We all talk about how the media are shills for the Bush administration, but how can we prove it? According to the statistics:
- News Corp (aka Fox News) gives 62.86% Republican/37.12% Democrat.
- Disney (including ABC) gives 29.08% Republican/70.53% Democrat)
- NBC Broadcasting (from General Motors) gives 48.49% Republican/50.87% Democrat
- Clear Channel Corp gives 65.98% Republican/33.96% Democrat
- Viacom (aka CBS) gives 39.97% Republican/60.03% Democrat
- Time Warner gives 38.32% Republican/61.53% Democrat
From these statistics, you can see pretty clearly that only NewsCorp and ClearChannel give more money to the Republicans, and even then, that's not a clear sign of a bias. So, I look at individual contributions as well, by the total amount since the midterm election:
- Rupert Murdoch (NewsCorp, Fox) gave $37,000 to Republicans/$2,000 to Democrats
- Ted Turner (Time Warner, CNN, sort of) gave $500 to Republicans/$0 to Democrats
- Michael Eisner (Disney, ABC) gave $5,000 to Republicans/$9,000 to Democrats
- Merv Griffin (Griffin Group) gave $25,000 to Republicans/$0 to Democrats
- Roger Ailes (NewsCorp, Fox) gave $0 to Republicans/$0 to Democrats
- Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg) gave $43,000 to Republicans/$0 to Democrats (not suprising since he is a Republican politician in addition to the financial empire and TV network.)
- Walter Cronkite (CBS) gave $0 to Republicans/$1,000 to Democrats
- Mel Karmazin (Viacom) gave $0 to Republicans/$12,000 to Democrats
- Mays Family (Clear Channel) gave $145,369 to Republicans/$1,550 to Democrats (they gave a huge amount to their PAC in addition to this, which gives primarily to Republicans.)
- Michael Pulitzer (St. Louis Dispatch) gave $0 to Republicans/$27,000 to Democrats
- Summer Redstone (Viacom) gave $2,000 to Republicans/$13,000 to Democrats
So as you can see, the list is not particularly indicative of a conservative media, at least financially. Those that stand out as being clearly Republican supporters are already rolled up into their companies, such as News Corporation and Clear Channel. Therein lies my problem. When I look at the news, I can clearly see that they are treating the Bush administration with kid gloves. However, with a few obvious exceptions, there is no proof that the media supports the Republicans in particular, at least financially.
Instead, it seems to me like the media are way too in bed with the political process. Plus, they are very pro-profit, so that they will say whatever they say to get ratings and thus advertising dollars. They don't want to offend the populace, so they end up playing softball when they think it might scare away advertisers or bring up controversy. However, when they think they can get away with it, they will stir up controversy where non exists. The Republicans are more whiny and threaten boycotts, lawsuits, etc, so the media avoids criticizing them. The Democrats, on the other hand, just take the criticism and chalk it up to free speech I suppose. However, none of this gets me any further to having tangible proof of any conservative media bias. It's that evidence that I am looking for.