The last refuge of crybaby Deaniacs: Media bias

All the lefty bloggers are in a froth over a Salon article by Eric Boehlert claiming that Howard Dean is a victim of bias by the corporate-conservative press.

Oliver Willis gets paranoid: “Today's story from Salon shows how the media and their right-wing bretheren [sic] are on the edge of controlling another election for us.” Kos darkly intones: “This is probably the most important piece written about Dean's media coverage to date. Read it. Even if your guy isn't Dean. Our nominee will receive the same treatment regardless of who he eventually is.” Atrios: “Dean's the frontrunner so they're doing it to him, mostly, but the press is just picking up right where they left off in 2000 with Gore. It's a sad, sorry, pathetic state of affairs.” The aptly named Not Geniuses says: “But the only thing crazier than not getting some news from mainstream media is getting all news from it.”

Ah, yes, remember how the media hammered endlessly on Al “I invented the Internet” Gore? They focused on his sighing during the debates! They nitpicked on his earth tone suits! Bias! Except here are the results from a Pew Research Center study on how Americans viewed the media’s preferences in 2000:



So by a 2-1 margin, Americans felt that the national press wanted Gore to win the election. Yet, to believe the Kos-Krowd, the press was biased against Gore. Sure.

Fox News (and their ever rising ratings) drives the liberals insane. So much so that they forget the rest of the media which has been well-established as a bastion of left-wing thought, reporting, and bias:

Evidence of how hard journalists lean to the left was provided by S. Robert Lichter, then with George Washington University, in his groundbreaking 1980 survey of the media elite. Lichter's findings were authoritatively confirmed by the American Association of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1988 and 1997 surveys. The most recent ASNE study surveyed 1,037 newspaper reporters found 61 percent identified themselves as/leaning "liberal/Democratic" compared to only 15 percent who identified themselves as/leaning "conservative/Republican."

Read much more in this Media Research Center special report: Media Bias Basics. Here, for example, is a 2001 breakdown of journalists political leanings from a Kaiser Family Foundation study:



The “conservative” media complaint a fallacious excuse used whenever liberals don’t get their way. It was untrue for Gore and now it’s untrue for Dean. Suck it up, Deaniacs.