Liberal media bias?

[ckill1]

I have a favor to ask gents(& ladies)...I have a very liberal coworker wh happens to be busting my balls today. I am at work, have a couple busy patients & don't have time to do the research I need to do to refute this guy. Can anyone here post a couple examples of liberal media bias, especially as it pertains to CNN or MSNBC? I know they are (liberally biased) but am unable to prove it to this guy & he's killing me over what he calls FoxNews' conservative bias. I told him ALL mainstream media was & he should get over it, but he wants proof. if anyone could help me out, I'd very much appreciate it. Eating a quick lunch now, should be able to sneak back to a computer in a few hours. thanks in advance...

Chris

[lockednloaded45]

Here's one article that covers several diff points ) enjoy
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August 22, 2008
Advertising
Seeking More Viewers, MSNBC Turns Left
By BRIAN STELTER
WITH the promotion of Rachel Maddow, the Air America radio host, to a prime-time television spot this week, the longtime third-place cable news network MSNBC cemented its identity as a channel for a liberal audience.

But is that what advertisers want it to be?

MSNBC, which is owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, does not trumpet its shift. But in the 12 years that MSNBC has competed head-to-head with CNN and the Fox News Channel, the partisan lines have never been drawn so neatly.

Advertisers are keeping a close eye on the 24-hour news networks, especially given the heightened interest in the presidential election and the resulting ratings boost for cable news. So far, they say the partisanship of the programming matters less than the ratings the shows can generate.

Fox News and MSNBC earn about two-thirds of their advertising revenues in prime time (although the two networks define the time period differently, with Fox citing 6 p.m. to midnight and MSNBC citing 7 p.m. to 2 a.m.) and any increase in the ratings measured by Nielsen Media Research can translate to higher advertising rates.

That seems to be the impetus for MSNBC’s decision, announced Tuesday, to remove Dan Abrams, the legal analyst who hosts the 9 p.m. hour, and replace him beginning Sept. 8 with Ms. Maddow, who has emerged this year as a popular political commentator.

“We’re not looking for political bent, we’re looking for eyeballs within our target audience,” said Peter Knobloch, the president of the media communications agency RJ Palmer. “That usually doesn’t skew Democratic and Republican; that’s more age, sex and lifestyle.”

There are three distinct options for cable news viewers in prime time: Fox News, which is largely associated with the conservative hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; MSNBC, which is dominated by the Bush administration critic Keith Olbermann; and CNN, which continues to cast itself as a network for independent-minded news consumers.

CNN is positioning itself as the objective option for viewers. A graphic for its 8 p.m. program promises “no bias, no bull,” alluding to Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly on the other channels. Greg D’Alba, chief operating officer for CNN Advertising Sales, said he pitches the reach of CNN’s platforms rather than the opinions, or lack thereof, on the programs.

There is increasing evidence that programming with a loud point of view attracts viewers. The ratings for MSNBC’s signature show, Mr. Olbermann’s “Countdown,” have nearly doubled since August of 2006, when the host started delivering “special comments” criticizing Bush. He now regularly attracts one million viewers every evening, far below Mr. O’Reilly’s average of 2.25 million but far above MSNBC’s previous ratings for the time slot.

And in 2007, for the first time, Fox News raised more advertising revenue than the combination of CNN and the sister network Headline News, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. It estimates that Fox earned $460 million in advertising last year, while CNN and Headline News netted $434 million and MSNBC earned $137 million.

Roger Domal, a vice president and the national sales director for Fox News, a unit of News Corporation, said in an interview Thursday that MSNBC had struggled to gain traction for its previous programs in the time slot. “This is going to be tough for them,” he said.

Mr. Domal said he viewed the partisan nature of cable news as a programming issue rather than an advertising one. “Partisanship doesn’t scare advertisers. What scares advertisers is lower viewership,” he said.

The news networks have had no trouble signing up sponsors for their coverage of the primaries and conventions. CNN, owned by Time Warner, said its sponsors included AT&T, Cisco Systems, Exxon Mobil, Hyundai, AARP, and Sharp Electronics. MSNBC said that, compared to its election coverage in 2004, it had raised five times the revenue from advertiser sponsorships this year. And Fox News, whose political convention sponsors include CSX, Norfolk Southern and Nationwide Insurance, said its advertising inventory during the two events had sold out.

Smaller advertisers with a target audience of a certain political persuasion — activist groups, for example — are already benefiting from the partisan divide on cable news. For example, subscriptions to the liberal opinion journal The Nation spiked after it advertised on MSNBC. Ben Wyskida, the publicity director for The Nation, said the content on “Countdown” dovetails nicely with the topics of the magazine. He noted that the magazine’s writers occasionally appeared on the program, putting faces to the name of the publication for potential readers.

“Our advertising budget for TV is generally pretty shoestring,” Mr. Wyskida said. With “Countdown,” he said, “We get a pretty good bang for our buck.”

MSNBC hopes that more of Mr. Olbermann’s viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 — 334,000 on an average night in July — will stay tuned at 9 for the “The Rachel Maddow Show.” (The New York Times and NBC News, the parent of MSNBC, have a content-sharing arrangement for political coverage.)

In July more than half of Mr. Olbermann’s viewers in that demographic tuned out during Mr. Abrams’s show. By contrast, the 9 p.m. program on Fox News, “Hannity & Colmes,” is able to hold onto four-fifths of the 444,000 25- to 54-year-old viewers of the 8 p.m. “The O’Reilly Factor.” Talking to Mr. Olbermann on “Countdown” Tuesday, Ms. Maddow acknowledged the importance of the lead-in.

“I will be talking politics, and trying to convince ‘Countdown’ viewers to hang out with me after they hang out with you,” she said.

Fox News, although viewed by many liberals as a bastion of conservative influence, has carefully avoided labeling itself as anything but “fair and balanced.” The network features Alan Colmes, a liberal, on “Hannity & Colmes,” and Greta Van Susteren, who rarely espouses political views, at 10 p.m.

But for years, some liberals have bemoaned what they perceive to be an imbalance on cable news: an absence of prominent progressives on TV. “Happy Now?” Mr. Olbermann asked in a blog post on Daily Kos, a liberal Web site, as he informally announced Mr. Maddow’s promotion on Tuesday. He wrote that the fans who had been lobbying for Ms. Maddow to host a show “had something to do with it.”

Asked whether MSNBC will acknowledge that its prime-time programming tilts to the left, the network spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, responded: “Don’t make a judgment about the show until you see it. Our goal is to have programs with the smartest takes on the day’s developments, and that’s what Rachel brings to the table.”

[lockednloaded45]

And who could forget all the "mainstream medias " ignoring the Acorn scandle??
Blogs Home » News » Politics » Toby Harnden
Toby Harnden
Toby Harnden is the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC. More about Toby. Contact toby.harnden@telegraph-usa.com. ACORN story fells the big oaks of mainstream media

By Toby Harnden World Last updated: September 18th, 2009

50 Comments

If there’s one story that’s had it all in the past week it’s the series of undercover reporting stings that have uncovered the true nature of ACORN – the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now. It’s got sex, misuse of taxpayer funds, the condoning of illegal activity by officials and connections to Barack Obama.

You would be forgiven for having missed it, however, because it’s got almost no play in the mainstream media. It wasn’t the “New York Times”, CNN or NBC who broke the story. Rather, it was two twenty-something independents with a few thousand dollars, a bit of time and a lot of guts.

The story first appeared on Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and was then enthusiastically pushed by the Drudge Report and Fox News. Oh, so that makes it just a piece of scurrilous, racist “gotcha” journalism does it? Listen to the disdain of Charlie Gibson, the ABC anchor, here and his ignorance of a blockbuster story.

Don’t believe me? Well have a listen to this well-known member of the vast Right-wing conspiracy (not) Jon Stewart, who mocks the smug complacency of liberals and the torpor of the mainstream media by calling it how it is here.

[questor]

If you want media bias, visit this site:

http://newsbusters.org/

[Terry_P]

From the news busters web site:

http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/blog/ilc285709320.html

During Tuesday night's coverage of the Massachusetts special election, CNN and MSNBC aired only a fraction of the Republican candidate's speech. Fox News Channel aired both candidates' speeches in their entirety.

When Martha Coakley (D) took the podium to concede the election, all three channels aired most or all of the eight-minute speech. However, Republican Scott Brown's address was cut short on CNN after just seven minutes. On MSNBC Keith Olbermann cut Brown's mic and instead attacked the Republican candidate, talked about "teabaggers", and ran commercials. CNN only ran 26% of Brown's speech, while MSNBC aired 37%. Fox News Channel carried 100% of both speeches:

[ponycar17]

Heck, the Tea Party movement is an example. No major networks except Fox (and they're cable) covered the movement for its sheer magnitude and breadth. Now, Scott Brown is elected in a surprise upset of a Democrat moron in MA in large part due to the Conservative Tea Party Express backing. Do you think the media underreported the movement's effect? Dang right!

Here's a more direct example done by the PEW Media Research Center during the 2008 elections.

THE COLOR OF NEWS
October 29, 2008
HOW DIFFERENT MEDIA HAVE COVERED THE GENERAL ELECTION
When it comes to coverage of the campaign for president 2008, where one goes for news makes a difference, according to a new study.

In cable, the evidence firmly suggests there now really is an ideological divide between two of the three channels, at least in their coverage of the campaign.
Things look much better for Barack Obama—and much worse for John McCain—on MSNBC than in most other news outlets. On the Fox News Channel, the coverage of the presidential candidates is something of a mirror image of that seen on MSNBC.

The tone of CNN’s coverage, meanwhile, lay somewhere in the middle of the cable spectrum, and was generally more negative than the press overall.

On the evening newscasts of the three traditional networks, in contrast, there is no such ideological split. Indeed, on the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC, coverage tends to be more neutral and generally less negative than elsewhere. On the network morning shows, Sarah Palin is a bigger story than she is in the media generally.

And on NBC News programs, there was no reflection of the tendency of its cable sibling MSNBC toward more favorable coverage of Democrats and more negative of Republicans than the norm.

Online, meanwhile, polling tended to drive the news. And on the front pages of newspapers, which often have the day-after story, things look tougher for John McCain than they tend to in the media overall.

These are some of the findings of the study, which examined 2,412 stories from 48 outlets during the time period from September 8 to October 16. [1] The report is a companion to a study released October 22 about the tone of coverage overall. This new report breaks down the coverage of tone by specific media sectors—print, cable news, network television and online.

Among the findings:

MSNBC stood out for having less negative coverage of Obama than the press generally (14% of stories vs. 29% in the press overall) and for having more negative stories about McCain (73% of its coverage vs. 57% in the press overall).
On Fox News, in contrast, coverage of Obama was more negative than the norm (40% of stories vs. 29% overall) and less positive (25% of stories vs. 36% generally). For McCain, the news channel was somewhat more positive (22% vs. 14% in the press overall) and substantially less negative (40% vs. 57% in the press overall). Yet even here, his negative stories outweighed positive ones by almost 2 to 1.
CNN fell distinctly in the middle of the three cable channels when it came to tone. In general, the tone of its coverage was closer than any other cable news channel to the press overall, though also somewhat more negative than the media overall.
The distinct tone of MSNBC—more positive toward Democrats and more negative toward Republicans—was not reflected in the coverage of its broadcast sibling, NBC News. Even though it has correspondents appear on their cable shows and even anchor some programs on there, the broadcast channel showed no such ideological tilt. Indeed, NBC’s coverage of Palin was the most positive of any TV organization studied, including Fox News.
At night, the newscasts of the three traditional broadcast networks stood out for being more neutral—and also less negative—than most other news outlets. The morning shows of the networks, by contrast, more closely resembled the media generally in tone. That might surprise some who imagined those morning programs were somehow easier on political figures. Overall, 44% of the morning show stories were clearly negative, compared with 34% on the nightly news and 42% in the press overall.
These findings augment what was learned from a broader report on campaign media coverage released a week earlier entitled “Winning the Media Campaign: How the Press Reported the 2008 General Election.” That study found that in the media overall—a sample of 43 outlets studied in the six weeks following the conventions through the last debate—Barack Obama’s coverage was somewhat more positive than negative (36% vs. 29%), while John McCain’s, in contrast, was substantially negative (57% vs. 14% positive). The report concluded that this, in significant part, reflected and magnified the horse race and direction of the polls.



FOOTNOTE:
1. Secondary coding was performed on a subset of the campaign stories to further examine the tone of the coverage. That sample included 857 stories from 43 outlets.

From http://www.journalism.org/node/13436

[Carne Frio]

Originally Posted by ckill1

I have a favor to ask gents(& ladies)...I have a very liberal coworker wh happens to be busting my balls today. I am at work, have a couple busy patients & don't have time to do the research I need to do to refute this guy. Can anyone here post a couple examples of liberal media bias, especially as it pertains to CNN or MSNBC? I know they are (liberally biased) but am unable to prove it to this guy & he's killing me over what he calls FoxNews' conservative bias. I told him ALL mainstream media was & he should get over it, but he wants proof. if anyone could help me out, I'd very much appreciate it. Eating a quick lunch now, should be able to sneak back to a computer in a few hours. thanks in advance...

Chris

Why bother to refute ? If he is a true Libtard then proof will not matter
to him and you are just playing his game in the arguing. I worked
in the health care industry for 30 years and would just advise my lib
coworkers to not spout any political talk towards me or that they would
hear from HR for a harassment charge. It worked and since the
majority of the power structure (the docs) were conservatives, it
was effective.

[Bobitis]

Originally Posted by Carne Frio

Why bother to refute ? If he is a true Libtard then proof will not matter
to him and you are just playing his game in the arguing. I worked
in the health care industry for 30 years and would just advise my lib
coworkers to not spout any political talk towards me or that they would
hear from HR for a harassment charge. It worked and since the
majority of the power structure (the docs) were conservatives, it
was effective.

Agreed.
You'll never change a liberals mind.
Diffuse the moment by not engaging in it.

That'll really get em worked up.

[ponycar17]

Originally Posted by Bobitis

Agreed.
You'll never change a liberals mind.
Diffuse the moment by not engaging in it.

That'll really get em worked up.

Oh, but I have a hobby that's probably not very healthy. I'm a numbers guy and memorize statistics pertinent to my way of thinking. I also save data all the time relevant to different subjects. When the liberals start their tirade I rip them a new rear orifice with an avalanche of data. It's rather fun...

[bcj1755]

Originally Posted by Carne Frio

Why bother to refute ? If he is a true Libtard then proof will not matter
to him and you are just playing his game in the arguing. I worked
in the health care industry for 30 years and would just advise my lib
coworkers to not spout any political talk towards me or that they would
hear from HR for a harassment charge. It worked and since the
majority of the power structure (the docs) were conservatives, it
was effective.

Bingo. You can't change the mind of an Obamite, they're too busy obeying the will of the collective.

[red14]

First of all, liberals think they are smarter than conservatives. They will never listen to conservatives. They only way they will change their mind is, if someone (liberal) tells them too.

[Redhand]

Just repeatly remind your friend that the media doesn't make a big play when the liberals"LOSE ONE" laugh and walk away.

[ampaterry]

Interisting topic -

Yesterday, the New York Times carried shocked articles about the upset in the MA special senate race.

Today, they are all into the spin on it; They claim the Tea Party movement operated 'under the radar', and the liberals ignored the race because they thought they had it sewn up.

Has anyone EVER seen ANY tea party action done in SECRET???? Although the operations are truly ignored by most media, they are always right out in the public eye for anyone interested to see!

And the Liberals IGNORED the race in MA?
Who the heck was that guy that showed up there campaigning for Coakley? He sure bore a striking resemblance to one Barak Husein Obama (May his name be accursed).
Gee, I wonder who would have shown up to support her if they had NOT ignored the race? Perhaps a trifecta of the Pope, Queen of England and President of the United Nations.

Three elections since The Enlightened One took office, and all three went against the Dem's!

Hey, Washington!
Are you GETTING IT YET???

[ckill1]

Thank you all! Just what I was looking for...

Chris

[bcj1755]

Originally Posted by ampaterry

Perhaps a trifecta of the Pope, Queen of England and President of the United Nations.

Isn't Barry already trying to become that trifecta?

[ampaterry]

Originally Posted by bcj1755

Isn't Barry already trying to become that trifecta?

To quote Dirty Harry;
He is a legend in his own mind!

[Blue Tiger]

Why do you people always call leftists liberals n progressives? What's up with that? Is it that you believe they are nice, tolerant people who can do no harm and actually want to improve society and that rightists are repressive, intolerant, and oppose all progress? You'll never make convincing arguments if you keep calling your opponents the good guys when they are the bad guys. You're only buying into the artificial construct and propagandistic language created by the hypocritical, self-righteous, and condescending left.

[red14]

Progressives is a brand given to a politcal movement, started in the 1920's I believe. Hillary even mentioned it in a debate in 08. To me it's another name for Socialists. It is not a term of endearment. It is a label, and not a good one, IMHO.

[Suwannee Tim]

To a liberal the mainstream media is.....well, mainstream, fair and ballanced and everything else is right wing propoganda. It is all a matter of world view. You might try this:

Media Research Center

Not that it will do any good, at least not until your friend gets mugged by reality.

[ponycar17]

I wouldn't consider the term 'progressive' to be a good thing any more than I would consider the term 'conservative' to be a bad thing. 'Progressive' may be, as you say Blue Tiger a bit of a sugar coated term but it is indeed not positive. Those on the right (or conservative) side want to see our country remain true to her founding principles, while the progressives want to tear it down and replace it with something much different.

[Terry_P]

Originally Posted by ampaterry

Interisting topic -

They claim the Tea Party movement operated 'under the radar'

They dressed up like indians and threw pictures of Kennedy into the Chappaquiddick River.

[tcox4freedom]

Originally Posted by Blue Tiger

Why do you people always call leftists liberals n progressives? What's up with that? Is it that you believe they are nice, tolerant people who can do no harm and actually want to improve society and that rightists are repressive, intolerant, and oppose all progress? You'll never make convincing arguments if you keep calling your opponents the good guys when they are the bad guys. You're only buying into the artificial construct and propagandistic language created by the hypocritical, self-righteous, and condescending left.

Liberal or Progressive are not offensive terms. "You people" however is an offensive term. It shows blatent disrespect to those that you are addressing.

BTW;
Only "Liberals" or "Progressives" seem to have a problem with being catagorized as such. I know of NO conservative who takes offense at being called a "Conservative". However, I do know that on another forum a "Survival" forum no less, calling a Liberal a "Liberal" will get you BANNED!