Back in the time that CNN was owned by Ted Turner. It seemed to me that CNN was a truly balenced news company. I would say it was main stream fair. It was not left wing but it was honest. Why has this changed? Media matters has the spin comming from CNN who is not fox but is getting close.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200410010011
Now I have wondered why they have decided on this course. The current CEO has supported both sides in politics but generally supports Bush.
He did give to Kerry in the primaries but some claim that might have been a fear of dean and his thoughts on media concentration. http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/stories.php?story=04/02/10/3838101
All in all the large media want the statis quo. They careless about which party wins but more of there longterm goals of media control or market share.
http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/stories.php?story=02/05/21/4434997
Which brings me back to my question what does the Bush White House have on AOL Time Warner? It might be this..."The DOJ investigation of the world's largest media company comes just weeks after corporate accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and other firms rocked the financial world, eliciting calls for widespread reform"
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/26127/26127.html
There is also the ties on the social security issue between the White House and Parsons.
"A watchdog group, Campaign for America's Future, reports that Bush's commission is a totally stacked deck. Co-chairing the bunch is Richard Parsons, a top exec for media giant AOL Time Warner, where Parsons ran a scam that tried to deny pension benefits to employees there. He got caught, was sued, and Time Warner had to pay $5.5 million to compensate the workers he tried to short. Now he's ram-rodding Bush's scheme to short us.
There also are three former Congress critters on the board, each of whom favors privatizing Social Security, raising our retirement age, and cutting benefits. Four other commissioners came straight from the Wall Street world that will pocket the Social Security cash that will flow from privatization, while another four hail from right-wing think tanks that have long proselytized for privatization -- and are financed by corporations that would profit from it"
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-05-25/pols_hightower.html
The SCLM theme has been common knowledge for along time around these parts.. Some might want to look at the real ties and who moves them Joe Conason's has the goods.
"Had the columnist bothered with minimal research concerning Lichter and the Center, he might have discovered that they are and always have been terribly dependent on right-wing foundations. According to MediaTransparency.org -- which tracks nonprofit funding from IRS 990 forms -- the Center has received $2.3 million from the Scaife, Olin, Bradley and Smith Richardson foundations, the big four of the far right. That figure includes $275,000 in 2001 and $200,000 in 2000 alone.
And this little tid bit of information..
"Why wouldn't they instead reflect the bias of editors, publishers, directors and management, all of which tend to be Republican and conservative? Editor & Publisher polled the nation's newspaper executives just before the 2000 election, and found an overwhelming preference for George W. Bush."
"We also know that Jack Welch, former chief of NBC (and GE) is an ardent Republican. So was Larry Tisch when he owned CBS. So are Richard Parsons and Steve Case of CNN (and Time Warner AOL). Michael Eisner (Disney ABC) gave to Bill Bradley and Al Gore, but he gave more to Bush and McCain -- and he supported Rick Lazio for the Senate against Hillary Clinton. Rupert Murdoch and John Malone are big Republican supporters of the Cato Institute. So why isn't anybody complaining about the "conservative bias" of media executives?"
http://www.salon.com/politics/conason/2002/12/18/bush/print.html