Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Sorry, Perfesser, but “to the left of my/your preferences” does not mean “left.” By no stretch of the imagination is ABC, NBC, the NYT, CNN, or indeed any of the other outlets you listed a “left-wing” news organization; they’re all centrists, or in the case of the WaPo, perhaps the LAT, and perhaps CBS center-left. We don’t have an equivalent of the Grauniad or Frankfurter Rundschau in this country.

Uh, NYT and CNN are pretty left-leaning, make no bones about it.  I’d say those two and Fox probably balance each other.  I can’t say I’ve seen enough ABC or NBC to make the call.

Regarding the NYT, story placement analysis and reporting has shown several times the leftward bias.  Their ombudsman even acknowledged it in 2004! (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E7D8173DF936A15754C0A9629C8B63)

Sorry, Calvaria, but that doesn’t wash. Okrent’s little humor piece — and that’s all it is — points out that they’re “liberal” on one issue, for some value of “liberal"… that is hardly “left.” And CNN “left”? Have you actually sat down and listened to anything other than their interview “shows”? They’re right down the middle; perhaps that’s to the left of your preferences, but it’s not actually on the left.

This is a rhetorical error that I see from both the left and the right all the time: Anything in the center is necessarily to the opposite direction of their preferences, so it gets labelled as if it is completely opposed to their own preferences. But calling a centrist a “liberal” (or “conservative") does not make him/her one.

Um, CE?  Have you read their editorial page?  NYT has frequently just done a copy and paste on the Democratic party platform.

Of course, leftists don’t think the media has a left-wing bias? To them, there is no such thing as a left-wing bias.  They’re just correct!

CNN not biased?  This is the network where their chief *news* executive resigned after falsely accusing US soldiers of assassinating journalists; acknowledging that they purposefully buried heinous details of Saddam’s government to keep reporters there; the same CNN that has *journalists* flatly saying the war in Iraq is a disaster?  And here I thought *news* was supposed to be objective reporting.  Commentary makes sense, it’s supposed to be subjective.

Anyways,sounds biased to me.  Though I guess you could just call them corrupt and horribly inept, as they’ve manufactured/manipulated other non-political non-news into controversies.

Per the NYT: didn’t happen to read that front-page hitpiece alluding to McCain and adultery?  There was even a video of a NYT reporter quite blatantly trying to goad McCain into an argument, then accuses him of being hostile when he doesn’t take the bait. (http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4409567).  This was all pretty obvious to me and I don’t even like/support McCain!

(Data): http://www.journalism.org/node/8249

C.E. must be left-leaning.  There have been countless studies showing the left-leaning tendencies of mainstream media.  It is impossible not to let your own personal biases impact both the actual reporting and the selection of stories and placement.  When 90%+ of people in media vote Democrat, that means bias.  To those with innate leftish inclinations it may honestly appear neutral or centrist - but on objective studies it comes out left.  (and I did not even address the outright hit pieces put forth on occasion by outlets like the NY Times)

At least Fox admits it leans right (perhaps not directly, but everyone knows “fair and balanced” is a direct jab at the lefty CNN et al)

The crucial difference is that Fox (unfortunately) isn’t conservative - it’s a bizarre mix of jingoistic and a fully-integrated propaganda outlet of the Republican party.

The NYT and CNN may lean culturally liberal, but their treatment of Democrats is pretty consistently worse than their treatment of Republicans. Anyone remember their treatment of Gore when running against Bush? Or, for a more recent example, compare their treatment of Obama’s “bitter” comment with their treatment of the (repeatedly revealed) fact that McCain doesn’t understand the difference between Sunni and Shiite five years into the Iraq conflict.

I went without cable from about 1989 to about 2003, and the drop in quality of cable news was obvious when I returned to it in 2003.  If you could find a one-hour clip of CNN from the mid 80s and watched it, you wouldn’t have the stomach to watch it today.  I no longer have a TV...it’s especially useless for getting news.  Anyway, what I really wanted to say was don’t slap me in the face a hundred times with your left hand, then tell me that I should be grateful when you start using your right.  These networks are supposed to be providing NEWS....this isn’t the same as watching a little NOVA and then a little Gilligans Island and calling the result “balance.”