Media

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From the "sun came up in the east" department...

Conservatives remain scarce in the news media landscape.

Only 6 percent of the national press corps describe themselves as "conservative" in a population that includes reporters, editors and producers from major television and radio networks, daily newspapers, news wires and online sources.

Those who consider themselves "very conservative" amount to just 2 percent, according to a wide-ranging survey of 585 journalists and news executives released yesterday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In contrast, 36 percent of the overall population generally consider themselves conservative. ...

The majority of nationally ranked journalists — 53 percent — described themselves as moderate, 24 percent were liberal and 8 percent "very liberal."

And still liberals scream about Fox News.  I guess they're ticked off about that 6 percent.

Good news.  The media is writing the obituary for conservatism.  Which HAS to mean we're due for a conservative renaissance.

Why doesn't this headline surprise me?

"Ex-ABC consultant said to fake interview"

A former ABC News consultant fired last year because he couldn't authenticate academic credentials is at the center of a new dispute over apparently faked interviews with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and others.

The consultant, Alexis Debat, quit the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, on Wednesday after Obama's representatives claimed an interview with the senator appearing under Debat's byline in the French magazine Politique Internationale never took place. The interview quoted the Democratic presidential candidate as saying the Iraq war was "a defeat for America."

Of course, on the other hand, even when they actually DO interview their subjects, the resulting product often seems just as manufactured.

Within the space of just a few days, we had a former President call for tax-payer funding of a known terrorist organization, a former Vice-President offer aid and comfort to our enemies while giving a speech in a foreign country, and a sitting Vice-President accidentally shoot a friend while quail hunting.  Of these three events, the one with the least importance to our national security became the fixation of a self-indulgent media for well over a week.

Given what we already know about the selective memories of many in the mainstream media, it should come as no surprise that they also seem to suffer from a case of selective attention span.  On issues that don’t present liberals in a favorable light, the press suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder.  When it comes to similar situations involving conservatives however, they become obsessive-compulsives.  Perhaps a dose of Ritalin is in order.

In the first of these events, we had former President Jimmy Carter call for the continuation of American aid for the Palestinian Authority which, given their recent election results, is tantamount to direct funding of Hamas, a terrorist organization with the avowed goal of the destruction of Israel.  Note that in the aftermath of this comment there was no constant hounding by the press as to whether or not the former President would retract, reconsider or revise his remarks.  Nor were there any stakeouts of his home attempting to catch him leaving for the office each morning to grill him as to why he refused to do so, or to demand an apology on behalf of the Jewish people.

The second example saw former Vice-President Al Gore, while speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia, accuse his own country of “terrible abuses” of captured terrorists and “indiscriminately round(ing) up” Arabs after 9/11 on minor charges and holding them “in conditions that were just unforgivable”.  He went even further and referred to the facilities where we hold captured terrorists as Bush gulags.  He made these statements to an Arab audience on foreign soil, in reference to a country where he once campaigned to be President.

These two events by major American political figures went hardly noticed by the American people thanks to a nonplused media that was more interested in Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and finding out why they weren’t the first to know about it.

If ever there was a real life example of the dictionary definition of the term “feeding frenzy” as it applies to the press, this was it.  And what instigated the frenzy was less the story itself, but the media’s injured sense of entitlement.  “Why did some local Texas paper get the scoop?”  "Why was a private citizen putting out the information?"  "Why hasn’t he come forward and apologized?”  Imagine those words in a whiney cry-baby voice and you’ve got the gist of how the press briefing went in case you missed it.

Immediately, they went into full blown conspiracy mode, speculating that Cheney was either drunk and/or attempting a cover-up of the incident.  Such theories fit the standard liberal template, whereas it being the result of an accident while two buddies were out hunting did not.

First they demanded that Cheney offer a public “apology”, despite the fact the no one but Harry Wittington was injured.  When Cheney did take to the airwaves to discuss his accident, the press corps derided the fact that he chose to do so on Fox News.  Then the press complained that the apology wasn’t good enough, since he didn’t actually use the words “I’m sorry”.

What they wanted was a full blown press conference, with Cheney hauled in to contritely bow, scrape and submit himself to their machine gun style questioning.  In other words, a repeat of what White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan endured a few days earlier.  A chance for reporters to beat up on a public figure before the TV cameras, then thump their chests as they stand over the carcass of their prey.  (At least this is how it goes when they dream about it at night.)

The incident did serve some purpose however, by offering a great example of how self important these so-called journalists really are.  One went so far as to yell at the White House Press Secretary and call him a “jerk” during an open briefing.  No wonder these guy's ratings are going down the drain.  People see them for the self-centered bunch they really are.

Columnist Thomas Sowell has pointed out that our friends in the media and on the left in general are (not surprisingly) being selective about what they choose to call a "scandal" and get exercised about.  Noting that these are the same people who accuse the Bush administration of “domestic spying”, but largely ignored real domestic spying conducted by the Clinton administration, not to mention the hundreds of FBI files that Clinton political hacks absconded for their own purposes.

While one could perhaps attribute a good bit of the inordinate attention to the Cheney story to the fact that there was little other news, as we’ve seen, that just wasn’t the case.  It was an opportunity to criticize a conservative Republican that they maintain a vehement distaste for.  In other words the Cheney story fit the template, and it triggered the inner obsessive-compulsive in them all.

Think for a moment about what you didn’t hear about in the recent election season.  Something you were probably sick of hearing about in news coverage in every election for the past few decades.  All about how Republicans don’t fare well with women voters.  The called it the “gender gap”.

For years it was put forward that Republicans were at a disadvantage among female voters largely due to the abortion issue.  Those crazy Republican’s pro-life tendencies were the cause of it all.  If only the GOP would not allow those radical pro-lifers to run their party and stop being so intolerant and mean, then maybe women would flock to their cause.

Every election cycle we heard it again, but with a new twist.  There was the “Year of the woman” in ’92, and then “soccer moms” all through the late ‘90’s and 2000.  Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the 2004 election.  The gender gap disappeared.

Well, sort of.  I say sort of because the 2004 exit polls tell us that, if there is anything close to representing a “gender gap” in American politics today it is the Democrats gender gap among men.  That’s right, the “no testosterone” party is down among the Y chromosome crowd by a whopping eleven percent.  Women on the other hand slightly favored the Democratic nominee, but only by fifty-one to forty-eight percent.  And this year, men made up fifty-one percent of all votes cast.

This goes a long way towards explaining why you DON’T hear the predominantly liberal media talking about the “gender gap” any more…because it doesn’t cut against Republicans.  That’s journalistic integrity for you.

But what about other gaps?  There is the “abortion gap”.  That’s the one that shows the difference in support for the two parties among voters based on their position on the abortion issue.

A post election poll conducted by Worthlin Worldwide demonstrated that pro-life candidates had a nearly two-to-one margin of support among the forty-two percent of voters that said the abortion issue “affected how they voted”.

Further, eight percent of voters responded that abortion was “the most important issue” in determining who they voted for.  Six percent went for Bush and two percent for Kerry – a pro-life advantage of four percentage points of total turnout.  When you consider that the average election in America is won or lost by less than five percent of the vote, the importance of that number becomes pretty clear.  (See Florida, 2000 and Ohio, 2004).

Want another?  How about the “marriage gap”?  This one’s a doozy.  It shows that Kerry took un-married voters by eighteen percent, but then lost among married voters by fifteen percent – a thirty-three percent swing!  Further, married voters outnumber un-marrieds by sixty-three to thirty-seven percent.

Apparently something happens to people when they get married that causes them to run from Democrats.  Could it have something to do with liberal policies being perceived as less family friendly?  Married people generally pay more in taxes, have a greater stake in the economy and are (rightfully so) more likely to have children.  Probably as a result they tend to do things like go to church more often and generally be concerned about the overall coarsening of our culture.

In fact, this was the third election in a row where (aside from the black vote) the most reliable statistical indicator of how an individual will vote was based on an affirmative answer to three questions:  Are they married?  Do they have kids?  And do they attend church on a regular basis?  A yes to all three puts you deep in GOP territory.

Then there’s the “ideology gap”, which showed equal percentages of liberals voted for Kerry as conservatives who voted for Bush, (eighty-five percent), but that self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals thirty-four to twenty-one percent.

Last but not least, there’s the “values gap”.  It seems that the voters who placed a premium on moral issues might have been partially responsible for some political pros’ misreading of the tea leaves in the run-up to the election.  The responses to the pre-election polls regarding the overall direction of the country, (the “right track / wrong track” question), had a majority of voters saying they felt the country was headed in the wrong direction.

The media wrongly assumed that meant that they were unhappy with the President.  What it actually appears to have meant for many people was that they were unhappy with such things as gay marriage, abortion, activist judges and a host of other values related issues.  When it came time to vote, they pulled the lever for W.

In fact, voters who based their vote on “moral issues” supported President Bush by better than eighty percent.  Now that’s a gap.