My team of media researchers is on vacation just now, so I have to do this by myself, based on my non-scientific study of the journalistic lay of the land. What I have concluded from years of observation is that Fox TV news is widely scoffed at by erudite folks, just the kind who routinely read The New York Times. The alleged basis for the disdain is that Fox is obviously biased whereas the Old Gray Lady is impeccably objective.
But this is, I have concluded, a misimpression from the get-go, at least as far as political and public policy coverage are concerned. Take just the design of The Times's Op Ed page. Its regular columnists, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, et al., are nearly all echoing the editorial philosophy that's guiding the paper. Sure, Brooks is less harshly mainstream liberal and on occasion will defend a conservative line but lately less and less so. Moreover, he is so ambivalent in his views that they offer no contrast to the rest of the Leftist claptrap produced as opinion and analysis by the paper.
Now, there are some contributors to the Times who appear in its business section who don't toe the line but this doesn't count for much. The news analyses, so-called, that the paper publishes in its "Sunday Week" section and in the Sunday magazine is uniformly statist, favoring big government and the extension of Washington's killer deficit public finance philosophy. (The occasional exceptions deal with civil libertarian matters, excluding the civil rights of people in the business community.) The likes of Ron Paul, who champions free markets and free minds with equal intensity, rarely get a respectful treatment so that anyone who promotes fiscal responsibility is dismissed as hating the poor, etc. Those marching in protest in Greece against efforts to rein in state profligacy might well have gotten their orders from the Times's editorials.
More
No comments:
Post a Comment