Media Bias ...

this is a great Mark Steyn post on media bias. Evidently the press now thinks it’s being manipulated by McCain … how they can wrap their brains around that one is amazing …

Mad How disease [Mark Steyn]

The Washington Post’s media man, Howard Kurtz, is mad as hell and he’s not gonna take it for more than another couple decades or until the management buy-out offer improves:

The media are getting mad.

Whether it’s the latest back-and-forth over attack ads, the silly lipstick flap or the continuing debate over Sarah and sexism, you can just feel the tension level rising several notches.

Maybe it’s a sense that this is crunch time, that the election is on the line, that the press is being manipulated…

Yes, indeed. Howie feels the press is being “manipulated” by the McCain campaign.

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved “manipulating” the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin’s amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you’d “manipulate” the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can’t possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort.

Who knows? It’s a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie’s buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match.

You’d not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

John Hinderaker has more on Kurtz’ descent into madness, while Roger Kimball calls the last two weeks an “act of auto-immolation” by the media. Alas, while setting their own pants on fire, Howie & co also managed to spill the lighter fluid all over Barack’s coronation robes.

The other day Boston’s “alternative” paper ran a piece lamenting that MSNBC being so obviously in the tank for Obama is, in fact, damaging the Obama campaign. As Orrin Judd says:

Even if it isn’t particularly true, the notion that Keith Olbermann defeated Barack Obama needs to become conventional wisdom, just to drive the Left bonkers.

Indeed. When Howie claims he’s getting really really mad, I wonder if he realizes he sounds like Elmer Fudd warning Bugs Bunny “You’re making me vewy vewy angwy” right after he’s shot his own butt off.

(Incidentally, Howard’s second paragraph,quoted above, should be taught in Journalism School as a model of how to give the air of “impartiality” and even-handedness - “Whether it’s… or… or…” -when, in fact, you’re entirely “unidirectional”, in John Hinderaker’s word, in your obsessions.)

[quote]flyboy51v wrote:

Yes, indeed. Howie feels the press is being “manipulated” by the McCain campaign.

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved “manipulating” the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin’s amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you’d “manipulate” the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can’t possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort.

[/quote]

That is great. The idea that McCain is using the media’s own bias against like some sort of Machiavellian manipulator them is hilarious. It’s unfortunate that they can’t control themselves long enough to get a decent, unbiased story out, but that’s not McCain’s fault. He picked someone who he thought would be most likely to help him get elected.

The fact that the media has been frothing at the mouth to make her look like some sort of hypocritical, unprincipaled Christian nutjob is all their own doing, and all McCain has to do is sit back and laugh, while launching an occasional jab at Obama every time he says something that can be construed as stupid or uncivil. I don’t know if McCain planned things this well, or if the media is just that stupid. Either way, it doesn’t look good for Obama right now.

If the news folk can get their collective knee to stop jerking long enough to really dig into some of the possible negatives of Palin’s job as an elected official, they might actually get the results they seem to desire. But as long as they keep pushing her about her faith and her family, they are going to continue to look like fools, and gaining her more sympathy.