Tag Archives: Mainstream Media

News

Is the media accurate in reporting on left-wing and right-wing violence?

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Here’s an post from Newsbusters dated March 2010 that talks about whether the left or right is more violent.

Excerpt:

Before letting the media continue to perpetuate a stereotype that may not actually exist at all, let me give you the facts that U.S. journalists refuse to cite. Let me show you where real violence comes from, and I don’t even need to mention the millions of babies killed every year by progressives or even the tens of millions of people murdered by their communist heroes.

But of course, you would never have this view if all you watched was the mainstream news media. Isn’t it funny how the pattern of leftist violence has been obscured by the way that the media presents the stories? Is it intentional?

Is the media biased to the left?

Here’s a UCLA study on media bias.

Excerpt:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.”

Here’s a Harvard University study on media bias.

Excerpt:

The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture… of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).

When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.”

And of course in the related links you will find surveys of journalists, records of political contributions made by journalists, and glaring examples of left-wing media bias. The Democrat party as a whole is more to the right than mainstream journalism as a whole.

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Does the CBO think that repealing Obamacare will help or hurt the deficit?

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Gateway Pundit reports that the Democrats have been telling everyone that repealing Obamacare will make the budget deficit worse.

The left-wing Washington Post says:

Rescinding the federal law to overhaul the health-care system, the first objective of House Republicans who ascended to power this week, would ratchet up the federal deficit by about $230 billion over the next decade and leave 32 million more Americans uninsured, according to congressional budget analysts.

The rough estimate by the Congressional Budget Office also predicts that most Americans would pay more for private health insurance if the law were repealed.

The headline of this left-wing Washington Post news article is “CBO says health care repeal would deepen deficit”.

The left-wing New York Times says:

The nonpartisan budget scorekeepers in Congress said on Thursday that the Republican plan to repeal President Obama’s health care law would add $230 billion to federal budget deficits over the next decade, intensifying the first legislative fight of the new session and highlighting the challenge Republicans face in pursuing their agenda.

The budget office estimated that the health care law, including education provisions, would reduce deficits over 10 years by $143 billion. Tax increases and cuts in projected Medicare spending would more than offset the cost of extending health insurance to millions of Americans. The budget office projected that the law would result in even bigger savings beyond 2019.

The headlines of this left-wing New York Times news article is “Republicans Are Given a Price Tag for Health Law Repeal, but Reject It”.

Wow, that sounds bad.

But is it true? Is it possible that the government can cover MILLIONS OF PEOPLE and have health care costs GO DOWN?

Well, look at the latest CBO numbers, straight from the CBO mailing list.

Excerpt:

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have not yet developed a detailed estimate of the budgetary impact of H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, which would repeal the major health care legislation enacted in March 2010. Yesterday, we released a preliminary analysis of that legislation indicating that, over the 2012-2021 period, the effect of enacting H.R. 2 on the federal budget as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in deficits in the vicinity of $230 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections for that period.

We have been asked to provide the revenue and direct spending components of that total.  Extrapolating the estimated budgetary effects of the original health care legislation and accounting for the effects of subsequent legislation, CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections.

Ah. So repealing Obama care would CUT SPENDING by 540 BILLION DOLLARS. And the only way to say that Obamacare can produce a surplus is by RAISING TAXES BY 770 BILLION DOLLARS.

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CBS News caught on tape conspiring to smear Republican candidate

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Big Government reports on CBS News journalists conspiring to smear Alaska Republican Joe Miller. (H/T Lex Communis)

The audio:

The transcript:

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s up to you because you’re the expert, but that’s what I would do…I’d wait until you see who showed up because that indicates we already know something…

[Laughter]

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters…

MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah… can you repeat Joe Miller’s…uh… list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester?

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.

[Laughter]

MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’

FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that.

[Laughter]

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.

For many voters who don’t look at specific policies and candidate voting records, there is a tendency to vote based on scandals and sound bites. I personally know people who voted against McCain because they didn’t like Sarah Palin’s voice. My attempts to get them to compare voting records on spending went unheeded.

So media bias is one way that people vote Democrat. Another way is by voter fraud.

First, here are a couple recent examples of voter fraud:

So how does Obama respond to this voting fraud?

Excerpt:

The Justice Department is sending a small pack of election observers to Arizona as Hispanic groups sound the alarm over an anti-illegal immigration group’s mass e-mail seeking to recruit Election Day volunteers to help block illegal immigrants from voting.

Hispanic voting rights groups say the e-mail is just an attempt to intimidate minority voters. But election fraud monitors say that there are hundreds of examples of duplicate registrations, wrong information and past unregistered voters getting ballots.

Voter fraud allegations have emerged just days before the midterm in many crucial battleground states across the country, including Nevada, Pennsylvania and Florida.

The Justice Department announced Friday it would deploy more than 400 federal observers to 30 jurisdictions in 18 states ahead of Tuesday’s election. But Arizona officials say the department had already committed to sending observers to their state.

Justice Department officials had notified Maricopa County that they would send a “handful” of election observers, even before the e-mail was sent, Matthew Benson, a spokesman for Arizona’s secretary of state, told FoxNews.com.

Yes, the same DOJ that dropped charges against Black Panthers for voter intimidation at polls.

And this video of Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who opposes requiring photo identification for voters. (H/T My Pet Jawa via ECM)

Get out and vote on Tuesday because I suspect that the Democrats get a huge boost from media bias and voter fraud. My guess is that the Democrats gets somewhere around a 2-3% bump on election day from voter fraud, and the media gives them another 5-10% by focusing on irrelevancies instead of rigorous policy analysis. I have no idea how much of a boost they get from using the Department of Justice.