Category Archives: Commentary

What can we learn about media bias from donations made by journalists?

From the radically extreme leftist MSNBC.

Excerpt:

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

The donors include CNN’s Guy Raz, now covering the Pentagon for NPR, who gave to Kerry the same month he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq; New Yorker war correspondent George Packer; a producer for Bill O’Reilly at Fox; MSNBC TV host Joe Scarborough; political writers at Vanity Fair; the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition; local TV anchors in Washington, Minneapolis, Memphis and Wichita; the ethics columnist at The New York Times; and even MTV’s former presidential campaign correspondent.

Here’s a little snip about The New Yorker:

The last bulwark against bias’s slipping into The New Yorker is the copy department, whose chief editor, Ann Goldstein, gave $500 in October to MoveOn.org, which campaigns for Democrats and against President Bush. “That’s just me as a private citizen,” she said. As for whether donations are allowed, Goldstein said she hadn’t considered it. “I’ve never thought of myself as working for a news organization.”

Don’t you think that this bias towards the left would affect how they report the news?

How government control of medicine leads to violations of conscience

Story here from the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Deep within the massive health-care overhaul legislation, a few little-noticed provisions have quietly reignited one of the bitterest debates in medicine: how to balance the right of doctors, nurses and other workers to refuse to provide services on moral or religious grounds with the right of patients to get care.

[…]The debate has focused attention on President Obama’s plan to rescind a federal regulation put into effect by the previous administration to protect workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable. Soon after taking office, Obama announced he would lift the rule, arguing it could create obstacles to abortion and other reproductive health services. But a final decision about whether to kill, keep or replace the rule with a compromise has been pending as the debate over the health law raged. The outcome is being closely watched as a bellwether of how the administration will handle a possible thicket of conflicts under the health legislation.

“The act is thousands of pages of new government power, decision-making and funding,” said Matthew S. Bowman of the Alliance Defense Fund, which represents workers who object on religious grounds to being required to provide some forms of health care. “Any government power over health care can be exercised in a way that discriminates against pro-life health providers, especially when officials already support abortion and oppose enforcement of conscience laws.”

And more:

Bowman and others point to Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo as an example of what they fear could become increasingly common as the government becomes much more deeply entwined with health care. Cenzon-DeCarlo was working at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York last year when the nurse was stunned to learn that she had been assigned to help abort a 22-week-old fetus. A devout Catholic, Cenzon-DeCarlo thought she had a long-standing agreement with the hospital that let her avoid abortions. But this time, despite her pleas, Cenzon-DeCarlo’s bosses insisted.

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” Cenzon-DeCarlo said. “It was devastating. I have suffered intense emotional pain. I’ve had nightmares. . . . I felt violated and betrayed.”

Cenzon-DeCarlo, who filed state and federal lawsuits against Mount Sinai, is the only health-care worker who has filed a complaint under the previous administration’s rule, which remains in effect. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is investigating, but officials would not comment on the case. The hospital also declined to comment.

Government is necessarily secular, and it is typically run by people who are born rich and educated at expensive schools. It causes them to think they are better than other people. They become extremely disdainful of the moral law, and the Judeo-Christian worldview that supports it – because they view the moral law (and the Constitution, etc.) as a  antiquated brake on their pursuit of happiness in this life. The desire for happiness now causes them to believe in anything that will push the demands of the moral law off.

And their personal views inform their political views. Those on the left favor policies that push moral rules aside, and sometimes even the people who believe moral rules – like pro-life doctors. The problem is that dismissing the moral law only works when you have a rich grandmother to bail you out. That’s why we need to elect more people like Michele Bachmann, who are self-made and had to work for a living, and who have raised their own children. People who don’t have contempt for the beliefs and values of ordinary people.

A feminist critique of common sense and reason

Here is a funny anecdote from a writer in the secular leftist magazine Psychology Today.

Excerpt:

Several years ago, my wife and I had gone out for a celebratory dinner with one of my doctoral students and one of his female friends. The friend in question was a committed postmodernist and a staunch academic feminist. At one point during our dinner, I gently asked her whether she genuinely believed the postmodernist foundational tenet that there are no universal truths.

[…]I asked her whether it was a universal truth that within the human species it is only women who bear children. Surely this is an absolute fact no? After rolling her eyes in utter disgust and taking a few huffs and puffs, she replied that she was amazed at how sexist my example had been. At this point, my doctoral student, my wife, and I were truly baffled. The feminist explained that in the spiritual narrative of a particular group of Japanese people, it is the men who bear the children! Hence, by purposely restricting childbearing to the physical/biological realm, I was being sexist.

[…]I asked her whether it was indeed a universal truth that from any vantage point on Earth, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Surely, since time immemorial sailors have relied on this cosmological fact. Take a minute to think about how she might have retorted in this case. Here is a hint: she used the tools of deconstructionism to “tease apart” my latest universal. Deconstructionism argues that reality is a linguistic creation. Hence, there is no objective truth to speak of, as all information is constrained within subjective linguistic bounds. She proposed that I was putting labels on things, and she refused to play such games. She did not know what I meant by “East” or “West”. These were arbitrary labels. What did I mean by “sun”? That which I called the sun, she might refer to as “dancing hyena” (her actual words!), to which I wryly replied: OK, the dancing hyena rises in the East and sets in the West.

The article then explains where this postmodern view that “nothing is objectively real and nothing is objectively true” leads.

These anti-science movements coupled with cultural relativism, political correctness, and an ethos of self-guilt regarding all geopolitical realities will prove the demise of Western civilization. It is such babble that caused nearly all of the American news media to offer hallucinatory explanations regarding the recent Times Square incident including that the alleged terrorist did this because he had defaulted on his mortgage payment, and hence was facing great financial strain. Both the media and Obama officials are under a strict edict to avoid uttering the most obvious of geopolitical facts. These nonsensical pseudo-intellectual movements will spell the end of liberal democracies if they are not eradicated from public discourse.

There is something very strange about postmodern/relativist/politically correct types.