As somebody who once loved journalism, thrilled to the pursuit of a story, and felt it was an honorable way to earn my bread, I never wanted to grow up and be a media grump.
But the media’s liberal bias, increasingly blatant, has driven me to be just that — a media grump.
Here are some recent instances of bias as reported by the invaluable Media Research Center:
“A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study released on Friday documented that, thanks to the Bush tax cuts, the top 20 percent of taxpayers saw their share of all income taxes collected rise while the burden borne by the middle 20 percent fell. But the media highlighted data which either pointed out the self-evidently obvious and thus hardly newsworthy — that the higher your income the larger the numeric value of your tax cut — or by claiming the tax cuts shifted the tax burden away from the wealthy, a contention based upon including taxes untouched by the Bush plan. NBC showcased a graphic which announced that the ’richest one percent received 1/3 of the President’s tax cut,’ with the ’1/3’ enlarged in red. The New York Times headlined its story: ’Report Finds Tax Cuts Heavily Favor the Wealthy.’ The Wall Street Journal: ’Budget Office Says Biggest Tax Cuts Go to Richest 1%.’
And the Washington Post: ’Tax Burden Shifts to the Middle.’ Only FNC smelled a rat, as anchor Jim Angle alerted viewers to how the Friday ‘headlines don’t tell the whole story about taxes, the wealthy, or the middle class.’”