The problem with the NYT, CNN and its fellow travelers, though, is not their points of view but the fact that they will deliberately falsify or distort facts to push an ideological agenda.

One example of such distortion is the news media practice of omitting the party affiliation of stories on corrupt Democrats while highlighting it for Republicans. For another, simply read through the buried retractions section of the NYT. Then, there was the case of CNN’s Eason Jordan that it had deliberately slanted their coverage of Saddam Hussein in order to protect their access to him.

My attitude is that once a news organization shoots its credibility, I have neither the time nor the money to bother with it any longer. Say what you will, FOX news makes a point of presenting spokespeople with conflicting points of view. If I want DNC talking points, it’s much cheaper to send in a $10 contribution and wait for them to appear in my mailbox than to bother with the Lefty MSM. Life’s too short.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSNkloIFTQ0

“Free Sarah Palin! Free Sarah Palin!”

How pathetic. She’s clearly not wanting to help out poor, poor Sarah. She’s angry and frustrated at the McCain campaign – and seeking to *force* it to do what she wants, and isn’t *that* an amazing bit of advocacy? – and that’s all that’s going on there. Except for the fact that she’s trying to hide her real motives behind a totally fake “concern” for poor, poor Sarah.

If I had a child that attempted this kind of deceitful argument – nay, rant – I’d send her to bed without supper to think about it.

“Free Sarah Palin! Free Sarah Palin!”
I’ve gotta go laugh uproarously for a while. See y’all tomorrow.

I agree completely. I also think the “con job” snuck on the media slowly. (The frog in the boiling water analogy comes to mind – and we have now reached the boiling point in the last few months, and the frog just died.) I think they’ve been slowly slipping since the 70′s, and they didn’t recognize the danger, and now it’s simply too late to go back.

Perhaps some few media will be able to reintroduce new, rigorous objective standards, and regain our trust; there must be an audience out there for *truly* objective news. I can’t see that happening until the current owners throw up their hands and sell their media to new owners. By the time that would happen, the entire organization would already have been staffed by partisans, and they really couldn’t possibly go along with new owners laying down the law, could they? So I just can’t see it happening.

Media partisanship has already reached critical mass. I think it won’t be long until the public awareness of this reaches critical mass as well.

Review from Publishers Weekly:
Grammar maven, Pulitzer Prize-winner, novelist (Freedom) and erudite political columnist Safire delivers a sprawling, fact-based if somewhat stiffly written novel that will acquaint readers with several of the nation’s first political scandals. In light of the recent White House brouhaha, it’s fascinating to learn that in the days of the founding fathers, politicians were just as licentious and newspapermen even more scurrilous than some players in contemporary media.

Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/5xobp8

Just shows there’s really not much new about this.

I believe the idea that the media is objective has really only been around since CBS’ glory days during World War II. What I think we’re seeing is simply a return to the concept of the media editorial group as advocacy for one side or the other. Naked advocacy.

The only problem is that they’re still pretending to be objective, and the public still buys it. That’s reality on the ground that we conservatives have to accept. The public’s acceptance of the lie might last through this election, but it won’t last too much longer.

It *is* too late for the media to backtrack now to regain objectivity. Given the pressure from the web and 24/7 news, and the loss already of conservatives, who feel the hurt from their naked bias and have had it, they can never go back to reclaim objectivity.

Many are saying that an objective media is vital for our republic to survive. I don’t agree. How did we survive from 1789 until 1940? Perhaps the brief, sixty-year experiment with media objectivity should be over. Certainly objectivity has been decaying for the last forty years in any case.

Today’s media question: What’s Black and White and Red all over?

It’s a bit past time, but I’m glad to see that the McCain Campaign has found its afterburner switch. I’ve been breathing shallow now for several months, hoping that the good Senator was just letting the “kill zone” of his ambush fill.

Hopefully, the campaign will open a Congressional front also.