Media Bias: Same Basic Scenario, Polar Opposite Reporting From The Mainstream Media

The Left’s propagandists are constantly trying to convince us that there’s no inherent media bias. One of my fellow bloggers at TheRightSphere.com, Brock Boehlert, provides a perfect counter to the liberal noise-machine’s disconnected-from-reality talking point:

Take a look at these headlines:

The President’s Jobless Recovery

Frustrated Job Seekers Cause Jobless Rate To Drop

Economy Adds Few New Jobs

Low Jobless Rate Reflects Lost Hope

US Jobless Rate Drops But For Wrong Reasons

Recent headlines regarding the drop in the unemployment rate from 9% to 8.6% right?

Wrong.

Wrong, indeed. Those headlines are from 2004 when then President Bush was gearing up for re-election and the unemployment rate had dropped to 5.7%. How many millions of Americans would be jumping for joy at that unemployment rate right now? Yet, back then news outlets, including some allegedly unbiased sources like the Associated Press, were cranking out doom and gloom stories about the rate drop actually being bad news.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The facts back then were similar to the facts now. The unemployment rate had dropped because over 300,000 had just given up looking for work. Now take a look at some headlines from last week after the unemployment rate dropped from 9% to 8.7%:

Here are headlines from Friday’s job numbers:

Unemployment Rate Drops To 8.6% Raising Hopes

Jobless Rate Drop Could Boost Obama

Obama Gets Economic Indicator He Can Crow About

Good News On Job Front For Obama

Jobless Rate Lowest In 2.5 Years

See the difference? I am not one to go one about “the liberal media.” That would indicate the media as a whole has a sought after liberal agenda (and some of them do but they’re easy to spot). The problem is, most journalists have an inherent bias that affects their reporting. They just don’t realize it. It just comes out naturally. The majority of those who work in journalism are Democrats/liberals.

I’m not as generous as my TheRightSphere.com colleague. I happen to think a lot more journalists intentionally skew the news to push an agenda, but the overall point is accurate. The media is dominated by Leftists and their bias comes out naturally.

Here we have almost the exact same scenario being reported in two opposite ways. The “mainstream” media is picking sides. In this case, they need to make it look like Democrats, and Obama specifically, are turning the economy around. Back in 2004, they needed to make it look like Bush (with unemployment significantly lower than it is today) was leading us in the wrong direction.

Does it get any more blatant that this?