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News

Did Obama’s foreign policy make America more respected abroad?

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Map of the Middle East
Map of the Middle East

From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

In the Middle East, where U.S. military involvement and diplomacy are most closely watched, President Obama is held in lower regard in the Arab world than President Bush was in the last year of his presidency.

Obama is not only less liked than the supposedly hated Bush, he can’t even hold a candle to Iran’s grubby, menacing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Zogby reports that in Egypt, 31% of Egyptians agree with Iran’s policies compared with 3% for Obama’s, with similar figures in Jordan. Among Egyptians, just 5% hold a favorable attitude toward the U.S. compared with 9% in 2008.

[…]Clinton will do no better in bilateral talks with the Turks — a nation that has moved so far away from its long alliance with the U.S. it can only be called a former ally — on Syria, Iran and Israel/Palestine.

In these countries, Obama’s policy can be summed up in a litany of ineffectual maneuvers.

On Syria, the first move was to succor, then to scold as the dictatorship indifferently sheds streams of blood in the streets of Damascus — showing the fundamental disconnect between what the brutal Syrian regime is and what the Obama administration thinks it is.

After throwing Tunisia and Egypt, two pro-Western allies, overboard, the administration ineffectually grasps a problem in Syria as the bodies pile up.

On Iran, Obama policy shows even more weakness. The president wasted two years coddling the monster regime that threatens a region of more than a billion people. He missed a chance to support a student uprising in 2009 and now watches as Iran’s illegal nuclear program speeds ahead with little fear of consequences, more brazen and closer to realization.

Whatever this learning-curve policy amounts to, it garners no international respect.

Then there’s the stance the White House has taken on Israel, abusively telling its ally to retreat to 1967 borders. It emboldened provocations from Palestinian terrorist groups and showed the rest of the Arab world that it pays more to be America’s enemy than its friend. Now the Arab League is moving to recognize Palestine.

It turns out that what foreign powers respect is strength, not weakness.

Commentary

What do studies tell us about mainstream media bias?

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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.”

From the Washington Examiner, a study of the political contributions made by the mainstream media.

Excerpt:

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

[…]The data on contributions by broadcast network employees was compiled by CRP at the request of The Examiner and included all 2008 contributions by individuals who identified their employer as one of the three networks or subsidiaries. The data does not include contributions by employees of the three networks who did not identify their employer.

The CRP is the organization behind OpenSecrets.org, the web site that for more than a decade has put campaign finance data within reach of anybody with an Internet connection.

President Obama received 710 such contributions worth a total of $461,898, for an average contribution of $651 from the network employees. Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain received only 39 contributions totaling $26,926, for an average donation of $709.

And more from a study done by the radically 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.

And here’s a bit from that same article 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.”

Those are the facts.

So what?

Now consider this column from Brent Bozell, which explains the difference media bias makes to political intelligence.

Excerpt:

The Republican presidential contest is picking up steam. Obama is consistently polling under 50 percent. This one’s a toss-up, and in the thick of it is the Fox News Channel. It’s not just their role in hosting and vetting the candidates. It’s their role as the chief villain in the eyes of liberal Democrats struggling to push their version of the “truth” about Obama.

Jon Stewart rhetorically asked Chris Wallace about Fox on “Fox News Sunday, because he thought he knew the answer: “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

In the real world – outside Stewart’s smug bubble – this is garbage. A 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center asked media consumers three questions: which party was in control of Congress (Democrats), who was the secretary of state (Condi Rice) and who was the prime minister of Britain (Gordon Brown).

Let’s document how the viewers of “Hannity &Colmes” were better informed than Stewart’s “Daily Show”  gigglers on basic political facts. Hannity viewers beat Stewart’s on the Democratic majority (84 percent to 65 percent correct answers), Condi Rice (a dramatic 73 percent to 48 percent gap) and Gordon Brown (49 percent to 36). Overall, as a percentage getting all three questions right, Hannity won 42-30.

Just keep that in mind when you are watching the mainstream media news shows. A very good site to bookmark and read is Newsbusters, which documents mainstream media bias daily. I even have an RSS feed of their latest stories on the front page on this blog.

UPDATE: New York Times cites abortion advocates as neutral sources.

News

New study finds that young people value marriage and hope to marry

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From the National Post. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Young adults still tend to view marriage as an important life commitment to which they aspire, results of a new U.S. study suggest.

The findings appear to contradict public and academic anxiety over the state of marriage, and surprised even the researchers.

“What was so striking about what the young people said is that no one really described rejecting marriage,” said lead author Maria Kefalas, a sociology professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “I had a category all written -marriage rejector -and we couldn’t find any. There was no one who said, ‘Marriage is meaningless and I don’t want to get married.’ ”

The researchers uncovered a divide between rural and urban young adults after examining interviews with 424 people aged 21 to 38 who lived in New York, San Diego and Minneapolis/St. Paul or rural Iowa.

Young adults in small towns and rural areas -dubbed “marriage naturalists” -generally have a 1950s view toward marriage, they found, seeing it as the inevitable “next step” in a long-term relationship.

“It was like a time capsule,” Ms. Kefalas said. “Marriage was expected. It wasn’t fretted about, there was very little hand-wringing about it. A lot of the pressure for marriage was external in terms of social expectation that that’s what you do.”

In contrast, urban young adults -dubbed “marriage planners” by the researchers -had high standards for potential marriage partners and a strong sense that marriage was something they had to be “ready for.”

[…]Ms. Kefalas said she believes declining marriage rates in Canada and the United States are due to a shifting economic landscape that makes it more difficult for young adults in the Millennial cohort born in the 1980s and 1990s to get the education, career, housing and general stability they feel they need before saying “I do” -not a lack of interest in the institution itself.

“One of the great myths has been that young people, in particular millennials, are saying, ‘We don’t want to get mar-ried and marriage is irrelevant to us,’ and that’s not true,” Ms. Kefalas said.

The paper is to be published in the Journal of Family Issues.

I think the problem I see, and this is something for Christians to research, and for churches to get serious about – is that we need to help young people to translate these aspirations to marry into a solid plan for how to get married well. That means telling them how to prepare themselves to be married, how to find and evaluate another person for marriage, and how to court another person in a way that will result in a stable, loving marriage. Young people need to understand things that social scientists know – like the fact that chastity is good for marital stability, and that cohabitation is bad for marital stability. We need to study these factors and then inform the young people in winsome ways.