mccain campaign sets controls over media access to sarah palin

I'm getting really disappointed in John McCain. For someone who claims not to be a regular Republican, he sure is acting like one.

It's been an increasingly trope of the Republican Party since the days of Richard Nixon to complain that the media have it in for them. We can argue and debate how much merit there is to accusations of liberal media bias, but it seems there are times conservatives like to trot this out because they don't like being caught unprepared.

For a political party that claims people need to stop blaming outside forces for their failures and find success through hard work, the GOP does like to blame negative perceptions on the news media.

Case in point: The McCain campaign has announced that Alaska Gov. and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will no longer answer questions from reporters "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference." Gov. Palin apparently has made it a practice in the past not to talk to just any media, but only to those who put her in a favorable light.

It's not a liberal bias that makes Gov. Palin look unprepared for the big time. It's the fact that she's unprepard to answer even basic questions, even when someone like Katie Couric throws her a bunch of softballs.

The governor's answers in her interviews have shown a lack of depth and understanding and a ready defensiveness that are enough to make anyone question her fitness for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency, should McCain win and something happen to him.

Limiting press access to Palin to strictly favorable outlets disturbs me. While McCain talks about straight talk and bringing us together, actions such as this contribute to further polarizing the nation by encouraging a divide in how we get our information.

Our nation doesn't need conservative media and liberal media, we need news media, period. We also need politicians who aren't so afraid of the public that they feel a need to control how they appear in the media.

But that control is exactly what McCain is aiming for. So much for straight talk.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'Liberal media bias' and other tired shibboleths

Allow me to say that I have grown weary of hearing about liberal media bias every time Sarah Palin comes across poorly in the press.

This has come up most recently in a political discussion on a religion and humor forum I frequent. An acquaintance of mine known as RBP recently complained that the coverage of former Democratic candidate Jon Edwards' affair in the press was delayed and sorely lacking, Coverage of the teenage pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has been extensive and immediate. It's a double standard obviously. (You may read RBP's comments here, if you like, along with the entire discussion.)

Now I will grant that the coverage of Bristol Palin's teen pregnancy has been overdone. She's not running for vice president; her mother is.

But not newsworthy? Sarah Palin has been running in part on her supposedly superior family values, including an opposition to safe sex education, which does lead to a reduction to teen pregnancy. The contrast is worth noting.

As for Edwards, I don't know how much the news media knew before he finally admitted to the extramarital affair, but let's be fair. Saying that legitimate news media failed to cover something reported in The National Enquirer is rather like taking them to task for failing to cover Bat Boy.

Edwards is a public person, but at the time the Enquirer broke the news, he was not a presidential candidate nor even particularly clearly a favorite for vice president. I'm not sure what public good was neglected in this case. And again, The Enquirer is hardly a font of credible journalism. Perhaps the respectable news media should be all over the impending Bush divorce that the tabloids have been reporting?

Let's look at other high-level affairs and how the news media have covered them.

Not that many years ago the press dug into the story of Clinton's affair with such thoroughness that not only were there stories on how many news outlets were covering Zippergate, there were news stories about many news outlets were covering the coverage of Zippergate. Was that a liberal bias at work, or a conservative bias? Or was it merely pandering to the baser appetites of the public for salacious details about our leaders?

For that matter, John Kerry didn't even have an affair in 2004, but the media still dug into the private life of one of his campaign staffers and made her life a living hell.

Gary Bauer took the unusual step of holding a news conference during Primary 2000 to announce that he wasn't having an affair with his staffers, and was pretty much given a free pass. I mean, really, there's not much of a better way to draw attention to a potential impropriety than to insist that it's not what people think, especially when no one publicly is thinking it.

From I have been told by other journalists, the word around Washington, D.C., during the presidency of George H.W. Bush is that he also was having an affair. I recall no coverage of this at the time. Further liberal bias at work?

I know that "liberal media bias" is an important shibboleth within conservative culture, but let's be fair. Repeat it enough, start assuming it from the get-go, and dang if you won't find boatloads of evidence of it. The New York Times could say that President Bush walks on water, and the response would be "Those dirty liberals are suggesting Bush thinks he's above the law of gravity!"

There are plenty of other reasonable explanations why the Edwards affair wasn't aired immediately, and the Palin situation was. Let's be reasonable, and stop blaming news we don't like on a liberal media bias.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Of course, you should always blame the media

When all else fails, blame it on the media. Surely it's that the liberal media has it in for the pro-life movement and hates crisis pregnancy centers. There can't be any other explanation for why the silent work of crisis-pregnancy centers doesn't get more coverage, can there?

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because we believe that the news media won't make any effort to present our story, we don't spend any effort reaching out to the media and giving them a story that they'll run with. So the news media doesn't report anything positive about crisis pregnancy centers, thereby proving that they are in bed with pro-choice activists.

Media outlets love heartwarming stories about people helping other people in need. That's a big part of liberalism, don'cha know?

Forget the rhetoric, take the time to develop a serious media campaign, and spend the money it would take to implement it properly, and pro-life groups will find they're getting more coverage of their activities.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I'm not just a liberal journalist. Let's pretend that I'm also a pro-choice liberal journalist. Chances are that I'm going to be one of those who just takes abortion as a for-granted position, and it's not an obsession for me at all, any more than auto insurance reform.

Every time I run into someone who is strongly pro-life, they rant and rave about how Planned Parenthood is killing babies, how the media are deliberately covering up the dangers of legal abortion to protect their allies in the abortion industry, and how we always go for the sensational stories that make pro-lifers look like idiots and ignore the things they quietly do to help pregnant women.

Every now and then I'll encounter other wackos who automatically assume that I'm going to hell and publicly call on people to pray for my soul, without even stopping to find out anything about my spiritual state.

That's a fairly rude way to treat someone. It irritates the real me, who has been pro-life since his teen years. I can only imagine how much worse it would go over with a pro-choice me.

This isn't just about publicity and marketing. A lot of it is about plain old-fashioned manners.

Want coverage of other aspects of the pro-life movement than the loudmouths at demonstrations and protests? Then find some way to make "business as usual" sound compelling. It's not that hard -- there are literally thousands of public relations firms that do just that for their clients, every day.

Get the local Birthright or some other pro-life group to hire me, and I guarantee I will start getting them into the newspaper, and not just little three-inch press releases, either. Most advertising money is money poured down the drain, anyway.

I can't begin to tell you how many times as a reporter and as an editor small-business owners called us up to let us know about what was going on, or just loved it when we used their business for a news story. Nonprofits loved it too -- it always drove up the giving and got their message out to the community.

Conservatives and churches have bandied about the term "liberal media" so much that they've created a divide that doesn't have to be there. Groups that could benefit tremendously from the news media just don't think about it because they've been told so many times that the media have it in for them that they believe it. And so, rather than being in the world but not of it, we withdraw further from it, and create our own media to broadcast our message loud and clear to people who already know it by heart.

It is within our ability to get the right horns tooted, but to do that we need to take the initiative to do it, and make a better effort to get along with the people who work in the news media. Complaining that it's not our fault doesn't accomplish either of those purposes.

Pat Sajak and the plank in our own eye

Pat Sajak has a hub on his site where he complains about how liberals have ruined political discourse in America. It seems you can't say anything in support of our president or a conservative viewpoint without being savaged by the liberals in the media and all around us.

Sajak's column is going to win points with conservative readers who already feel that way about outspoken Far Left-ers, but for thoughtful and reasoned analysis, it falls far short in really saying anything meaningful about the shrill tone of American political discourse. There is no shortage of people on the Far Right who demonize liberals as hating America, freedom and apple pie; who bill anyone on the Left as traitors, lacking a moral backbone, and so on.

It was only six months ago I was hearing that the Left would sell us all out to al Qaeda, that liberals would destroy the institution of marriage, that liberals are a bunch of soft-brained crybabies who want to be coddled, and so on.

It was barely two weeks ago that I was hearing that liberals hate life and the people who try to defend it. And I'm regularly reminded on a Christian forum I belong to that the liberals in the media and that prominent Democrats have no ethics, no standards, no sense of fair play, and no grasp of reality.

When you get down to brass tacks, no political party, position or leaning has a dearth of arrogant SOB's, and there's plenty of blame to go around for the lack of reasoned political dialogue.

As Christians, whether liberal or conservative, Right or Left, it behooves all to begin the process of reconciliation by looking at ourselves and asking where we have sinned against one another, and against the world.

We're all guilty of looking down our noses at people who we think "just don't get it"; for seeing people as the enemy instead of as other people with different ideas or approaches to improving the world; and for allowing our own sense of right and wrong to drown out our sense of community and love.

Repentance and forgiveness should be our legacy, not arrogance, judgment and "neener neener."

Sajak's right, as far as he goes: There are plenty of loudmouth liberals who have left the planet and lost all sense of proportion. They're the ones who think a comparison between Bush and Hitler is reasonable, if a little unfair to Hitler.

The thing is, it's not the nitwits on the Left alone who have brought public political discourse in the States to a standstill. There are plenty of blowhards and bastards on the Right as well.

I used to work for a newspaper where the publisher nuked every staff-written column that criticized Bush policies because they "weren't local enough" while he had no problem with staff-written columns that expressed a pro-Republican viewpoint. (Note that I said "columns" and not "editorials.") And the negative treatment that Bible-belters show those of liberal views or unapproved lifestyles is worth remembering.

We're barking up the wrong tree when we start pointing the finger at liberals, or at conservatives, and saying "They're so bad."

We're missing the point when we sing without ceasing the lament of the Biased Liberal (or Conservative) Media.

We're in the wrong when we laugh and say "What's the matter? Can't you handle being the ones out of power?"

We're in the wrong, because we're just as guilty.

I've sinned. It's been easy -- too easy -- for me to wag the prophetic finger at City Council and bemoan their willful disregard for the rights and needs of my city's poor, and the way they use their eminent domain power to uproot established, home-grown businesses, destroying people's livelihood and removing homes while they claim to be engaged in "redevelopment."

I've sinned not because I've been unfair to the City Council or because I've failed to appreciate the economic advantages to having another Starbuck's instead of a privately owned deli.

I've sinned, because there have been many times I've been just as willfully ignorant or negligent of my responsibility to do what's right by my hungry or homeless neighbors.

The city leaders have sinned, and so have I.

I've sinned not because it's wrong for me to notice and comment on the transparent bias in a news report; to be disgusted by the shoddy reporting and lazy investigation that went into the story; or to be outraged by the plagiarism I've seen professionals commit, the stories that are so far from reality that it staggers the mind, or the other sins of journalism.

I've sinned, because I've committed the same faults, even if they haven't been in print. There have been times I've allowed my passions to blind me to fairly presenting a situation to my wife, to my employer, to a friend, and to a neutral third party.

There have been times I've been too lazy or tired to dig into the truth of a matter and find out what really happened, and so students got away with something they shouldn't, or the wrong person was punished, or everyone was.

And there have been times someone's shared ideas with me, and I've passed them, and forgotten to give credit where it was due, or I've claimed to have been an influence for an action I wasn't even involved in.

And like everyone else, I hate it when things don't go my way and I feel like the people who could help me are completely indifferent to how I need their help.

I've sinned in all these ways and more, and if I had to take bets, I'd wager that everyone who reads this forum has committed those sins too.

There are many times we play host to a game of Look How Stupid They Are. We all get into it in one form or another, either online or at home. We talk about how one group or another doesn't get it, acts as though they think the entire world would be better off if we all thought they way they did, and (of course) we do it with the oft-unstated but still clear understanding that we are different.

We, as the better party, understand or are privy to a higher order than the poor slobs we're castigating as proud, judgmental and woefully uninformed.

And that's why I suggest that we all need some prayer and some soul-searching. Because, just like Sajak's column ironically misses the fact that the fault he sees in his liberal friends can be found among conservatives, we all miss the plank in our own eyes.

Media bias follows the money

It's true that our news media are biased. Research has shown that it depends on how you interpret it, where the bias lies.

Randy Bergman, a former editor of mine, did his master's thesis on how objective newspapers were when it came to businesses. His discovery was that, despite ardent claims that advertising dollars don't determine coverage, and despite a few newspapers that actually do appear to make a concerted effort not to connect the two, there can be no doubt that newspapers are pro-big business in terms of coverage. I've seen it myself.

At The Times of Trenton, where I worked last year, we refused to cover a major lawsuit against one of our big advertisers. (The Princeton Packet, incidentally, covered the story and lost the account, which represented more than $30,000 annually in lost advertising.) The Times also gives front-page and Page Three coverage to all sorts of stupid things because they involve advertisers. A new rollercoaster at Six Flags got a bigger story than any of the local issues that day.

It's pretty despicable, really.

At WCN Newspapers, where I work now, we're not allowed to do a story on any business -- no matter how newsworthy -- unless we clear it with the higher-ups first. After all, they might owe us money or not have an account with us. So much for an independent press.

In the end, an individual's perspective and defintions shape their understanding of media bias. "Pro-big business" is a conservative bias, and has nothing to do with how wealthy you are.