Amber

The Media is the Problem

June 9, 2006 | bias, media, media bias

Stephen Spruiell, writing in the National Review, has an excellent commentary on an opinion piece written by Helen Thomas, in The Nation, titled “Lapdogs of the Press.” Helen Thomas used to have a reputation as a hard-nosed White House Press reporter, but she has become a caricature of herself. It would be hard for anyone to come up with a substantive question she has asked at a White House Press Briefing. She prefers to knock off smarmy Liberal talking points, as if they were news or even original. For example, we have this utterly unpleasant exchange, from a White House Press Conference, January 6, 2003:

Ari Fleischer: � And with that, I’m more than happy to take your questions. Helen.

Helen Thomas: � At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.

Ari Fleischer: � I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.

Helen Thomas: � My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis

Spruiell finishes up with this:

Thomas goes on to argue that the White House Press Corps needs to be more hostile:

It is past time for reporters to forget the party line, ask the tough questions and let the chips fall where they may.

How could someone who sits in the White House briefing room everyday be completely unaware of the fact that the briefings routinely degenerate into shouting matches because the current level of hostility is so high? Whatever curative is needed to repair the relationship between the White House and the press, it is certainly not more hostility.

We don’t have a failure to ask “tough questions” � we have an administration that has decided to deal with the adversarial press by tuning it out. The result has been a White House that is often unable to effectively communicate its message. The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that one reason the adminstration bungled its response to the Dubai ports deal is that its communications office was still dealing with the media’s ludicrous caterwauling over Dick Cheney’s hunting accident. As a result, we’ve suffered a real consequence: a victory for isolationism in an age when global economic integration holds so much promise both for national security and prosperity.
Thomas says we just need to turn up the heat on this cauldron. I say Helen Thomas is part of the problem.

In fact, though, while Thomas is part of the problem, the media, itself is most of the problem.�They have become advocates of a single political position, and have given the impression, more than once�that�they hoe to a position that is far to the left of the current administration, an impression that is buttressed by polls of their voting records, which show that the proportion of liberals to conservatives in the press, either 3-to-1 or 4-to-1.

The problem is not so much the bias of the media, since intelligent people are expected to have a point of view, but the pervasive, one-sided and often distorting influence of antipathy towards the President and his policies which are actually influencing policy. The media is functioning in the role of an opposition party, aiding and abetting the real opposition party. They are not presenting the news, they are presenting a poltical point of view. That is simply wrong. Phillip Brennan talks about the ‘Big Lie’ which, for a long time, was based on distortions of the truth but, now, has expanded into outright wishful thinking, as with the media’s obsessive wish for an Iraqi civil war that never seems to happen.

As such, they cannot claim objectivity, and cannot claim that their purpose is simply to report the news. They are not doing that. They are presenting one side of the news…and, as in the example above, actually creating danger to this country because of the atmosphere of insularity they create in the White House. The President is unable to present his voice to the people, since to do so, he has to face a hostile press. The press�are�endangering our lives.