Left-Wing Media Bias

The Problem

How can it be that someone like Peter Mulhern can pen the following words:

"The biases of the elite media are too well documented to make good column fodder. Most journalists have a tribal attachment to the Democrat Party that transcends even ideology" ( http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm ),

while (as at 18 May 2002) the page http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html (on a Media Studies site) treats media bias as if only right-wing media bias existed? Surely they live in different worlds ?

The media and education systems (the Media-University Complex) in Western countries have the ideological cohesiveness and mass coverage to create "reality", and then to go out and "discover" it, to research it, and to report it. They create reality by seeking out left-wing, Feminist, and ethnic etc. extremists and giving them the same, or more, coverage as/than mainstream organizations, and refusing to give first-person coverage (fair interviews) to right-wing extremists, Pro-Life activists, and Men's/Fathers' groups, etc.. Over time, this moves the criterion of "mainstream" inexorably to the left.

Meanwhile, the real reality is simmering away below the surface of reported events. On the rare occasions when it attempts to burst out into public consciousness (e.g. when the Right are doing well in the polls), the media do their best to sweep it back under the carpet by means of scare-mongering, libel, and selective reporting. It is really only talk-back radio and the Internet that give people the freedom to bypass Left-Wing media censorship and propaganda.

The media are frequently attacked by "Right-Wing" critics -- not for the bias of the owners of the media (which is relatively minor in scale), but for the bias of the media workers (journalists, in particular). For example, in 2002 media coverage of French Right-Wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Dutch political assassinee, Forteyn, most journalists were blatantly and openly one-sided, as if the media were a left-wing political party (which, in practice, they are). The media see right-wing extremism as the problem, whereas in fact left-wing media bias forces moderate Right-Wingers into extremism, because the media prevents them from having equal access to the public.

Right-Wing populists are bound to be critical of media bias, because they attract most of it - names such as Rush Limbaugh and Richard Nixon, in the USA, and Robert Muldoon and Winston Peters, in New Zealand, spring to my mind immediately. The website http://www.mrc.org is solely given over to the publicizing of Left-Wing media bias. The webpage http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm, referring to an event involving Lyndon Johnson that was "news" to me, states:

"Nothing Richard Nixon was ever accused of in connection with Watergate posed as great a threat to the integrity of the American political process as the crime Lyndon Johnson committed in James Reston's presence. But Johnson was a Democrat. He could rely on Reston to ignore his crime. He could also rely on Newsweek to continue ignoring it 35 years later."

Though the Fathers' Movement is, at long last, starting to get a little bit of media coverage, any activist in the broader Men's Movement can testify to anti-male, Feminist bias in the media. See http://blackribboncampaign.altervista.org/marclepi.html , for example.

Media Power

People often say things like "Knowledge is Power" or "Information is Power," but they seldom seem to realize this applies to politics as well as to everything else. The Media - particularly before the advent of the Internet - controlled information. This seems to have gone to their heads, in many cases. Some media people have acquired star status, which is an indication of their power over people's minds. They are not aware of their own bias.

The news media are very powerful, as Goebbels knew. He was aware of the need to conceal the "art" of the media professional from the audience by using historical analogies rather than making blatant political propaganda. Similarly, the modern western media propagandizes by choosing what to cover and what questions to ask, rather than by being blatantly biased in the presentation of what it does cover - usually, at any rate. The problem for politically incorrect causes such as Men's Rights has been how to get covered at all.

Let us take the example of the Jews and the state of Israel. The Jews are labeled victims in their role as a minority in western countries - and so they get very little negative press from journalists who fear being branded anti-Semitic. Indeed, they have so much power they are often able to suppress the dissemination of information on the Nazi Genocide of the Jews that they disagree with. The Armenians have no comparable power to suppress Turkish Revisionism that denies the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, for example.

But Jews in Israel are seen as "oppressors" of the Palestinians, and so they get some bad press in the West for that role. I was sympathetic towards former Likud Party Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu of Israel, when he complained about anti-Israeli media bias. It's not so much that I agree with his policies - it's just that Israeli Right-Wingers, like Masculists, come up so often against the wall of simple-minded media bias that they feel there's almost no point in fighting it head-on. It has taken the events of September 11th 2001 to modify this media bias to any extent - now Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel are categorized as "terrorism", and linked to the World Trade Center atrocity.

Another case in point is Bosnia, where the western media has been biased against the Serbs. Martin Bell was a famous BBC television reporter who argued within the BBC against their official policy of neutrality. He eventually left the BBC and went into politics. I heard him in an interview referring to the Bosnian Serbs as the "bad guys." His intonation made it clear he meant to have scare-quotes around the phrase, but it is also clear that that was how the western media - and hence the western world - actually saw the Bosnian Serbs.

In the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs and the Croats had virtually the same spoken language (called "Serbo-Croat"), but the Serbs wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet (like the Russians and the Bulgarians) while the Croats used the Roman alphabet. Whether this was cause or effect (or both), I am not sure, but it is clear the Serbs had closer relationships to Eastern Europe, and the Croats (to the extent the Cold War allowed) had closer relationships to Western Europe. This made it almost inevitable that the western media would have an anti-Serb bias - which was exacerbated by the fact that these media people were mostly based in Sarajevo, in anti-Serb territory.

I am not excusing Serb atrocities. But the agenda of the Serbs appeared to be to be independent from the Croats and Muslims. The United Nations and the media, dominated by western interests, decided on a contrary agenda of forcing the three parties to live together in one country (Bosnia). Faced with the world community's hostile agenda, it is not surprising how some Bosnian Serbs may have acted like cornered animals.

The Sociology Problem

There is a standard, Left-Wing bias that prevails in Universities, but I will not discuss that topic here - except with reference to the field of Sociology. See my book, "Sex, Lies & Feminism" ( http://blackribboncampaign.altervista.org/contents.html ) for further details.

The problem of Left-Wing media bias is best understood as pertaining to the field of the Sociology of the Media. However, Sociology is itself known to be a Left-Wing bastion - so much so that I once received an email from a man, asking me about Men's Rights, and apologizing for the fact that he was a Sociology student and therefore likely to be hostile to Men's Rights !

For example, a quick search of the World Wide Web for "Sociology of the Media" (or something similar) yielded the following top results:

The City University, London, which showed no sign of any interest in the sociology of media personnel in their extensive course-offering;
The "Equality Studies Centre" of University College Dublin, which has a course on "Sociology of the Media and Equality", taught by a woman, amidst a raft of other optional courses, which are virtually all taught by women, and include "gender", "sexualities", and "women" - but not "men", needless to say;
The personal page of a female lecturer at the University of New Brunswick, who has so far taught "Sociology of the Media" along with "Introduction to Women's Studies";
Hope College, which gave no detailed information;
New School University, which has a course "Fundamentals of Sociology of Media", which refers to the media as being "a constitutive element in the power structure of capitalist societies", but shows no sign of investigating the role of the employees of media entities;
A University of Essex gateway to resources about the Sociology of the Media;
The University of New Brunswick, which does not give much information about the content of courses;
The University of Limerick, which has a course on "Sociology of the Media", which includes "media representation of women" (but probably not "media representation of men") as one of its topics.

None of these show evidence of any interest in researching the role of the workers in the media industry or men, as such. Their focus seems usually to be on the owners of the media, as capitalists (i.e. from a Leftist perspective), on the effects of the media on Society, and/or on Feminist perspectives on the media.

Conclusion

Far from being mere observers and reporters, the media are powerful and active players in the political process. One example is the well-known Feminist author, Susan Faludi. According to Laura Taflinger,

"Faludi thinks a journalist's job is to create social change by educating people and taking the time to investigate things. A journalist needs to be passionate about a cause, she says." ( http://www.dnai.com/~ljtaflin/FEMJOUR/faludi.html )

Since they control the actual perception of political reality of billions of people, the media have to choose between tidying up their act and becoming increasingly a target of political violence.

See also:

The Problem

How can it be that someone like Peter Mulhern can pen the following words:

"The biases of the elite media are too well documented to make good column fodder. Most journalists have a tribal attachment to the Democrat Party that transcends even ideology" ( http://nj.npri.org/nj99/11/media.htm ),

while (as at 18 May 2002) the page http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html (on a Media Studies site) treats media bias as if only right-wing media bias existed? Surely they live in different worlds ?

Though the Fathers' Movement is, at long last, starting to get a little bit of media coverage, any activist in the broader Men's Movement can testify to anti-male, Feminist bias in the media. See http://blackribboncampaign.altervista.org/marclepi.html , for example.

Media Power

The Sociology Problem

There is a standard, Left-Wing bias that prevails in Universities, but I will not discuss that topic here - except with reference to the field of Sociology. See my book, "Sex, Lies & Feminism" ( http://blackribboncampaign.altervista.org/contents.html ) for further details.

For example, a quick search of the World Wide Web for "Sociology of the Media" (or something similar) yielded the following top results:

The City University, London, which showed no sign of any interest in the sociology of media personnel in their extensive course-offering;

The personal page of a female lecturer at the University of New Brunswick, who has so far taught "Sociology of the Media" along with "Introduction to Women's Studies";

Hope College, which gave no detailed information;

New School University, which has a course "Fundamentals of Sociology of Media", which refers to the media as being "a constitutive element in the power structure of capitalist societies", but shows no sign of investigating the role of the employees of media entities;

A University of Essex gateway to resources about the Sociology of the Media;

The University of New Brunswick, which does not give much information about the content of courses;

The University of Limerick, which has a course on "Sociology of the Media", which includes "media representation of women" (but probably not "media representation of men") as one of its topics.

Conclusion

Far from being mere observers and reporters, the media are powerful and active players in the political process. One example is the well-known Feminist author, Susan Faludi. According to Laura Taflinger,

"Faludi thinks a journalist's job is to create social change by educating people and taking the time to investigate things. A journalist needs to be passionate about a cause, she says." ( http://www.dnai.com/~ljtaflin/FEMJOUR/faludi.html )

Since they control the actual perception of political reality of billions of people, the media have to choose between tidying up their act and becoming increasingly a target of political violence.

See also:

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Latest Update

17 September 2024