Buzz Bissinger, the liberal writer best known for his non-fiction book “Friday Night Lights,” says his peers in the mainstream media are “deceiving themselves” if they think they can keep their left-leaning biases out of their stories and reporting.
After Bissinger, a life-long liberal, wrote a column about why he has decided to vote for Mitt Romney this year, his liberal peers in the media savaged him.
Bissinger, who contributed $2,300 to the Obama campaign in 2008, said “writers from national media outlets” were “trying to pick the column apart because they were outraged that one they considered part of the tribe, a journalist and author, would actually turn away from the ingrained liberal leanings of the profession” and publicly support Romney.
“The column only confirmed for me the liberal bias that is rife in the mainstream media,” Bissinger wrote. “Every colleague but one vehemently disagreed with my support of Romney, and they are deceiving themselves if they think they can keep such political views out of their stories.”
In endorsing Romney, Bissinnger wrote it was “the most difficult opinion piece of my life,” but after Romney “performed with stunning vigor and enthusiasm and President Obama performed with stunning aloofness and arrogance,” Bissinger decided to vote for Romney this year.
Bissinger wrote:
As a lifelong Democrat from a family of lifelong Democrats, I noted repeatedly that the decision was anguished, difficult, emotional, but rooted in a sincere conviction that I could no longer back a president who no longer acted like he wanted to be president, who offered a vision for the country as original as those college essays you can buy off the Internet, who in front of 70 million viewers acted like he had 90 minutes to kill before going out to dinner with Michelle for their 20th anniversary. Coupled with Romney exuding a belief that this is a country that can still move forward, not backward. Coupled with Romney’s return to the moderate he always was as Masschussetts governor.
Bissinger said he did not write the column to “inflame” and wrote the piece in a nuanced way to “show that we have to move beyond the dangerous reactionary conviction where liberals believe there has never been a good conservative idea in the history of the Republic and conservatives believe there has never been a good liberal idea in the history of the Republic. “
“The response to the column, for me at least, is far more interesting than the column itself,” Bissinger wrote.
He said while “liberals preach tolerance,” “90 percent are every bit as nasty and vitriolic” as they accuse conservative of being.
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