CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.
The trend in news ratings for the first three months of this year is all up for one network, the Fox News Channel, which enjoyed its best quarter ever in ratings, and down for both MSNBC and CNN. …
About the only break from the bad news for CNN was that March was not as bad as February, when the network had its worst single month in its recent history, finishing behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but also its sister network HLN — and even CNBC, which had Olympics programming that month.
CNN executives have steadfastly said that they will not change their approach to prime-time programs…
Well, how bad were the ratings, anyway?
Peter Sean Bradley’s blog Lex Communis had a graph from Nielsen Media Research.
Peter’s remarks are insightful:
Bwahahahahaha!
Indeed. I concur.
I left a comment with my evil laugh, but it wasn’t my best one. I thought of a better one afterward.
If you can’t stand the heat, manufacture a hate crime epidemic.
After years of covering racial hoaxes on collegecampuses and victim sob stories in the public arena, I’ve encountered countless opportunists who live by that demented mindset. At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent.
Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health care “reform” victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there’s a Tea Party epidemic of racism, harassment, and violence against them. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a tepid, obligatory statement against smearing all conservatives as national security threats. But her lieutenants had already emptied their tar buckets. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Chris Van Hollen blamed Republican leaders of “stoking the flames.” Democrat House Whip James Clyburn accused the GOP of “aiding and abetting” what he called “terrorism.”
Here’s an example:
In November 2009, Kentucky Census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead in a secluded rural cemetery with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly, the Huffington Post, and liberal media hosts stampeded over themselves to blame Fox News, conservative blogs, Republicans, and right-wing radio. Federal, state, and local authorities discovered that Sparkman had killed himself and deliberately concocted a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
The article contains many more faked hate crimes conducted by the left to smear conservatives. A substantial portion of people on the left thinks that anyone who disagrees with them is a terrorist. And if evidence is not available to substantiate that claim, then it just has to be manufactured. By the left.
The mainstream news media is more than willing to run with the lies. After all, CNN thinks that a tea party rally of thousands of people actually drew a few dozen people, (check the photos – is that “a few dozen people” like the CNN woman said?). It’s not like the lamestream media is there to tell the truth – they’re leftists. And they ignore real hate crimes committed against conservatives. All the news that fits… they print.
By the way, ECM sent me this article from the American Spectator a few days ago. It talks about Jewish Republican Eric Cantor’s campaign headquarters getting shot up (with real guns and real bullets). The point of the article is that the religious left had nothing to say about attacks on the wrong kinds of victims. If you’re a Jewish conservative, then hate crimes just don’t happen to you! They can’t, because only secular leftists can be victims of hate, see? So just keep in mind that reports of hate crimes have to be taken with a grain of salt.
First, he talks about different journalists are from the rest of America:
The modern secular newsroom lacks the ideological know-how to truly understand religion. Perhaps Terry Mattingly best exlplained the media’s “diversity problem”. According to Mattingly, “While there’s been heavy gender and racial diversity … there’s a lack of cultural diversity in journalism…” It is this lack of diversity that leads to major misconceptions and the media’s inability to adequately tell stories that are rooted, themselves, in religious themes.
The lack of diversity may lie in the journalists themselves, as personal faith plays a role in the ability to understand and thus illustrate religious themes. Just how religious are journalists? According to USA Today, “the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported in 2007 that 8% of journalists surveyed at national media outlets said they attended church or synagogue weekly.” Additionally, 29% reported never attending church services, with an additional 39% stating that they go a few times each year. In sum: Not very religious – especially when compared to America as a whole.
Later on, he talks about how rigid conformity to secular presuppositions creates bias:
In covering the American Religious Identification Survey that was conducted in March 2009, the Pew Research Center wrote,
“A comment on the blog Matters of Faith declared, “The media’s tendency to give inordinate attention to religious dimwits and crackpots has seriously damaged the credibility of religious leaders. You rarely read or hear of the miraculously generous work of faith communities in caring for the poor and infirm around the globe. But let someone suggest that the Virgin Mary has appeared in a plate of refried beans and the bulletins circle the globe in minutes.”
This commentary targets one of the media’s main malfunctions when it comes to covering religion in general and Christianity in particular. As is the case with most stories covered by the mainstream media, the more outlandish, the more the story is pursued. In practice, this creates a climate of coverage strewn with the “dimwits and crackpots” mentioned above, as journalists lack the understanding or desire to seek a wide array of theological viewpoints. Meanwhile, thousands of Christian missionaries risk their lives both domestically and internationally to make lasting spiritual and physical change in the lives of those in need. Yet their stories go widely unnoticed.
Here is an example of news coverage that you will never see in the mainstream news.
The secular leftist media will run stories about Sarah Palin’s children, and the Duke Lacrosse non-rape, because even though the stories later turn out to be fraudulent, they want to send the right message. They view their work as propaganda designed to effect political change. And I think it is sometimes useful to reflect on the story in the video above and ask why such stories are not covered. And the answer is because the media doesn’t tell people about news that doesn’t fit their rigid ideological stereotypes.
I was chatting with ECM about this post, and he informed me about The New Yorker’s movie critic Pauline Kael, who was surprised by Republicans’ 49-state landslide victory in the 1972 federal election.
She said:
“How could that be? I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.”
And that’s the news media today. They are not informed about views different from their own. They do not question their own fundamentalist assumptions by seeking out debates. Everything they need to know about religious people they learned from watching “Inherit the Wind” and “Jesus Camp” and such propaganda that allows them to demonize anyone who disagrees with their worldview. You would think that their ignorance of the best arguments on the other side would make them cautious, but it doesn’t.
WINTERY KNIGHT 