These People Should Not be Trusted

[Cross-posted at Bull v. Elephant]

Suppose you are a college football fan rooting for BYU to crush University of Utah. You watch the game and are disappointed to see that call after call is botched, but not in a random manner. Almost every close call, and many that aren't close, favors the Utes. Then you discover that all of the referees happen to be U of U graduates. They claim to referee the game fairly, but you find that hard to believe given their one-sided calls. Additionally, you find out that, off the field, many of these referees express disdain for the Cougars and love for the Utes. How would this make you feel about the honesty of the referees? The fairness of the game?

You'd understandably be mad, and you'd probably conclude that the referees' one-sided calls are the product of their bias for the Utes. You'd also probably conclude that the referees have acted deceptively, (and possibly immorally) by claiming neutrality when in fact, they have an undisclosed conflict of interests. Worse yet, they may be actively working to promote the Utes. The referees' failure to disclose their bias calls into question their honesty and undermines the integrity of the game.

Unfortunately, the above is a pretty apt analogy for what journalists do when reporting on politics. The vast majority of journalist are liberal. For example, 93% of Washington corespondents said they voted for the Democrat in the last election. Journalists then are like the referees above, pretending to be neutral arbiters of the facts when they're really partisan Democrats.

Maybe you'd argue, yeah journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, but their liberalism does not affect their work. When they report, they play it straight. But does the evidence support that theory? Let's look at some examples of media bias from major media outlets.

Select examples from before this last election cycle:

• Michael Isikoff had tapes of Monica Lewinsky talking about the fact that she was having sex with the president and planning on lying for her in deposition, but Newsweek didn't run it because they claimed they weren't sure of the authenticity. As a result, Drudge Report broke the story (and one before it.) (Jesse has argued that this was simply a result of rigorous fact checking, not bias. But aren't tape recordings plus a witness enough to run with a story? Also, rigorous fact checking protocols did not keep Newsweek from running the bogus story about Koran flushing at Gitmo during the Bush administration.)
• Before he broke the Lewinski story, Isikoff wanted to report on the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, but according to leftist Christopher Hitchens, the Washington Post didn't, so Isikoff was suspended. Howard Kurtz confirms, "Isikoff has attracted the limelight in part because he's had trouble getting his seamy stories into print, first about Paula Jones and, last week, about former White House intern Monica Lewinsky."
• In September before the 2004 presidential election, Dan Rather and 60 Minutes ran a story about President Bush skipping guard duty. The story was sourced to 1970s documents, later proved frauds by bloggers at the Powerline Blog. Still, 60 Minutes stood by the story for several weeks, even doing follow up stories defending the documents as fake-but-accurate. Eventually they had to retract. Rather kept his job for several months after, although he was eventually forced to retire.
• During the 2008 primary election, the New York Times ran a piece about John McCain having a romantic relationship with an attractive lobbyist who then received special favors from him. Except there was no actual evidence that they had sex or a romantic relationship, or that McCain broke the public trust.

From this last election cycle:

• Romney faults Obama for failing to call the Benghazi attack a terrorist attack. Obama says he did call it an act of terror in the Rose Garden speech, and Candy Crowley, the journalist-moderator backs Obama. But that was false. In the September 12 Rose Garden speech, Obama said "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation," but he never specifically called the Benghazi attack an act of terror. In the subsequent weeks after the September 11 Benghazi attack, Obama and Ambassador Rice both blame the attack on a spontaneous demonstration in response to an obscure youtube video, not on terrorism.
• Steve Croft of 60 Minutes conducted an interview with Obama on September 12 after the Rose Garden speech. Croft asked Obama whether the Benghazi attack was terrorism and Obama answers it's "too early to tell." Pressed further, he admits there probably was a planned element to the attack. After the October 16 presidential debate, CBS releases a portion of the video where Obama says there was a planned element to the attack, giving the  impression that Obama had called the attack terrorism. CBS only released the full version of the video, where Obama says its "too early to tell" on the eve of the election. CBS responded to the criticism of its decision to withhold the video by saying they are proud of their Benghazi coverage, presumably including their decision to suppress the portions of the video contradicting Obama's debate statements.
• Andrea Mitchell shows a video of Mitt Romney where it looks as though he's expressing amazement at a grocery store's touchscreen technology. Mitchell and Chris Cillizza then have a good laugh at Romney's expense based on the edited video, calling it his "supermarket scanner moment." Except, the end of the video shows Romney is actually expressing his amazement at private markets ability to innovate, not at touch-screen technology. The next day Mitchell plays the full video, claiming "we didn't get a chance to play that" the day before, and then moves on. 
• David Chalain, the Yahoo! Washington bureau news chief was caught on live mic at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans saying Republicans were “happy to have a party with black people drowning.” He was promptly fired for the offense, but then hired less than two months later by Politico.
• ABC, Washington Post and Politico criticize Ann Romney for wearing a $990 blouse. No one bothers to report on Michelle Obama's much more expensive closing. The New Yorker explains that that the media goes easy on Michelle's expensive taste because she is under a lot of pressure.

Since the election:

• PolitiFact awards Romney its Lie of The Year award for his claim that Jeep was going to start building cars in China. Except, it turns out, that's true. Jeep has started making cars in China.
• FBI is investigating whether Democratic Senator Mel Martinez has had sex with underage prostitutes on his repeated trips with a campaign donor to the Dominican Republic. Although ABC News knew about the allegations in May, 2012, the Daily Caller was the first to report on the story in November.
• Martha Raddatz, the vice-presidential debate moderator and ABC employee, recently interviewed Mel Martinez but didn't ask one question about the sex-scandal allegations or the propriety of taking trips on a campaign donor's private plane.
• Bob Schieffer, CBS's anchor of Face the Nation and one of the presidential debate moderators, analogizes Obama taking on the gun lobby to Johnson taking on civil rights legislation, and Roosevelt taking on the Nazis.
• Martin Bashir of MSNBC runs footage of a gun-rights activist heckling the father of one of the Sandy Hook victims. However, the video deceptively edits out the father's challenge to the audience to explain the need for assault weapons. The so-called heckler was not heckling but responding to the challenge from the father.
• NBC's David Gregory uses an illegal gun magazine on air to confront the NRA president Wayne Lapierre. Washington D.C. police told NBC personnel that Gregory could not use the magazine on air, but he uses it anyway to make his gun argument. Despite the clear violation of the law, he escapes prosecution. An Iraq war vet, who unintentionally violated the law, was not so lucky.
• CBS New's political director, John Dickerson advises Obama to declare war on Republican Party. Then he claims it was just analysis, not advice, despite using words "should" and "must" and saying there's "no time to lose."
• Steve Croft does an interview with the Obama and Hillary. There were no hard questions on any topic, especially on the Benghazi attacks. After the interview, Croft explains he's not going to ask any gotcha questions of the President.  Even the liberal Margret Carlson says it was a series of softball questions, and reminisces about the time when "the scariest words in TV journalism were, ‘I’m from "60 Minutes" and I’m here to interview you.'"
• Buzzfeed's Michael Hastings explains how reporters swoon over Obama. “When [reporters] are near him, they lose their mind sometimes. They start behaving in ways, you know, that are juvenile and amateurish and they swoon.” He admits to behaving the same way.
• CNN's reporter Tom Foreman has written a letter to Obama every day of his presidency. He usually ends the letter with a request for President Obama to give him a call. No call yet, but a guy can dream!

Bonus:

• NBC makes a third (probably first in time) deceptive edit to George Zimmerman's 911 call, making it sound like he was suspicious of Treyvon Martin because he's black. In fact, Zimmerman only mentioned race when he was specifically asked about it by the dispatcher:
• Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
• Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
• Zimmerman: He looks black
• NBC edit: 
• Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

I suppose this exercise is open the criticism that my sample isn't random.  A few point on that. First, I'm not including some media sources like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or some of the anchors on Fox News, like O'Reilly, because they are not claiming objectivity, just as I have not included Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow for the same reason. I'm focused on the journalists who are ostensibly doing objective reporting.

Second, the examples I've focused on are the biggest names and institutions in journalism: The NY Times, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, Dan Rather, Bob Schieffer David Gregory, Steve Croft, 60 Minutes, and 3 of the 4 journalists that moderated the presidential debates in this last election. These are supposed to represent the best the objective media have to offer, and yet they are clearly allowing their bias to affect job performance in the examples above. 

Third, much of the bias is deliberate. CBS deliberately released only the part of the Croft-Obama interview that made Obama look good. NBC deliberately edited three videos in misleading ways that supported liberal positions in the controversies. Scheieffer's comments about the gun lobby being like the Nazi's was no mistake, either, other than the mistake of saying what he actually thought.

Fourth, more statistically rigorous approaches to measuring media bias reach the same conclusion. Political science professor Timothy Groseclose has written a book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, which endeavors to measure media bias statistically. He created a measure of bias called slant quotient (SQ), with 0 being conservative and 100 being liberal. He then compares SQ to the political quotient (PQ) of the population, generally. Unsurprisingly, his statistical approach also concludes that all mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias, with most registering in the high 60s or low 70s. 

So, in conclusion, you should not trust mainstream media journalist. They are overwhelmingly liberal, and their liberalism biases their reporting. That journalists continue to claim they are objective only serves to prove that they are trying to deceive you and do not deserve your trust.