The Liberal Media: Fact or Fiction? Part 5

A week-long look at bias in mainstream American media

Part 5: Anatomy of a Calamity

"My own party spent millions to stop me from becoming the nominee AND Obama has the support of nearly every demographic in the country? Oh, this is going to be bad. Really, really bad."

By Tyrone  L. Heppard  

   At this point, it’s pretty much clear that there is no such thing as a media bias; there’s only a small group of people with power who would like the rest of us to believe there is a bias and that it is slanted in favor of the left. But even though the people generally don't buy it, that didn't stop the Romney campaign from trying the same stagnant excuse his compatriots have been using for decades.

   Anyone who followed Romney’s struggle (and that’s truly what it was – a struggle; I believe “rolling calamity” is the term being thrown about now) leading up to him becoming the presidential nominee should’ve noticed one thing. As far as the media is concerned, not even liberals were going out of their way to paint the former governor of Massachusetts in a bad light; he did a fantastic job all by himself. Let’s take a look back shall we?

   From off-color comments like, “I enjoy firing people” and, “I’m not worried about poor people”, to calling Russia our greatest political foe in the world, liking the height of Michigan’s trees, and saying 47 percent of Americans don’t take personal responsibility for their lives, Mitt Romney had portrayed himself as the less-than-desirable GOP nominee for a while.

"I got $10,000 that says you'll never see me again if Obama wins..."

   It’s interesting to see how the republican base did everything they could to try and distance itself from Mitt Romney just to end up stuck with him anyway. After all, in Romney, we see a Mormon (weird enough already…) who had to deal with trying to show the differences between a health care plan he instituted as governor and President Obama’s (because it looks an awful lot like the one republicans are complaining about right now). 

  He had to stick up for the wealthy (because almost every American was at one of the hundreds of Occupy protests last year addressing the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us), and he had to support fighting a possible war with Israel against Iran (even after a majority of Americans said they’re sick of war and want their friends a family back; provided they weren’t killed in combat).

   To any political junkie, it’s clear that the Mitt Romney isn’t your traditional republican candidate, and even if you don’t have conservative viewpoints, you have to be impressed with the way that Romney bumbled and stumbled his way to the GOP’s nomination.

   With that being the case, most of us would agree that earlier on, the Romney campaign needed to bring their base together before they started worrying about how to unite the country. And, at first, it seemed like they found a way to do that. They decided to go to that old stand-by: the liberal media bias.

   It was actually a brilliant plan. For a “non-traditional” republican like Romney looking for the support of the party, nothing says you’re a conservative more than blaming the left when you say/do something a majority of the people (or, of your party for that matter) don’t agree with while you’re in front of a news camera.

Romney probably realized this soon after Rick Santorum dropped out of the race and, like any good republican; he tried to play up the liberal media bias angle. 

   On conservative Andrew Breitbart’s radio show in April he said, “Many in the media are inclined to do the president’s bidding. I know that’s an uphill battle we fight with the media generally, but fortunately, there are other voices… which have, in many cases, a lot more credibility.”

I totally would have used this as my official presidential photo

  What’s funny is that Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s polls show that from January 2, until April 15 – when he made those remarks – Romney’s coverage had been 39 percent positive and 34 percent negative. President Obama would have no idea what that felt like, seeing as how at that point, there wasn’t a single week where positive coverage for him outweighed the negative. How did this happen? The answer shouldn’t be that surprising. It turns out that it was due to all of the republican candidates (including Mitt Romney) bashing the president at their televised campaign stops and during all of those televised debates.

   You remember the republican debates, right?! The debates the ‘liberal’ media would hold three to four of in one week (during prime time hours). The debates with campaign stops in between where the ‘liberal’ TV news outlets would broadcast live for 15-20 minutes and air random clips from throughout the day. The debates and campaign stops that the ‘liberal’ media frequently took sound bites and talking points from; the ones they talked into the ground with pundits for hours and hours. Those debates and those press campaign stops. Plus, the whole Supreme Court-challenge-to-a-healthcare-bill thing didn’t help Barack Obama either.

   On top of that, data shows that out of all the republicans running for president, the media treated Romney the best. Go Figure! Pew Research says that Romney was treated most favorably while Santorum was treated just as bad as Obama. Newt Gingrich only got positive coverage after he won South Carolina (but that only lasted a week), and Ron Paul?

   Well, the media barely covered Ron Paul, and that might sound like liberal media bias. However, if you do some research on what Ron Paul stands for and what a traditional conservative believes in, it wouldn’t be hard to understand why politically nobody even want to acknowledge him: Ron Paul and the republican base have virtually nothing in common and some of his views were a little too extreme for even the bluest of liberals.

   With this helpful data from Pew Research we learned that the myth of a liberal media bias is a fundamental part in hiding the fact that there isn't a media bias. In addition, we’ve learned that as a conservative, it’s you’re duty to say that you’re a victim of the “leftist propaganda machine”, even if it’s treated you pretty well.

  So now that future journalists know that they are probably going to be accused of working for hippies and communists for a majority of their careers, they should remember that their job isn't just to tell us stories; it's to deliver the truth to the American people as often as possible.

Tomorrow: Part 6: Mandate of The Fourth Estate