Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Where does media bias come from and are they anti-American?

Real Clear Politics has this:

Cap Weinberger and Wynton Hall point out a very telling thing with this quotes cataloged by Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center:

"The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life....I think they [the 19 hijackers] were brave at the very least." - AOL Time Warner Vice Chairman and CNN founder Ted Turner in February 11 remarks at Brown University, as reported by Gerald Carbone in the February 12, 2002, Providence Journal. The next day, Turner issued a statement: "The attacks of Sept. 11 were despicable acts. I in no way meant to convey otherwise."

Headline: "Our Soldiers in Iraq Aren't Heroes."


"We should not bestow the mantle of heroism on all of them [American men and women in uniform] for simply being where we sent them. Most are victims, not heroes." - CBS News 60 Minutes commentator, Andy Rooney, writing for The Buffalo News, April 12, 2004.

"We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist....To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack." - Steven Jukes, global head of news for Reuters News Service, in an internal memo cited by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz in a September 24, 2001, article.

"What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find." - Dan Rather denigrating the men and women of the Armed Forces by suggesting their decision to serve their nation was a last resort during the CBS Evening News on March 31, 2004, the day four American civilians were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, Iraq.

"The other day, while taking a break by the Al-Hamra Hotel pool...I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials....She came to the point. Not only had she 'known' the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the 'evil' George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. 'Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.'" - British journalist Toby Harnden, a reporter for the London Daily Telegraph, in an article published in the May 15, 2004, edition of The Spectator, a British-based weekly, recounting a conversation at a Baghdad hotel.

"Like beauty, freedom is a perception that lies in the eye of the beholder, and we ignore other nations' versions at our peril. The most dangerous perception of all may be that one's own side has an exclusive claim to either the truth or patriotism." - CBS News foreign correspondent, Allen Pizzey, preaching moral relativism on CBS's Sunday Morning, October 14, 2001.

"I don't support our troops." - Joel Stein, Los Angeles Times columnist, January 26, 2006

"I decided to put on my flag pin tonight--first time.... I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us." - Bill Moyers on PBS's Now, February 28, 2003.

The point? That these are not leftwing bloggers, these are not the Hollywood leftie elite, or the radical wing of the Democratic party. These are leading reporters and media executives.

As the article points out:

"These are some of our nation's leading journalistic lights; people whose words ricochet around the globe and often set the terms of debate for world leaders on issues of global concern."

It boggles the mind.