We're living in the golden age of media choice
All media are subjective and biased. It's up to consumers of news and opinion to decide who to read or watch, not political hacks in Washington.
In 2004, when I wrote this, media bias, subjective journalists and partisan 'misinformation' already flourished across the political spectrum. Ideological diversity and choice was important for Americans then. It's more important now, especially with Twitter, Facebook and Google practicing censorship and de-platforming for biased political reasons.
News item: House Democrats Press Cable Providers on Election Fraud Claims: Before a hearing set for Wednesday, Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee asked cable companies what they did to combat “the spread of misinformation.”
October, 2004
by Bill Steigerwald
CBS and its liberal tilt is old news to me.
Long before Spiro Agnew denounced television news broadcasters as a biased "unelected elite," long before Walter Cronkite told us we were losing the Vietnam war, I was being taught by my dad to be suspicious of CBS's nightly version of reality.
He knew back in the early 1960s, before real news choice came to America, that Uncle Walter and the gang of lefties he featured on the "CBS Evening News" were not practicing fair and balanced journalism.
As we ate our family dinner together within ear-shot of the broadcast each night, my dad criticized Cronkite's "straight" news reports and talked back to the liberal commentaries of Eric "The Red" Sevareid and Daniel Schorr.
It was a strange, politically saturated home environment that probably should have been brought to the attention of the local authorities. But I realize now I was lucky to get those early lessons in media criticism from my crazy conservative Republican dad, even if they were hilariously subjective and one-sided.
Thanks to him, I grew up automatically questioning the motives and veracity of the mainstream news media — which, except for an eccentric conservative anomaly on public television named William F. Buckley Jr. — were arguably all-liberal, all the time in the mid-'60s.
I also learned something that most of today's pundits, political party spinmeisters and professional media critics of both the left and right still apparently don't get: objectivity doesn't exist and news, opinion and truth can only come from many different and even contradictory sources.
You'd think that by now everyone with a passing interest in the media would understand that political bias is part of the DNA of the news and opinion life form.
It has been obvious for a rather long time. Left or right, liberal or conservative, CNN or FOX News, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, The Nation or National Review, Salon.com or National Review Online, Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh, they are all biased.
No single source of news and/or opinion — not Time, not CBS, not Al-Jazeera, not the Drudge Report, not slate.com, not Andrewsullivan.com — is fair-and-balanced or spin-and-agenda free. Big, small, old, new, if it is staffed by humans, it is subjective.
Of course, media critics of the left and right can never ever acknowledge this reality, or they'd be out of a job. They prefer to perpetually whine that FOX News is a slick right-wing Republican propaganda mill or NPR is a slick publicly funded Democrat clubhouse for recovering socialists, both of which charges are largely true.
But so what? Consumers of news and opinion, who are much more sophisticated than most critics give them credit for, are not watching FOX or listening to NPR 24 hours a day.
Most of them are taking full advantage of the vast, competitive, amazing, ideologically diverse and ever-expanding multimedia universe of TV programs, radio talk shows, magazines, newspapers, books, documentaries, blogs and Internet sites out there.
Truly enlightened modern consumers have discovered the joys of journalism choice.
They know there's only one way that fairness and balance can be pursued, but never attained, in today's imperfect and hopelessly subjective world of news and opinion — by casting aside the untrustworthy network anchor men and searching for it themselves.