A Brief Example Of Media Bias

I SAW A FRONT PAGE ARTICLE today (February 24th, 2006) that can serve as a simple example of how the mainstream media is cleverly biasing its stories in favor of a liberal agenda.

This was in USA Today. Can we agree this is part of the "mainstream media?" There was rioting in several parts of Iraq and a hundred people died. The authors of the article said flat out in the first paragraph, that this kind of violence is "threatening to spark civil war."

Then they say that the Iraqi president "joined others in Iraq in expressing concern that the nation was headed toward a bloody civil war."

So far, so good. Then, of course, they come to mentioning what the Bush administration thinks about it. The article says, "Throughout the administration, officials tried to play down concerns that Iraq was on the brink of civil war."

Check out that wording. First of all, they attribute a motive to what the Bush administration said. And by using the words "tried" it implies failure. The authors did neither of these things with any statements by others earlier in the article. To be fair and unbiased, they would either simply quote what the administration said (because that's what they did with their own statement and the Iraqi president's statement). Or they would also attribute a motive to the other statements. For example, "The Iraqi president tried to alarm people by saying that civil war might break out."

This is an example of the constant and unrelenting bias of the mainstream media, against war and against the conservative agenda. And this is combined with a bias toward negative, frightening news.

Learn more about how the bias happens (if it was blatant, they couldn't get away with it). They have to be clever, and they are. Read Weapons Of Mass Distortion.