Evil media bias? It depends on which lens you’re looking through that day

By David McElroy · December 21, 2011

I love to watch people’s attitudes toward media shift as the facts of a story changes. I’m never sure whether what I’m seeing is funny or pathetic, though. I guess it’s both.

I’m reminded of that again as I watch various people try to decide what they think of media reports in the last week or two that Ron Paul just might be doing well in Iowa. As the facts of the story have changed, pro-Paul and anti-Paul people have both scrambled to spin the media’s role to suit their own narrative.

For a long time, there wasn’t anything especially positive for the media to report about Paul. He hung around down around 10 percent in real polls and it was clear to all that his positions weren’t going to be adopted by the mainstream anytime soon, so he wasn’t someone to take especially seriously in news coverage. (Let’s not get sidetracked into fanatical craziness about straw polls and website “polls,” both of which are about as close to meaningless as you can get.)

During that period, news coverage was mostly about which candidates were jockeying for the lead or about which new candidates were seen as having the potential to become serious challengers. There wasn’t much to say about Paul in either of those regards. (Remember that the media cover elections as though they’re horse races, not as though they’re about ideas. The public wouldn’t bother to read or watch actual intellectual coverage.) So during that period, all I heard was screams from my Paul-loving friends that the media “hate” Paul and that they’re “trying to make sure he can’t win.”

Nothing of the sort was going on, but I guess it made them feel better. At the same time, the neoconservatives of the GOP mainstream were quite happy with the media’s Paul coverage, because it suited what they wanted to see happen, so they were mostly smugly silent about the coverage.

Then something shifted. In a state that’s not especially representative of the rest of the country, a poll or two has come out showing that Paul is actually a contender in Iowa. Suddenly, he was a legitimate part of the conversation about the Iowa caucuses, rather than just the libertarian freakshow. When that happened, the Paul supporters and the Paul-haters switched sides on media coverage.

As the news has turned positive for Paul, Rush Limbaugh has gone ballistic in attacking him, even making a fake campaign ad to mock Paul this week. What’s more, earlier this month, he told a caller that Paul had “nothing to do with the Tea Party,” conveniently forgetting that the whole Tea Party movement grew out of Paul’s supporters. And on Monday, Limbaugh told viewers that the “mainstream media” will try to build Paul up if he wins Iowa.

What’s my point? Simple. When there was nothing positive to report about Paul’s campaign, pro-Paul people were angry and convinced that “the mainstream media” was opposed to them. Now that there is something positive to report about the Paul campaign — and it’s being reported — the anti-Paul people are suggesting that the same “mainstream media” want to build up a Republican contender who can’t win.

The truth is that the media didn’t push Paul down when there was nothing good to say about him or pump him up now that there’s a positive poll or two to report. In both cases, they just did what you’d expect media to do related to any candidate. (I’m not even going to try to get into critiquing the way modern campaigns work and how they’re covered. I’m just saying they did what is expected by normal rules of coverage.)

I’m a big critic of the news media today, both the broader media and television news in particular. (Well, actually, I’d like you to turn your televisions off entirely.) But if you want to criticize the media, criticize them for the systemic problems. They’re not out to get you and your candidate, whoever he is. Even though every reporter and editor and producer has a bias of some sort — because they’re human beings — most of them are honestly trying to be fair. They sometimes get it wrong. They sometimes have competing issues to worry about — such as getting a story done on time with reduced staff and lower budgets — but they’re not out to get you.

Journalists don’t wake up each morning thinking about how to make you and your beliefs look bad. They wake up thinking about how to do their jobs and get more readers or more viewers. They’re just flawed human beings doing a tough job. Criticize the industry all you want — I certainly do — but criticize them for the things that actually do wrong, not your paranoid fantasies of what they’re trying to do to you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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