I've long felt that, as a whole, the media was biased towards sensationalism, not liberalism. The media needs to drive people towards them, and by blowing up non-stories out of proportion, many of them drive readership / viewer-ship. This is not an absolute blanket statement, of course - there are outfits, such as the New York Times, that for the most part care about getting it right rather than generating a story for the sake of generating a story. And, we all know about Faux News hides behind the "fair and balanced" slogan while being anything but fair and not at all balanced. Opinion writers and commentators do seem to be more free to call it like it is, but as a whole, the media does seem to be in the business of generating a story for the sake of having a story.
I'm writing this, and what's below the fold, mostly as a way in which to consolidate some thoughts and lines of evidence to use in debates against conservatives who take it as established fact that the media is in fact a big liberal conspiracy. I have actually seen some conservatives claim that the liberal media is covering up some aspects of the Park51 Lower Manhattan Community Center Project story, which is alternatively sad and amusing for the complete lack of proof for their opinions.
This brings me back to the Park51 Lower Manhattan Community Center project. I'm going to skip over most of the controversy, except to say that I fully support the right of the organizers to build the center. I'm going to instead focus on the oft-repeated conservative meme, driven by Limbaugh, Palin, Beck, Hannity, and a few others, where they repeatedly talk about the liberal media and how the liberal media doesn't want us to know this, the liberal media is misreporting that, yada yada. It gets quite tiresome after a while, but the Park51 project provides a perfect counterpoint to that tired meme.
The very name that has "stuck" for the Park51 project is a powerful argument against blanket liberal bias. Calling it "ground zero mosque" misleads twice in the same statement, as covered in many diaries. It's not at ground zero, nor is it a mosque. Yet, the insistence of the media to refer to it in these terms, instead of by the technically correct "Park51" project or the better descriptions "Financial District Mosque", "Financial District Community Center", or "Lower Manhattan Community Center" (apologies to Nate Silver for use of his ideas here), gives lie in and of itself to the liberal media meme. By referring to the project repeatedly in those terms, the media has helped drive the controversy, and it's obscured the actual facts of the situation to the point where it is understandable if low-information voters don't know that the Community center is neither a stand-alone mosque nor is it on Ground Zero itself. I fully recognize that the media does have a lot of people and entities which have not fallen into this trap - The New York Times and a variety of commentators come to mind. However, as a whole, the "ground zero mosque" name has stuck and the very fact that this name stuck is a powerful counterargument towards the "liberal bias" meme.
This isn't the only controversy recently where I feel that the media is showing a bias towards sensationalism and driving a story for the sake of having a story. Another notable example is the "climate-gate" emails story. The very fact that "climate-gate" stuck as the tag line and that so few major media outlets bothered labeling it something else showed that the media was not this big liberal conspiracy. And, as is the usual for this sort of thing, the stories about "climate-gate" were all over the place after the emails were hacked, but the many exonerations of Mann and Jones and others were buried deep within newspapers and they have indeed been missed by many people.
There are other examples, but I'll skip them for now - suffice it to say, these aren't the only two examples. I will note, however, that many conservatives use this "liberal media bias" meme to dismiss stories and / or facts that are inconvenient to them and to their narrative. It's their very own "get out of jail free card". Don't like a story? Factual reporting paint them in a poor light? It's all the liberal media's fault! This sort of logical fallacy has always bothered me - conservatives should use examples from the media to attempt to prove liberal media bias, instead of starting with the assumption that the media is biased liberally and then using that opinion as the evidence with which to dismiss stories and facts found in the media. It's a bass-ackwards way of doing things.
I'm interested in hearing other people's thoughts on the matter. I'm trying to avoid making too-strong blanket statements myself, and I do note that there are several in the media who are getting the Park51 Lower Manhattan Community Center project story correct. I can only imagine what Frank Rich will say on Sunday, too - he's been on a real roll with his columns.