Argexpat, your posts are getting pretty hostile. Is someone getting a little bitter about being repeatedly proven wrong?
If it makes you feel any better, here is some historical proof that further demonstrates how wrong you are in defending the liberal media.
John Martin of ABC News • reported on a rally in October 1989 in support of the homeless. “They came here from all over the country, the rich, the famous, the ordinary, the down-and-out. They staged the biggest rally in behalf of the homeless since the Reagan Revolution forced severe cutbacks in government housing programs.”
In• December 1989 Tom Brokaw said, “Reagan, as commander in chief, was the military’s best friend. He gave the Pentagon almost everything it wanted.” Then they started showing pictures of homeless people and Brokaw said, “Social programs? They suffered under Reagan. But he refused to see the cause and effect.”
In November of 1990, Garrick Utley was with NBC News. He said,• “In the 1980s, the Reagan years, the amount of government money spent to build low-income housing was cut drastically. Then, the homeless began to appear on streets and in doorsteps.
Goldberg writes about 1999 column by editor and former Carter employee, Philip Terzian, in which he details the results of a Village Voice study. The study found that in 1988 the New York Times ran fifty stories on homelessness, including five on page one. But a decade later, in 1998, the New York Times ran only ten stories, and none on page one. Similarly, the Media Research Center found that in 1990, while George Bush was in office, there were seventy-one homelessness stories, but in 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, that number went down to just nine. And he adds that the shift in coverage was clearly not due to homelessness abruptly vanishing all over the country in two years under Bill Clinton.
Goldberg cites a May 22, 1989 New York Times story by Gina Colata as being the first groundbreaking moment in which the mainstream media was willing to acknowledge the overwhelming connection between homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse. And he went on to explain how incapable traditional liberal models of intervention- like housing programs- were of fixing or even treating addicts.
He also refers to a former homeless man, Lee Stringer, who wrote in his book Grand Central Winter that, “When the homeless ceased to be portrayed as blameless victims, people ceased to care. The image became one of people who might just have some complicity in their circumstances, and that changed the mood greatly.”
Later in the book, Goldberg writes about a now famous survey conducted by the Freedom Forum and the Roper Center-two highly reputable, independent groups. The survey of 139 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents found that Washington journalists are far more liberal and far more Democratic than the average American voter.
89% of journalists• said they voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, compared with just 43% of non-journalist voters.
7% of journalists voted for George Bush, while 37%• of the voters did.
2% of the news people voted for Ross Perot while 19% of• the electorate did.
50% of journalists said they were Democrats, while 4%• said they were Republicans.
61% of journalists said they were “liberal” or• “moderate to liberal,” while only 9% said they were “conservative” or ”moderate to conservative.”
59% of journalists said the Republican Contract with• America was “an election-year ploy,” while only 3% said it was “serious.”
To thoroughly contrast this with the average American, Goldberg shows the results of a 1985 nationwide poll taken by the Los Angeles Times.
23% of the public• said they were liberal, while 55% of journalists said they were.
49% of the• public was for abortion rights, while 82% of journalists were.
74% of the• public was for prayer in schools, while 25% of journalists were.
75% of the• public was for the death penalty, while 47% of journalists were.
50% of the• public was for stricter gun controls, while 78% of journalists were.
In addition to facts and figures, Goldberg also includes the following rhetorical questions (among others) about subtle forms of media bias:
“Why does• Bob Schieffer tell us that John Ashcroft has conservative views, but that the organizations that opposed him in the confirmation hearings were simply ‘a collection of rights groups?’”
“Why does he [Dan Rather] feel the need, I• wonder, to tell us about President Bush’s ‘Republican-right agenda?’ The man was in office less than a week and already Dan has spotted a ‘Republican-right agenda.’ Why, I wonder, did he never talk about President Clinton and his ‘Democratic-left agenda?’”
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In 2004, Kluwer Academic Publishers published an academic, peer-reviewed study on the media’s calling of states for Bush and Gore in 2000.
They found that states leaning even slightly for Gore were called for him almost instantly, while even states that went heavily for Bush from the beginning by double-digit leads took hours for the media to call.
And in one case, the media even called a state that was leaning towards Bush (according to their multi-million dollar VNS machine) for Gore-Florida. This early call happened while the rigidly conservative panhandle was still voting, and there were consequently 10,000 less votes (all of which probably would have gone to Bush) in the panhandle than in the last several elections. This all happened despite the media being specifically asked by K. Harris, in writing, not to call the state until all the voting was done. The liberal media CREATED the 2000 debacle.