinion? The video continues to undermine the protests by discrediting the protest's cause, using statistics completely unreated to the protests themselves, and using strong, emotional language to create bias.
Much criticism of the biased-coverage of the protest was based around CNN’s poor Susan Roegsen who just happened to let go of any journalistic professional ethics in her interviews with Tea Party protesters in Chicago.
Once good journalism, now gone bad. Roesgen becomes a propoganda arm for her own liberal affiliations by trying to sell the Stimulus during a report, confronting and debating with her news story. Instead of reporting the news, she tries to influence it and ends up becoming the story.
Again, she verbally confronts a protester in the second half of this clip at the same rally.
The fact that she obviously harbors a politically-motivated double standard, by implying that Bush is a satanic Adolf Hitler while defending Obama against criticism, is not important. The issue that should upset any consumer of the news media is journalists abandoning their code of ethics and aggressively trying to undermine her subjects in debates to create a political message. Her bellicose attitude did not stop on air. She continued to debate with demonstrators after the interviews.
As a representative of credible news agency that supposedly honors journalism’s sacred values, she could not be more of a disgrace to herself, to CNN, and to the American news media.
The infiltration of opinion into actual news reporting is what will create the misleading bias and politicization of news so that news no longer becomes truth. We have seen that with some news channels that intentionally blur the line between commentary and journalism. The three arms of news media - news, opinion, advertising - must be completely separate for the truth to be unadultered. Other networks such as ABC, CBS, or Fox are not exempt from this sort of bias. This failure of neutral coverage of any, even slightly, political event reflects the greater failure of news media to function as an agent of empowering citizens in a democracy. Instead, the politicization and dichotomization of news media into liberal and conservative will only breed ignorance, intolerance, and misinformation.
Recognizing that news in China is heavily politicized to create a bias, the dangers of such bias to democracy, even if neutral from government control, should obviously be as dangerous as state-media is to freedom. It would be a sad era in history when the time-tested great American democracy fails only because of its news corporations.
The following clip is not quite related to the tea party movement, but it is relevant to the issue of manipulation of news. Yes, the source is Fox News, but that does not at all detract from the logical argument presented here.
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