Category: Media Bias

The Case of the Missing Young Blonde

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Twenty-year-old Holly Bobo is missing, believed to have been abducted April 13 from her family’s home in rural Decatur County, Tennessee:

Police say they believe the alleged abductor may be from the area and possibly acquainted with Bobo and her family. The kidnapper is described as a white man, about 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing 200 pounds.

Bobo is 5-foot-3 and 110 pounds. She is the cousin of country singer Whitney Duncan. There is an $80,000 reward in the case. Here’s a Fox News report on the latest development in the case:

Of course, this is a terrible ordeal for the Bobo family, their friends and the entire community. From the perspective of media criticism, there is a distinct phenomenon in such cases: Crimes against attractive young women and girls tend to get far more TV coverage than do similar crimes when perpetrated against less attractive victims.

You saw this phenomenon, for example, in the Jon Benet Ramsey case and the Natalee Holloway case. Other than the fact that the victims were young pretty females, how were those crimes different — more unusual or newsworthy — than hundreds of other crimes committed every year? Old people, ugly people, fat people, men and boys: Hundreds of such people fall victim to foul play every year, and yet their fates never become fodder for national TV news in the way that crimes against attractive young females do.

More than anything else, this reflects two basic facts:

  1. Television is a visual medium, which favors very attractive people as subjects.
  2. Female victims naturally evoke more sympathy, because of their presumed greater vulnerability.

Reporting on The Case of the Missing Young Blonde is good for TV ratings and television news is a business — an extremely cynical business, at that. This does not diminish the horror experienced by the friends, families and neighbors of Holly Bobo, but it does explain why her disappearance is treated as national news, while so many other crime victims are never noticed by the networks.


Cokie Roberts Must Be Telepathic

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by Smitty (via Right Wing Video)

After there is a liberation of talk shows, there needs to be a rule: sweeping, idiotic generalizations must be met with a pie in the face. Sure, these intellectual shortcuts are easy to throw out there, we can all flail ourselves. But let’s work to cut it out. I’m not certain all Lefties are as reprehensible as Cokie here, attacking ‘People’ for calling President Obama Muslim because they can’t say ‘I Don’t Like Him Cause He’s Black’. No one’s heart is truly knowable to less than the Almighty; the protestations of Christianity have to be taken at face value. Nor does the President’s train wreck record have anything to do with the genetics of the case: the record draws 32 feet of static head on its own (i.e., it sucks like hard vacuum).
So, get stuffed, Cokie: your statement tells us nothing except you’re handy with cheap rhetorical devices.

The Futility of Class Warfare Rhetoric

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Graphic: RushLimbaugh.com via Hot Air Pundit

Demonizing the rich may work as politics for Democrats, but the problem is that it fails as policy. One could argue that Americans are undertaxed in general, and that some kind of across-the-board rate increase (or closing of loopholes) is therefore necessary for the purpose of enhancing federal revenue to eliminate the deficit.

When I say “one could argue” this, I don’t actually mean to make such an argument. My belief is that overspending, not undertaxation, is to blame for the deficit. However, if liberals wish to make deficit reduction the putative goal of their argument for raising taxes, they must base that argument on an assertion of general undertaxation and a need for across-the-board increases, rather than attempting to persuade Americans that the rich in particular need to pay more taxes. If the top 25% of earners pay 86% of all federal income taxes, and the bottom 50% of earners provide only 3% of such revenue, how can anyone plausibly claim that the budget deficit is a result of “tax cuts for the rich”? This is especially so because, as the chart above points out, the share of taxes paid by the “rich” actually increased during Bush’s presidency.

Well, they’re liberals — no fair citing facts. Continue reading The Futility of Class Warfare Rhetoric →

Hanging With Breitbart

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We must all hang together or surely we shall all hang separately, so this evening I’ll be hanging out at a reception in Washington, DC, to celebrate the publication of Andrew Breitbart’s new book Righteous Indignation. Let’s hope Martin Bashir doesn’t show up to pester the guest of honor.

Breitbart points out the obvious: “You’re trying to insinuate that I’m a racist here, which is what MSNBC does to conservatives every single day.” What Bashir is doing is engaging in what I call the mala fides attack: Rather than discussing policy or politics, let’s just accuse the other side of acting on malicious motives.

In point of fact, it doesn’t make an iota of difference whether Breitbart is a “racist,” define the term however you will. If tomorrow, it were revealed that Breitbart is in fact the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, that disclosure would have no relevance to whether his statements about politics or policy are true or false. By attempting to depict Breitbart as a racist, however, Bashir seeks to pre-emptively discredit Breitbart, so that the MSNBC audience is given the clear message: “Don’t believe anything he says — he’s one of Them!”

And this is what liberalism has been reduced to: The politics of demonization, the argument that you should vote Democrat not because Democrats have better policies, but because Republicans are bad people. So you’re paying over $4 a gallon for gas, you’re unemployed, you’re underwater on your mortgage and there is no near-term prospect for improvement — but you can congratulate yourself on your moral superiority, because at least you never voted Republican!

Lawrence O’Donnell May Be A Knob, But That’s Not A Crime On Its Own

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by Smitty

I couldn’t agree less with O’Donnell’s thesis that Americans are Socialists, not rugged individualists.Rather than just reject him entirely, though, we need to allow that there is a healthy chunk of the population with an unhealthy taste for the socialist whip. They exist. Stupid people. Fortunately, their stupidity often extends to their mating habits, with predictable non-results.
To the extent O’Donnell has a point, I submit that arguing the Socialist/individualist question at the national level is itself the problem. Let Massachusetts or California be as Socialist as they want to be, and don’t mess with Texas. We must halt the redistribution of wealth that lets the federal government be the collection agent for fools. O’Donnell may lack the intellectual honesty to deal with the results of prying Socialist states away from the federal tit. Enforcing sanity on O’Donnell is not our task. Protecting our wallets from the idiocy of O’Donnell and his ilk, however, is.

New Motherf–g Tone, Libya War Edition

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“I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say, we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”
— Hillary Clinton, April 2003

“Republicans are attacking the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war! . . . There should be no debate: we ought to be kicking [Moammar Qaddafi’s] ass . . . Whose side are you on? Are you with the terrorists, Sarah [Palin], or are you with the President of the United States? . . . And I have to ask the question tonight: Where is the patriotism from all of these war-hawks? Where’s the patriotism of the Republican Party?”
— Ed Schultz, MSNBC, March 2011

Now, try to stop laughing at Ed Schultz long enough to imagine how Keith Olbermann’s head would explode if he ever saw a story like this about George W. Bush:

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

A secret order for covert war? In an Arab country with lots of oil? Without approval from Congress? Consulting with Bill Kristol?

Back in the day, 2006-2008, that would have merited a 5,000-word “Special Comment” from Olbermann: “Have you no shame, sir?”

PREVIOUSLY:

Media Decides to Be the Decider

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So, after a couple hours offline, I return to the computer, check Memorandum, and see headlines like these:

What’s going on here is that (a) the liberal media are once again trying to tell the Republican Party what to do, and (b) some Republicans — including a celebrity millionaire trying to promote his reality-TV career — are playing along with this game.

As a conservative, being able to think clearly about politics requires an enormous effort to see through the layers of tendentious bovine excrement smeared across the public mind. Understand, for example:

  • Members of Congress are fully authorized to vote their consciences without regard for how their votes would be portrayed by a hostile press.
  • When a reporter asks a question, “no comment” is an acceptable response.
  • Anonymous “insiders” are a dime a dozen in politics, and every time you see an anonymous source quoted in a story, you have every right to ask yourself, “What’s his agenda? What’s in it for him? Whose ox is this anonymous source trying to gore?”
  • Polls taken many months in advance of an election are a dubious predictor of the actual result, otherwise Charlie Crist would be a Republican senator and Martha Coakley would be a Democratic senator.

I’m not saying that people should ignore the news. I’m saying that people need to keep in mind that the media have their own agendas ( including trying to gin up readership and TV viewership) and that this imposes on news-consumers the burden of ignoring the hype and spin to find the actual facts buried beneath the bovine excrement.

And Republicans who try to advance their own narrow interests by playing along with the liberal media’s game — to the general detriment of the conservative cause — do not deserve admiration as “leaders.”

Stuff the NY Times Doesn’t Mention

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Who promotes racism today? The freaking media, that’s who.

It’s their tiptoe-around-unfortunate-facts attitude — this politically-correct worldview whose peculiar biases are never explicitly admitted, but which we must instead attempt to infer by occasional clues — that creates a distinct species of suspicion, because there’s this cone of silence surrounding things people know but can never say out loud. (The blessed exception being comedians, the best of whom can good-naturedly joke about ethnic stereotypes and make us laugh.) So then something happens, like 17 Mexican illegals getting killed or injured when a minivan wrecks in a high-speed chase on a highway in Texas or Arizona, which pops up as a tiny four-paragraph story out of Phoenix or Waco, and people say, “What the hell? Why isn’t the national media reporting this story in the context of our country being invaded to the tune a million illegals a year, huh?”

It’s like there’s a conspiracy, see? Continue reading Stuff the NY Times Doesn’t Mention →