John and Scott below provide examples of the media’s slavishness to the Democratic Party, which is now so obvious that attributing it to bias, or calling it “fake news,” doesn’t go far enough. Let’s call it for what it is: regime propaganda, worthy of the old Soviet Union, or Orwell’s no longer fictional world.
John notes the Time magazine cover about Kamala Harris, for which she refused a request for an interview. But they still slobbered all over her. Maybe she was right to refuse an interview; she might have said something dumb enough to have had to be reported.
But let’s contrast Time‘s Kamala-slobber cover with an older Time cover:
And CBS News isn’t even trying to disguise its propaganda function:
And CBS doubles down on this propaganda function by saying Republicans are “accusing” Harris of stealing the idea:
As the old saying goes, when you watch CBS, you see BS.
Will any reporter think to ask Harris about these inconvenient facts:
How much does this propaganda help Democrats? Here’s a short section from my chapter in the forthcoming book Against the Corporate Media (pre-order your copy today):
[Media] bias has significant consequences, affecting both public opinion and government policy. The political scientist Tim Groseclose, employing multiple and widely accepted advanced statistical techniques of social science, concludes that the left bias of the major news media skews public opinion at least 5 points to the left of where it would be if the general public was exposed to a more balanced spectrum of news and opinions. A 5-point difference may not sound like much, but Groseclose and several other scholars working independently conclude that this skew has made a difference in a significant number of recent elections—all of them favoring the Democratic Party.
These findings can hardly be dismissed as a special grievance or excuse of the right. Let’s not forget that in 2008 Barack Obama said “I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls.” And in 2004 Newsweek’s Evan Thomas remarked on PBS that media favorability toward the Kerry-Edwards ticket “was going to be worth maybe 15 points.” (Thomas later revised his estimate down to 5 points—coincidentally the same estimate as Groseclose and his colleagues.)
[See Tim Groseclose, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (New York: St. Martins, 2011); especially chapters 18 – 22.]
This media bias could account for most if not all of Harris’s bump in the polls since she replaced Biden on the ticket. Overcoming this requires a persistent messaging and ad campaign from Trump and other Republicans. Stay tuned.
