William Tate at American Thinker, breaks down the ratio of media bias to political donations:
The New York Times’ refusal to publish John McCain’s rebuttal to Barack Obama’s Iraq Op-Ed may be the most glaring example of liberal media bias this journalist has ever seen, but true proof of widespread media bias requires one to follow an old journalism maxim: Follow the money.
Even the Associated Press–no bastion of conservatism — has considered, at least superficially, the media’s favoritism for Barack Obama. It’s time to re-visit media bias. True to form, journalists are defending their bias by saying that one candidate, Obama, is more newsworthy’ than the other. In other words, there is no media bias. It is we, the hoi polloi, who reveal our bias by questioning the neutrality of these learned professionals in their ivory-towered newsrooms.
Big Media applies this rationalization to every argument used to point out bias. ‘It’s not a result of bias’, they say. ‘It’s a matter of news judgment.’ And, like the man who knows his wallet was pick-pocketed but can’t prove it, the public is left to futilely rage against the injustice of it all.
The ‘newsworthy’ argument can be applied to every metric: one-sided imbalances in airtime, story placement, column inches, number of stories, etc. Every metric, save one.
An analysis of federal election records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed so far this election cycle favors Democrats by a 15:1 margin over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans .
235 journalists (Link: http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?newest=1&type=occ&occ=journalist&search=Search) donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10:1. An even greater disparity, 20:1, exists between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.
Searches for other newsroom categories (reporters, correspondents, news editors, anchors, newspaper editors and publishers) produces 311 donors to Democrats to 30 donors to Republicans, a ratio of just over 10:1. In terms of money, $279,266 went to Dems, $20,709 to Republicans, a 14:1 ratio.
……A few journalists list their employer as an organization like MSNBC MSNBC.com, or ABC News, or report that they’re a freelancer for the New York Times, or are journalists for Al Jazeera, CNN Turkey, Deutsche Welle Radio, or La Republica of Rome (all contributions to Obama). Most report no employer. They’re mainly free-lancers. That’s because most major news organization have policies that forbid newsroom employees from making political donations.
Not that they pay heed.
As if to warn their colleagues in the media, MSNBC last summer ran a story on journalists’ contributions to political candidates which drew a similar conclusion: “Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left”
……As if to warn their comrades-in-news against putting their money where their mouths are, the report also cautioned that, with the internet, “it became easier for the blogging public to look up the donors.”
That’s the great thing about the internet. We can watch the ‘watch dog’.
It went on to detail the ban that most major media organizations have against newsroom employees donating to political campaigns, a ban that raises some obvious First Amendment issues. Whether it’s intentional or not, the ban makes it difficult to verify the political leanings of Big Media reporters, editors and producers. There are two logical ways to extrapolate what those leanings are, though.
One is the overwhelming nature of the above statistics. Given the pack mentality among journalists and, just like any pack, the tendency to follow the leader — in this case, Big Media — and since Big Media is centered in some of the bluest of blue parts of the country, it is highly likely that the media elite reflects the same, or an even greater, liberal bias.
Link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/07/big_media_puts_its_money_where.html
I’ve said this before: If you’re biased, at least be honest about it.
This one strikes me as ironic:
Fox: $40,573 (Dems) / $0 (Republicans)
Fox News/Fox News Channel: $1,280 (Dems) / $0 (Republicans)
I know Fox leans to the right, which is why I watch it. It may be a bit biased, but considering the overwhelming liberal bias in the NBC-ABC-CBS-PBS-CNN-MSNBC media conglomerate, it’s MY kind of bias for a change.