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Actually, the media is NOT trying to shove Romney down your throat. Try to pay attention. Rush Limbaugh has a thing for Newt. Fox News - Anti-Romney (for Newt right now, They were big on Rick Perry for a long time, essentially killing Bachmann's Iowa straw poll momentum).

Study: TV News Bashes Romney, Boosts Horse Race The TLDR; version is: In the broadcast networks, evaluative comments of Romney were 78% negative vs. only 22% positive. By contrast, on-air judgments of Ron Paul were 73% positive vs. 27% negative, evaluations of Jon Huntsman were 71% positive vs. 29% negative, Rick Santorum’s evaluations were 56% positive vs. 44% negative, and comments about Newt Gingrich were 52% positive vs. 48% negative. Other candidates received too few evaluations to be statistically meaningful.

The major topics of the coverage, measured as the number of stories about each, were as follows:

1. Campaign horse race - 105
2. Policy issues - 16
3. Voters - 11
4. Candidates’ professional backgrounds - 8
5. Candidates’ personal backgrounds - 7
6. Campaign conduct - 7
7. Debates - 5

Like I said, go figure.

As has been reported, Olbermann is off the air because he doesn't play well with others. I mean, did he alienate his "corporate overlords" when he was at ESPN also? I guess his journalistic integrity reporting sports news ran counter to the corporate agenda? From what I've read he's obnoxious with everyone, so it's no surprise that he got canned.

Being an atheist and generally socially liberal person, I have lots of problems with Fox news. I'm not so blinded by those problems that I don't see similar problems from other media outlets. Personally, I feel more informed by following a variety of news sources including Fox.

Do you read these things at all? This study does nothing to further your assertion that "Fox [is] the most balanced in straight reporting".

The study covered *only* 2008 Election stories during the prime time evening news shows for a period of 3 1/2 months in late 2007.

The methodology was to look for "positive" and "negative" comments about candidates. Suppose we had a story about a serial killer. By this methodology, if the news program called him a thug twice, and a blessing once, then we'd have an "unbalanced" news report which was 66% negative and 33% positive.

(Interesting to note that by these measures, the Fox news was close to 50+/50- for democratic candidates, but the others averaged 47+/53- for those democratic candidates.)

If you wish to learn more, go to SourceWatch.com (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Media_and_Public_Affairs) and find out who funds the Center for Media and Public Affairs (http://www.cmpa.com/). At the time of the report, the president of the CMPA, S. Robert Lichter, was a paid Fox News contributor.

And yet... they ARE.

Hmm, a study from an organization primarily funded by conservative concerns finds a liberal bias in the media. Why am I not surprised?

"Media Transparency documents that between 1986 and 2005 CMPA received 55 grants totaling $2,960,916 (unadjusted for inflation).[6] The data reveals that the overwhelming proportion of CMPA's funding comes from conservative foundations."

That argument doesn't work anymore. Just because Fox News is a right wing tabloid doesn't mean they all have a bias. If the truth doesn't support your reality and the other news organizations won't bend their coverage to support your viewpoint, that doesn't make them biased.

And yet... they ARE.

Negative: "You raised a lot of eyebrows on this trip saying, even knowing what you know now, you still would not have supported the surge. People may be scratching their heads and saying, 'why'(TM)?" Katie Couric, CBS

To me, if you believe that is an example of negative coverage then you have a liberal bias.

No. It is factually impossible to validly conclude, based on the presented evidence, that that demonstrated any sort of bias.

Bias means treating two sides on an inequal basis.

One of the most common forms of bias is to project the opposite bias into neutral information, a very effective method to dismiss that information and reinforce one's one position without even noticing it happening.

You clearly disliked the results of the study. You clearly searched it looking to find liberal bias in it, to discredit it. You then presented a rather extended chain of logic twisting the quotation into an insult to the IQ of any Obama opponent. You then jumped to the entirely unsupported conclusion that that was evidence of bias - the baseless assumption that Obama-comments and McCain-comments were being categorized according to inequal standards.

The direct meaning of the quote is to dispute the validity of Obama's position and to dispute the reasonableness/validity of reasoning. And like almost any statement it can be further interpreted and colored in a variety of ways by anyone according to their individual bias and inclinations. There is absolutely nothing unreasonable about using that sort of direct-level standard for evaluation. In fact I find it difficult to imagine any different standard that would work. Interpreting beyond that direct level of the statements is far to creative a process and involves drawing to many conclusions to allow any consistant objective categorisation.

There is absolutely nothing biased about that example or biased about that standard, if McCain's comments are categorized according to that same standard.

And while I do not have the full list of hours of comments about each candidate and the categorizations for all of them to compare them, here is their Research Methodology page. They establish explicit rules and procedures by which material shall be categorized, analysts are subjected to 150-to-200 hours of training. Furthermore multiple people must be able to independently reach the same categorizations for the same content with a high degree of accuracy in order to establish that the results are objectively consistent valid and unbiased.

So according to all that it sounds like they are following proper scientific procedures. It would be bias itself to dismiss the results as bias absent some other concrete basis to substantiate the bias allegation.

Now if I'm going to stand by the report and defend it, I figure I damn well better look into who is actually behind the study and whether they are in fact as nonpartisan they they claim and as reliable as their scientific methodology appears to indicate.

Well, to be honest I was a bit surprized at what I found on further digging. You were right to be skeptical about about potential bias from organizations claiming to be non-partisan and publishing research research on political topic.

Here's what I found:
The seed money for the center was solicited by the Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and friends. Nearly all of their funding comes from a very small group of right-wing foundations that fund a variety of right-wing organizations and right-wing causes.

So to any extent that they are failing to live up to their stated unbiased scientific procedures, such a failure would be OVERWHELMINGLY inclined to go in the direction of conservative bias.

Whoops. You'd have been better off if you hadn't pushed me to go investigate their partisan status. Chuckle.

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I mean, look at the Obama world tour...seriously, it was newsworthy enough for the anchor of every one of the 3 major networks to travel with him?

(1) Yes.

If McCain goes on world tour, think they'll all 3 travel with him?

(2) No.

it is pretty obvious who most of the networks seem to be favoring in coverage...

(3) Not nearly as obvious as you think. A scientific count of positive vs negative news comments shows a slant massively favoring McCain.

As for (1), yes, of course it was a major news event. McCain himself turned it into a Major Election Issue before Obama decided to go on the trip. All of the opponents of Obama were all tuning into the news hoping to see Obama fall on his face, tuning in out of fear that it might go well. And all of the Obama supporters were tuning in out of fear that he might fall on his face, tuning in in hope that he would score major points on the very issue McCain had made a big deal over. People on both sides tuned in in massive numbers to see and analyze in depth every detail, and those unsure in the middle were tuning in to see if Obama passed or flunked in this area considered a critical test of Obama.

The two candidates have different weak or vulnerable spots where they need to proove the are up to the job as president. Obama's biggest test is generally on experience and whether he was ready and able to be Presidential, and in particular McCain had made a huge production that Obama needed to go to Iraq and Afghanistan, and McCain made it a big point on the whole war issue. This trip focused on a critical issue to the election, focused on a a specific test that could have sunk Obama and decided the entire election right there.

Just like all of the networks sent a team of experts and had huge news coverage of McCain's medical records. McCains heath is a particular test *he* needs to pass if he wants to convince voters he is up to the job.

As for (2), that the networks wouldn't give that sort of coverage to McCain making the same international trip, OF COURSE NOT. Just as the networks wouldn't give major coverage to Obama's medical records turning up reasonably good. No one considers Obama's health a critical issue or critical test, no one expects Obama to fall on his face and lose the election over his medical records. Just as no one consider's McCain's performance on an international trip a critical issue or major test, no one expects McCain to fall on his face and lose the election over such a trip.

As for (3), yes, the coverage been more favorable to McCain. Obama has been getting more total coverage than McCain because Obama is seen as more of an unknown and more questions and more uncertainty, more promise and more risk, whereas people feel more confident they understand who McCain is and what to expect from him. But while Obama has gotten more total coverage, that extra margin has been completely negative. In a study of positive vs negative comments, the comments on Obama were 72% negative vs 28% positive about Obama, 57% negative vs 43% positive on McCain.

Source:
Scientific study by nonpartisian Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) 2008 Election News Watch Project.

A quick Google will turn up far more coverage for it. Of course if your primary news source is Fox, I'd hardly be surprised that they neglected to cover that inconvenient tidbit. The fact that the "liberal media" has treated McCain so much more favorably than Obama kinda pokes a huge hole in their biased liberal media dogma, and kinda ruins their justification that it's ok for them to be wildly flagrantly biased because they are merely a "Fair and Balanced" counterbalance to the wild liberal media bias. If they want to play that logic card they would have to give McCain 50% more coverage than Obama but it would have to be 79% unfavorable coverage of McCain while more than doubling their percentage of positive coverage for Obama. That would provide an accurate counterbalance to the bias of the other news networks. Heh.

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Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA [ucla.edu] (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left.

The same mainstream media that a study released a few days ago found have been far more negative in Obama coverage than McCain coverage? To quote from that: "Since the primaries ended, on-air evaluations of Barack Obama have been 72% negative (vs. 28% positive). That's worse than John McCain's coverage, which has been 57% negative (vs. 43% positive) during the same time period."

Yep, leaning FAR left there by bashing the hell out of the left wing candidate while almost praising the right wing one in comparison. Your study was from 2005, maybe it was true then, but apparently it's not now. The press LOVE McCain, don't believe me, believe Chris Matthews who's said "The press loves McCain. We're his base."

Many of your points are valid, but this is something that at best is a toss-up. Personally I see both biases from news sources. I believe it probably comes out about even overall. And yet the right keeps repeating, over, and over, and over, and over that there's this horrid left wing bias. I just don't see it, the only extreme biased media sources I see are ones that are openly for one side or the other. The rest lean one way or another but not extremely so.

Posted AC cause I don't feel like dealing with the karma wars most every post in this thread has generated so far. o_O

I think that you did read it correctly, but you're either confusing the clearly editorial content of the last two segments with the rest of the show, or the only thing you know about the show is that it's on Fox News.

From the pdf at http://www.cmpa.com/releases.html PDF: http://www.cmpa.com/releases/07_12_21_Election_Study.pdf

These results are from CMPA's 2008 ElectionNewsWatch Project. They are based on a scientific content analysis of all 481 election news stories (15 hours 40 minutes of airtime) that aired on the flagship evening news shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX (the first 30 minutes of "Special Report with Brit Hume") from October 1 through December 15, 2007.

Who's Fair and Balanced?: Fox News Channel's coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly - 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates - 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

On the three broadcast networks, opinion on Democratic candidates split 47% positive vs. 53% negative, while evaluations of Republicans were more negative - 40% positive vs. 60% negative. For both parties combined, network evaluations were almost 3 to 2 negative in tone, i.e. 41% positive vs. 59% negative.

I think that you did read it correctly, but you're either confusing the clearly editorial content of the last two segments with the rest of the show, or the only thing you know about the show is that it's on Fox News.

From the pdf at http://www.cmpa.com/releases.html PDF: http://www.cmpa.com/releases/07_12_21_Election_Study.pdf

These results are from CMPA's 2008 ElectionNewsWatch Project. They are based on a scientific content analysis of all 481 election news stories (15 hours 40 minutes of airtime) that aired on the flagship evening news shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX (the first 30 minutes of "Special Report with Brit Hume") from October 1 through December 15, 2007.

Who's Fair and Balanced?: Fox News Channel's coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly - 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates - 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

On the three broadcast networks, opinion on Democratic candidates split 47% positive vs. 53% negative, while evaluations of Republicans were more negative - 40% positive vs. 60% negative. For both parties combined, network evaluations were almost 3 to 2 negative in tone, i.e. 41% positive vs. 59% negative.

http://www.cmpa.com/documents/06.10.31.Bad.news.pd f

From the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Right there on the first page, 77% of Democrat coverage (ABC, NBC, CBS) is favorable, and 12% of Republican coverage is favorable to them. Heck, some news I've seen still mentions Tom Delay (Republicans = corrupt), but I never heard what happened to Rep William Jefferson (D-Louisiana) and his $90k in the freezer. Here in Illinois, two big fund raisers for the governor (a democrat) are in trouble for illegalities with their raising. Yet, I don't consider every democrat in the country corrupt because a few are.

What I don't recall from the 1994 takeover of Congress, was this HUGE push for weeks/months beforehand like they have now, saying how it's a done-deal, Democrats have won, Nancy Pilosi is Speaker, Bush will be impeached immediately, etc.

OT I know, but the CBS bashing is a bit much considering their record vs fox on real reporting. Besides, according to the CMPA, main news networks were more postive toward kerry, but all networks were negative toward bush over the past month. And Fox was 5 to 1 negative toward kerry. Of course, if you want faux news, read fox's summary of the report that says they are fair and balanced.
Fox version

Official study

The study found abc to be the most balanced, but it didnt actually discuss the quality of the evaluations.
--------
The Fox News Difference

Fox News Channel was about as negative towards Bush as the broadcast networks, but Kerry's evaluations were negative by a five-to-one margin. There was little difference in the evaluations of party- and campaign-based partisan sources, but Bush fared over four times as well as Kerry among non-partisan sources.

Dean was attacked all last year, and brutally in Iowa going into the caucus. Gephardt attacked him with total distortions, Kerry attacked him, Kerry and Gephardt supporters together attacked him under cover of the ironically named PAC "Americans for Jobs, Healthcare, and Progressive Values" - the conservative "Club for Growth" attacked his supporters (Are the Bush people afraid?!) and the press was highly negative all year, see:
the Center for Media and Public Affairs

I'd love to see you try to support that statement on the average American, or on the internet donors. Dean's fundraising continued strong into the new year and past the IA and NH losses.

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.