Would somebody tell me how these folks missed 9/11, al-Qaeda and the rest of the reasons behind the War on Terrorism?

Conservative bias in the American news media is "not simply a matter of taste, but of life and death," a panel of liberal radio talk show hosts and representatives of leftist organizations told a group of Democrats on Tuesday.

"There is no more urgent problem facing America today," stated Mark Lloyd, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of 10 panelists who spoke on "Media Bias and the Future of Freedom of the Press."

Gee, the fact that you folks donÂ’t control the media any longer is a greater threat than those who hijack planes and crash them into buildings, a greater threat than those whose avowed aim is the destruction of the United States and its liberties. Seems to me that you have a really confused set of priorities.

And what is even more disturbing is that this little shindig was sponsored by a senior Congressional Democrat, John Conyers. I love this minor detail.

No individual or group dedicated to the monitoring of liberal media bias was invited to the event, though Conyers said he might invite "an independent or a Republican" at a similar forum in six months.

So, you want to talk about media bias without inviting those who might dispute your preconceived biases. After all, allowing conservatives to dispute the assertions of folks like Randi Rhodes, an Air America host who has twice been responsible for threats against the life of the President on her show, would certainly have created a different picture than what you people wanted to set forth. What you have explicitly and intentionally done is set up a biased forum (which you claim is wrong when it is done by the media – how much worse is it when done by a government official?) and plan on doing so again in the future, with perhaps a token representative just to give a patina of fairness.

And it was Rhodes who set out the agenda of the Left – a regime of politically based censorship targeted at the conservative media, explicitly designed to prop up the Democrat Party.

She had three recommendations for addressing media bias. The first was for Congress to adopt standards for labeling a broadcast as news instead of opinion or commentary.

"Second, I think we need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, which served this country well from 1949 through 1987" by guaranteeing "competing viewpoints on issues of public importance."

Rhodes' final suggestion was "to protect our journalists," who "must be free to report and never be penalized with lost access to the people they cover or with retribution from partisan employers.

"If you fail to act," she told the liberal U.S. representatives in attendance, "I will be a member of a minority party for a very long time. That is, if the two-party system can survive this new propaganda machine called the news."

Let’s look at this scheme, which Rhodes tells us is designed to help the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. She wants the government to decide what constitutes news and what constitutes opinion in the media – never mind that much of the “objective” news coming out of the mainstream media has an explicitly anti-conservative spin to it, despite the fact that Rhodes and her fellow Leftists view it as too conservative because it doesn’t tip far enough their direction. She wants the government to tell the broadcast media what they must broadcast by reimposing the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” – something that would be anathema if applied to the print media. Lastly, she wants the government to control hiring and firing decisions in the media, and to force people to talk with reporters against their will – thereby giving members of the media greater rights to access to public officials and document than an ordinary citizen.

But I do think we owe the participants in this little hate-fest a debt of gratitude. After all, they have shown us just how hostile the American Left is to American values. They have shown us how stupid they believe the American public to be – after all, we cannot be trusted to sift fact from opinion or falsehood, and so they want the government to do it on our behalf, just like in Cuba, China, and North Korea.

Posted by: Greg at 12:15 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 741 words, total size 5 kb.