Media Bias Is Merely Commentary, Not Reporting

I have always believed that it is the reporter’s job to report and the commentator’s job to opine.  I want to read the facts and then I want to read what people think about them.

There has been a dangerous and disturbing fall from grace in the field of journalism.  The line between reporting and commentary has become so blurred and bias has come to be considered so normal that mainstream news outlets, whether in print or television, have become little more than political propaganda machines.  It used to be that newspapers or television stations were labeled “liberal” or “conservative” based on their editorial content, but now those labels extend straight to the heart of their news pieces.

It’s a form of hypocrisy even more frightening than what we see coming from Washington itself.  I wrote last week that despite the mainstream media’s ugly, crude disparaging of the April 15th Tea Parties, they were soundly trounced in the ratings by FOX News.  Their demonizing of self-proclaimed, unashamed conservative commentators backfired, and I would hope that those who changed their channels to watch the Tea Party coverage on FOX have started to see that “conservative is a mindset, not a political party” and that it does not preclude simply reporting facts as they occur.

No better example of the  liberal bias of mainstream media can be found than when news reporter-cum-commentator-wannabe-hack, Chicago-based Susan Roesgen brought CNN’s liberal bias out of the closet.  Turned down twice for a job with FOX, her bitterness was pathetically evident, and apparently CNN had to close down her email account in response to viewer outrage over her behavior, caught by the cameras of both CNN and Tea Party attendees.

An excellent commentary on the dangerous hypocrisy in reporting may be seen here.  I would suggest that while we still have the right to do so, anyone who finds their news reporters crossing the line into hack commentary call them out on it.  Because without fairness and unbiased honesty, without truth in reporting from a free media, we really are doomed.