The Bias Never Sleeps

It seems like such a long time ago that lefty writers were pushing the line that not only is there no liberal bias in the media, but in fact it's conservatives who have a disproportionate influence on the public discourse. Actually, it's been a mere couple of years since liberals tried making that preposterous case, largely as a reaction to former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg's surprise bestseller Bias, an insider's account of how liberal assumptions and prejudices shape the way the mainstream media present the news.

Liberal Rage

Since 1994, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has devoted a column every December to highlighting the year's most egregious examples of liberal hate speech. Jacoby describes 2004 as "another year in which liberals engaged in, and mostly got away with, grotesque slanders and slurs about conservatives - the kind of poisonous rhetoric that should be beyond the pale in a decent society."

Your Media At Work

The Media Research Center is out with its annual "Best Notable Quotables" awards, a gorgeous display of the media's liberal bias, all-around pomposity and laughable ignorance. For the full list, visit the MRC website (www.mrc.org). The Monitor found the following selection particularly illuminating:

ADL’s Misleading Media Surveys

The Anti-Defamation League, fresh off its lamentable stint as unwitting public relations apparatus for Mel Gibson, has, yet again, demonstrated a jaw-dropping inability (or perhaps a cynical unwillingness) to differentiate between a newspaper's news coverage and its editorial views.

Au Revoir, Harry Danning

Harry Danning died last week, and all The New York Times could muster was a dry, unbylined, six-paragraph obituary that somehow managed to overlook Danning's Jewishness - not a small thing when one considers that Danning played for the old New York Giants from 1933 to 1942, was selected four times to the National League All Star team, and until his death at age 93 had been the oldest living Jewish major leaguer.

Democrat Echo Chamber

One of the websites listed here last week as a Monitor favorite did a sterling job Sunday exposing The New York Times as a journalistic copy machine of Democratic Party talking points.

Politically Motivated ‘Scoop’?

The New York Times trumpeted a two-column lead story by James Glanz, William Broad and David Sanger, 'Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq,' in Monday's edition, a story one week before the election about events that happened at least 18 months ago - one blaming the Bush administration for letting almost 400 tons of powerful explosives disappear under its nose.

Monitor’s Online Reading List

The Monitor's sort-of-annual listing of recommended websites and blogs is a little different this time. Previous listings were an amalgam of readers' favorites and the Monitor's own choices; this one is purely the Monitor's concoction.

Uri Avnery, Moral Idiot

In an extraordinary interview published last Friday in Haaretz, Uri Avnery, the grand old man of the Israeli Left, spoke of his deep affection for Yasir Arafat, his great sadness at Arafat's passing, and his belief that Arafat would be recognized as one of history's great men.

Political Potpourri

Sun rises in East, Times endorses Democrat: Most Americans weren't born the last time The New York Times gave its endorsement to a Republican presidential candidate. The year was 1956, the candidate was the incumbent president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a weekday copy of the Times cost a nickel.

Watching The Returns

7 p.m.: Brit Hume and company over at Fox News look as though they've just been informed of the death of a loved one. Could the exit polls have been even worse than had been rumored all afternoon on the Internet? No one's saying anything, of course, but the atmosphere is positively funereal.

The Moral Clarity Of Fighting Men

In "The Media and the Military," an article in the November issue of The Atlantic - arguably the best serious magazine in America today - Robert Kaplan writes of the great social and cultural divide that exists between the nation's elite journalists and its soldiers.

Tracking Down Those So-Called Quotes

Did Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vow to burn Palestinian children and rape Arabic girls? Did former Israeli leader Menachem Begin refer to Palestinians as "two-legged beasts," and did another Israeli leader declare that all Arabs must be killed unless they are willing to live as slaves?

Fan Mail

Barring any of the nightmare scenarios posited by those who worried about the results being literally too close to call, the presidential election will have been decided by the time this column appears in print. But the Monitor was still busy early this week sorting through the daunting number of letters and e-mails that began coming in almost immediately after The Jewish Press endorsed George W. Bush two weeks ago.

Daffy Dan’s Predictable Downfall

The most shocking thing about the scandal now swirling around Dan Rather and CBS News is that - after decades of embarrassing incidents, both on air and off, and a mountain of statements betraying a pronounced political bias (his colleague Andy Rooney has called him "transparently liberal") - Rather was still in a position to so damage his network's reputation.

Liberal Media’s Tipping Point

The 2004 presidential campaign may well represent the tipping point in terms of public awareness that, despite the ritualistic protests to the contrary by some of the more blatant offenders, an insidious liberal bias does indeed infect nearly every aspect of the news coverage provided by mainstream media.

Pat Buchanan Democrats

Pat Buchanan was on "Meet the Press" this past Sunday, but more noteworthy than Buchanan's predictable anti-Israel fulminations was the tacit agreement with Buchanan voiced by Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who sought his party's presidential nomination early in the 2004 campaign cycle.

Keeping Tabs On The Times

The Monitor frequently has made men tion of the website Timeswatch.org, which methodically lays out, weekday after weekday, the lies, distortions, bias and convenient "mistakes" that seem to grace every issue of The New York Times, the one-time paper of record that now features as much opinion-laced journalism as one might find in any given edition of nakedly partisan publications such as The New Republic or The Weekly Standard.

A Tale Of Two Books

A tale of two books and how the media control what you know and whether you know. A tale of two books one harshly critical of President Bush the other highly unflattering to Sen. Hillary Clinton. A tale of two books the first of which rode a wave of media hype to bestsellerdom the second of which was all but ignored.

Who’s The Dummy?

The e-mail arrived a couple weeks ago from a Bush-hater barely able to contain his glee. According to this fellow's opening line, the president had once again shown himself to be a boob beyond compare, as evidenced by the following "news item" my correspondent helpfully attached:

Shooting Herself In The Foot

Recently, the veteran journalist Barbara Matusow wrote a rather shallow and uncomprehending piece for American Journalism Review, portraying critics of the mainstream media's Middle East coverage as nothing more than propagandists and chronic scolds, and claiming to detect little if any conscious bias among reporters stationed in the region.

More Hypocrisy From Sulzberger’s Times

The transformation of The New York Times is more or less complete. The newspaper long known for a liberal sensibility that sometimes bled from the editorials into the news stories has, over the past decade or so, essentially become the media auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

The Abominable Izzy Stone

June 18 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the passing of I.F. Stone, who upon his death was eulogized by mainstream journalists for his supposed independence and iconoclasm and who still remains an iconic figure to many in the media. This despite (or perhaps because of) his long record as a vocal enthusiast of Soviet-style socialism and merciless basher of Israel long before the sport assumed widespread popularity.

Pro-Kerry Media, Anti-Israel Moore

Maybe you still believe that claims of a biased liberal media are nothing but the deranged muttering of paranoid conservatives. And it could very well be that you refuse even to entertain the possibility that the mainstream media's coverage of this year's presidential campaign is driven to a large extent by a single-minded determination to send George W. Bush home to Texas and see to it that John F. Kerry is elected the 44th president of the United States.

Bush-Basher Nadler To UN: Help!

New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler is one of 13 Congressional Democrats now on record as believing that the United Nations - cesspool of corruption and hypocrisy, comfort station for thugs and dictators of every ideological stripe, breeding ground for anti-U.S. and anti-Israel sentiment - is better qualified than American officials to oversee the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Brando’s Branding

The death of the legendary actor Marlon Brando brings to mind an incident that tarred his reputation for years afterward and that serves to illustrate how certain Jewish organizations and their self-serving "spokesmen" risk trivializing the entire issue of anti-Semitism.

Media Swoon For Moore

What was that about the media not having a liberal bias? For a few months back in 2003, left-wing pundits and authors, reacting to a spate of books documenting the unmistakable leftwardtilt of the country's prestige media outlets, began putting forth the argument that their side was the one getting the short end of the stick.

Give Us A Horse Race Any Day

Of the taking of polls there is no end, particularly in a presidential election year. Although it's considered the better part of wisdom to feign at least a healthy disregard, if not an active disdain, for the preponderance of polling, the truth is that political junkies couldn't live without a steady dose of polls.

Commentary And Outreach At Jewish World Review

It's been two years since we last checked in with Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, editor-in-chief of JewishWorldReview.com - two years during which he's added new columnists, broken important stories, and seen JWR finish first in two "favorite website" polls of Monitor readers.

The Abu Ghraib Times

How obsessed has The New York Times been with Abu Ghraib? Between May 1 and May 27 the paper featured the prisoner abuse scandal on its front page virtually without letup and almost always above the fold.

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