Media Madness

It was not until about a year ago that I even cared about the news. With research needing to be done for school, my obligated responsibilities to the planet and sudden questions about how the World was operating began to pile up, I was finally forced to stick my nose in the papers and watch T.V.

The past six months have brought quite a revelation to me. When you read the paper and watch the news, what's being fed to you by the media is really how the owners behind the station, channel or paper want you to perceive their ideas. They take the opportunity of providing news in a way to sway you in their favor of politics, government and democracy.

Take my latest situation: a year and a half ago I saw this guy on television who at the time was contemplating running for the next presidential election. His name was Mike Huckabee--he was currently serving the end of his second term as Governor of Arkansas and he seemed to come out of nowhere. What came out of his mouth were ideas that were so fresh and so in line with my personal beliefs, I looked at my husband and said, "This guy needs to be our next President!"

My husband told me from the beginning that he'd never make it. Mike Huckabee had no money and he would be beat by the top Republican and Democratic electives early in the campaign, so why waste my time? It seemed so unfair to me that the only people who could get elected were the rich people with the most money and most commercials. After all, what we really needed as a leader was someone who was the opposite of rich, who could relate to normal people. I was so mesmerized by Mike Huckabee that I began following him and researching on the Internet, on television and in the political articles in the paper.

My first discovery was that CNN was obviously Liberal, because even though Mike surprisingly began beating his way up in the polls, his name never got mentioned. It was as if this channel, in an effort to keep the best Republican elective undiscovered, refused to give viewers any idea that he existed. Was it just me, or did anyone else think CNN was Liberally (not literally!) dispersing its news? I googled CNN + Liberal and realized I had been in the dark about CNN, until I made the discovery by watching myself. Apparently CNN had been refuting for years that they were Liberal, but since I came to that conclusion on my own without anyone telling me, I had to assume that they were. This piqued my interest in other areas of media.

I read an a CNN article by Bill Press http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/02/21/column.billpress/ Myth of the Liberal Media Rides Again, where he vehemently states that although CNN has been being accused of being Liberal for years, this is a totally false assumption. He uses examples of Bernard Goldberg attacks on CBS for liberal bias on the op-ed pages of a Feb. 13, 1996 Wall Street Journal article. Yet everything he says is based on his opinion of the message, not the facts. Personally, I would have preferred to see evidence where CNN is not Conservative by illustrating and mentioning articles which reflect Republican news, government officials and candidates in a positive light. So I went searching for them myself.

I went to CNN's website and searched in the political arena for the latest news ... VOILA! Amidst twenty or so (in a row) articles mentioned Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc. and the positive sides of their campaigns, there lies Mike Huckabee in an article titled, "Huckabee Once Advocated Isolation of AIDS Patients" where it quotes Mike Huckabee 17 years ago in a questionnaire that he answered saying "If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague." Give me a break!! It was 17 years ago and little was known about the origination or the liquidity of an incurable virus. You can't tell me that CNN didn't have anything else positive to write about Mike Huckabee or the way he his shooting up the polls lately, beating both Democrat and other Republican candidates alike. It only reinforces my discovery on Liberal Media and how they abuse their responsibility of fair reporting to the public. If they quoted Hillary Clinton accurately only three times, at least one of those three would contradict the first statement, and that goes for what she is saying today, not seventeen years ago! So I continued my search on CNN.com ...

So I continued to scroll down ... 5, 10, 20 more articles about Obama and Oprah's parade around the states, along with a few things regarding Hillary again ... and there I see, an article about Mike Huckabee's welcome in South Carolina which included anonymous anti-Huckabee fliers 8distributed in South Carolina supposedly claiming Huckabee as "too liberal" for the Conservative vote. The author of the flier uses a quote of Huckabee's: "Arkansas needs to make the transition from a traditional Southern state to one that recognizes and cherishes diversity and culture." What evidence is this to suggest that he is liberal just because he's suggesting positive change in diversity and culture? This is certainly not something that Conservatives are against. As I read this and chuckle to myself, I'm forced to ask if CNN had anything to do with the fliers. The fact that such an innocent and truthful quote by Huckabee could be taken in such Liberal manner suggests that a Liberal was behind it.

That was when I noticed at the top of their Political section news room: the head titles of the top subjects were: Barack Obama • Hillary Clinton • Iowa • John McCain • More Topics . Not surprisingly when I clicked "More Topics" no more political candidates were to be found.

It's not only CNN, but CBS News as well. When I pulled up CBS' news site, there were five or ten out of twenty or so articles about Oprah and Obama, and a few about Hillary Clinton, but nothing on the Republican candidates. There was even a feature article on the news home page titled "Popular Democrats." At least CNN mentions his name, even if it's negative--CBS doesn't mention his or any other Republican candidate names.

I have to say, I was fairly impressed by CNBC. They didn't have any negative garbage or positive information about any of the candidates, specifically, accept for an article mentioning Warren Buffet's interview coinciding with a fundraiser going on in town for Hillary Clinton. I liked the fact that there was nothing negative about any of the candidates, even if it meant no mentioning at all of any names. Even as I say this to myself, I wonder if there was some mistake in searching and I mistakenly found nothing when there really was plenty stashed somewhere unbeknownst to me.

"Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists
to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected
facts be linked into a coherent narrative (Newton 1989). Since it is impossible
to report everything, some bias is inevitable."