Assessment of Mr. Trump

[carpedm9587]

Three straight quarters of +3% GDP^[1] -- something that liberals have been insisting for the past 8 years was no longer possible in today's world market (and the day after Trump was elected liberal economic guru Paul Krugman called his victory "the mother of all adverse effects," predicting "a global recession, with no end in sight" as a result).

The unemployment rate is at 4.1% -- which is a 17-year low. And the last time I checked new unemployment claims are at their lowest in 43 years! Even CNN is admitting that Hispanic unemployment at an all-time low (4.7%) under Trump. At the end of last month Goldman Sachs predicted that the unemployment rate will drop to 3.7% by end-2018 and 3.5% by end-2019 leading their widely respected chief economist Jan Hatzius^[2] to declare, "Such a scenario would take the U.S. labor market into territory almost never seen outside of a major wartime mobilization."

1. And the New York Federal Reserve Bank is predicting that next quarter the GDP will be at 3.8% -- far outstripping the anemic average-annual GDP growth rate of 1.5% during Obama’s term as president.

2. he's won the Lawrence R. Klein Award for the most accurate U.S. economic forecast twice in the past four years.

Rogue - I subscribe to the general point of view that presidents have relatively little impact on the economy. There's a fair body of evidence to substantiate it, and there's a good podcast on it here: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/frea...really-matter/

Yes, they like to take credit (Obama did too), and they are certainly impacted by it (a bad economy is not usually good for a president, a good economy tends to be good for re-election). Congress has somewhat more of an effect - depending on what legislation they pass, and I suppose one could say the president has an indirect effect based on what he does and does not sign. But even that does not tend to have major impact as much as it once did - on this world of global economics. Job growth, which Trump loves to take credit for, is actually at par (or slightly below) what it was in Obama's second term. So, on an economic front, there is not a great deal of difference between what was and what is. Wall Street loves the promises of tax breaks and deregulation - but the larger percentage of the American public didn't like what Republicans were trying to do to health care, and the majority don't like what is happening with tax breaks.

But even if the case were to be made that the economy is "going gangbusters" due to Trump - the economy was actually pretty healthy when he took office, coming out of a deep recession, and there are a lot of people out there (myself included) who simply don't see the economy and money as the most important value. We look at what is being done to the ecology, to the gap between rich and poor, to the accessibility of affordable healthcare, and to simple human decency in the public square - and we are not impressed. I think you are going to see those folks come out in droves in 2018, and again in 2020 to reverse those courses. We do not like the anti-muslim tone. We do not like the way racial issues have been handled. We do not like the childish name-calling and even-getting and megalomania. We do not like seeing breaks going to those who least need it. We do not like seeing protections for our ecology being eroded. We are not willing to be herded by false claims about terrorism and immigrants.

And we vote. We are going to be voting in record numbers in 2018 and again in 2020 - I'm fairly certain. Every special election we have seen since Trump took office has seen a shift to the left, by an average of over 10 points. Most were in deeply red districts, so that was not enough to take the seat (until Alabama), but if that trend continues in 2018, the left will easily pick up the 24 seats needed to take control of the House. The Senate is not as likely, given the number of seats being defended by each party, but there is still a chance there.

And frankly, if the right doesn't run a decent candidate in 2020 against Trump - I predict he is going to go down. It may not be a landslide, because traditionally red states and his core base will continue to support him. But the swing states will not. He's simply alienated too many people - and continues to do so.

My hope is that the House shifts hands in 2018, and the Executive in 2020. If the senate does as well - that will be a concern for me. I do not like having all three (Executive and both Houses of Congress) in the hands of one party. But if that is what it takes to keep SCOTUS from shifting too far to the right, I'll tolerate it for one election cycle. Then I'd prefer to see a more even distribution of control.

I'd also like to see a return to bipartisan discussion and debate. Right now that is not on the table. Perhaps with Trump out and a president truly interested in bringing people together in, we might see some change.

[carpedm9587]

Sorkin, Stewart, Colbert, Chomsky, Nader, Finkelstein, Maddow, Huffington, Olbermann, Maher, Matthews, Baher, Uygur, Kasparian, Siegel, Cornish, Gross, Glass, etc. And it's not just people on the right who would make the claim that the mainstream media leans heavily left. Centrists like myself also make that claim, because, well, it's a fact. Most of Hollywood, most news media, and even most publicly funded media, leans left. The reason why stations like Fox News, and talk radio pundits like Limbaugh, and Savage stand out is because their right-leaning agendas are heavily contrasted against all of the left-leaning media that's the norm.

Some of those are comedians, Adrift - and I don't put a comic show on the same plane as a political commentator. As for the others, while I recognize the names, I would not have been able to recite any of them from memory. They simply do not have the same cachet and audience base as the pundits on the right. Do a search for "most influential political figures" and see how often, in the various lists, the top ten are predominantly right leaning.

The late night circuit, these days, is heavily skewed in their Trump coverage. But come on - the man is just a fountain of material. It's like Christmas for comedians. They pick on others as well - but why on earth would anyone pan for gold in a stream when there is a 3 foot vein of it running across the face of the mountain!

I also don't subscribe to the "bad ole MSM" mantra. Most media outlets are fairly central. MSNBC has been trying to copy the Fox business model, so I'd put them over to the left. The rest may be somewhat left of center, but not by a great deal. Then there are many that are right of center as well, like WSJ and Forbes. Yes - there are outlets that are badly skewed to the left - like Huffington Post, Jezebel, Mother Jones, etc. There are also the far right outlets like Brietbart, the Federalist, and the Blaze.

When I scan the headlines from outlets, I can usually tell if they skew left or right on the basis of the headline. But I tend to use www.allsides.com to give me a sense of where the sources lay on the spectrum.

[carpedm9587]

Trump allegedly did most of his woman alienating before the last campaign, and won pretty much similar % of women as previous candidates. Minorities vote democrat religiously no matter who the republican is, they're a non-factor. The last 3 groups might as well not even exist considering how few people are in them.

Trump's victory mostly depends on what he can deliver to the working class in swing states. That's what gave Obama his victory and what will give Trump his.

As far as I can see, his woman alientating continues to this day (see his tweet about Gillibrand and the reaction). And with renewed energy on the accusations of harassment, I think Mr. Trump is going to have a hard time of it. But, as I said...we shall see... it is also possible I am engaging in unsubstantiated hope. But I doubt it. There's an awful lot of substantiation out there.

[rogue06]

Rogue - I subscribe to the general point of view that presidents have relatively little impact on the economy.

Normally I'd agree with you but I'm having a hard time swallowing the idea that this monumental shift just happened to begin precisely when Trump was elected president. Too much of a coincidence to be... um, coincidental.

[rogue06]

Some of those are comedians, Adrift - and I don't put a comic show on the same plane as a political commentator.

IIRC, there have been a couple shows that revealed that a large portion of our society, primarily the younger generations, get their news from such shows like the Daily Show. That makes their impact pretty important and not worth hand waving away.

[Adrift]

Some of those are comedians, Adrift - and I don't put a comic show on the same plane as a political commentator.

I certainly do, and I think it's the height of dishonesty when people like Stewart or John Oliver claim that they shouldn't be held accountable because all they're doing is comedy. Limbaugh is as much an entertainer as Stewart, and Stewart is just as much a commentator as Limbaugh, they just approach the subject from avenues that most appeal to their audience.

As for the others, while I recognize the names, I would not have been able to recite any of them from memory. They simply do not have the same cachet and audience base as the pundits on the right. Do a search for "most influential political figures" and see how often, in the various lists, the top ten are predominantly right leaning.

Yes they do. Sorkin had over 17 million viewers for the West Wing, All Things Considered pulls in over 14 million, Limbaugh pulls in roughly the same amount. That you're not able to recite any of the names I mentioned from memory really lays out your left leaning bias. I'm not even that into politics, but you maintain a political page on Facebook! Most of the names I mentioned should have sprung immediately to your mind.

The late night circuit, these days, is heavily skewed in their Trump coverage. But come on - the man is just a fountain of material. It's like Christmas for comedians. They pick on others as well - but why on earth would anyone pan for gold in a stream when there is a 3 foot vein of it running across the face of the mountain!

Oh come on. You're telling me that SNL and Late Night shows weren't leaning heavy left before Trump came on the scene? Really? If that's something you really think, then again, your bias is showing. If you were the centrist you claim to be, then you would know, without a doubt, that that is bunk.

I also don't subscribe to the "bad ole MSM" mantra. Most media outlets are fairly central. MSNBC has been trying to copy the Fox business model, so I'd put them over to the left. The rest may be somewhat left of center, but not by a great deal. Then there are many that are right of center as well, like WSJ and Forbes. Yes - there are outlets that are badly skewed to the left - like Huffington Post, Jezebel, Mother Jones, etc. There are also the far right outlets like Brietbart, the Federalist, and the Blaze.

You think that because you really do lean left, and you're so used to hearing your own talking points in your ear that you think it's normal. If you were really a centrist it would be plain as day to you that the the "bad old MSM" mantra was plain fact. The article I linked was from 2015. It spells out in no uncertain terms that the mainstream media leans heavily left. There's not even room for doubt about it. It's a proven fact.

When I scan the headlines from outlets, I can usually tell if they skew left or right on the basis of the headline. But I tend to use www.allsides.com to give me a sense of where the sources lay on the spectrum.

Yes, I've seen you link that website probably about a half dozen times now. We get it, it's the bees knees. As far as I can tell, even with Allsides.com on your side, your judgement is on the blink.

[rogue06]

Some of those in the MSM quite openly admit to a liberal bias.

I'll never forget how then Newsweek editor Evan Thomas nonchalantly admitted to liberal bias on the now defunct Inside Washington show on PBS saying that it was worth up to 15 points For John Kerry in his bid to be president in 2004^[1]

Speaking of Newsweek this little gem from USA Today founder Al Neuharth from a 2011 column is worth noting:

"When Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post, it was predictably left-wing, but it was accurate. Under Tina Brown, it is an inaccurate and unfair left-wing propaganda machine."

Here are just a few of a whole lot of such admissions that I collected over the years:

• "I think we are aware, as everyone who works in the media is, that the old stereotype of the liberal bent happens to be true.” --Emily Rooney while “ABC World News Tonight” Executive Producer

• "Of course there’s a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left." --Andrew Heyward while CBS News President

• "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat." --Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post’s “Book Word”

• "Well it’s there and it doesn’t show itself in everything that is printed or broadcast but it is there." --David Brinkley, news broadcast icon discussing Liberal Bias on CNBC back in 1995. Many would argue that it is much worse now

• "I’ll give you that a lot of the media is liberal. In fact, I think that’s probably a gimme." --Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, CNBC “Power Lunch” co-host, while interviewing Ann Coulter

• "I don’t know if it’s 95 percent...[but] there are enough [liberals] in the old media, not just in ABC, but in old media generally, that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction....It’s an endemic problem. And again, it’s the reason why for 40 years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake." -- ABC News political director Mark Halperin in 2006

• "Personally, I have a great affection for CBS News....But I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me." -- Former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter (who was also an Executive Vice President of the CBS Broadcast Group)

• "There is just no question that I, among others, have a liberal bias. I’m consistently liberal in my opinions” … and that CBS anchorman “Dan [Rather] is transparently liberal” who “should be more careful.” --Andy Rooney, the late long time lovable curmudgeon on “60 Minutes”

• "Could anyone deny that most Washington reporters tend to move more aggressively to bring down Republicans in trouble than Democrats in trouble?” --ABC News’ political unit (Mark Halperin, Marc Ambinder, David Chalian and Brooke Brower), in a 2003 “The Note” column.

• "Of course it is....These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed. -- New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent and proud Democrat in a 2004 column asking, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?"^[2]

• "Everyone knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.” --Walter Cronkite, former CBS Evening News anchor and news legend (widely regarded as being responsible for turning the American public against the Vietnam War). This was a view he would express again and again up until his death in 2009^[3]

• "Many in the media have been one-sided, sometimes adding to Obama's distortions rather than acting as impartial reporters of fact and referees of the mud fights.... We hear a lot less about Democratic sins such as President Clinton's distortions of Bob Dole's position on Medicare in 1996 and the NAACP's stunningly scurrilous ad campaign in 2000 associating George W. Bush's opposition to a hate crimes bill with the racist murderers who dragged James Byrd behind a truck." -- Stuart Taylor while at National Journal and now Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the liberal Brookings Institution

• "It would be on "Frontline" tonight. It would be a documentary already. If [it was] Newt Gingrich, it would be on the front page of the “Globe” every single day since this happened; but because it was a bureaucratic snafu [laughs], it’s not much of a story." --Mike Barnicle while with the "Boston Globe" and now frequent contributor and guest on MSNBC, on the "Leher News Hour" on PBS during the first week of the "Filegate" scandal, in response to the question: "Do you agree with the Republicans when they say that if it was a bunch of Republicans, everyone would be all over them like a blanket?"

• "Oh, my God. Are you kidding? That George W. Bush was a crybaby, that he was the spoiled son of a failed president. You know, you could just hear the personal attacks on Bush would be just absolutely vicious." --Howard Fineman, while Newsweek's Chief Political Correspondent and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, admitting that things would have been very different if the 2000 post-election results were reversed and Bush was contesting a Gore victory.

• "Having spent time in...both the Hillary and the Trump bubble, I will tell you that...the reporters who are following around Hillary -- a lot of them are Hillary fans. They're just in awe of her. They're very patient with her....with the Trump people, it's a feeding frenzy...[they] are the most aggressive ones; the ones who they hope will dig up the one piece of dirt that will -- you know, kill the Trump monster" --David Martosko of the Daily Mail

• "No person with eyes in his head in 2008 could have failed to see the way that soft coverage helped to propel Obama first to the Democratic nomination and then into the White House." --New York Magazine political reporter John Heilemann

• "The mainstream press is liberal.... [T]he press corps at such institutions as the Washington Post, ABC-NBC-CBS News, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, etc. is composed in large part of 'new' or 'creative' class members of the liberal elite.... If reporters were the only ones allowed to vote, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won the White House by landslide margins." --Thomas Edsall veteran Washington Post political reporter in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review, called "Journalism Should Own Its Liberalism."

I should add that recently during a panel discussion at the left-leaning POLITICO's Playbook Breakfast with the New York Times' Peter Baker and Mark Leibovich, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CNN's Jake Tapper they unanimously agreed that the news media leans to the left.

To focus in on an example of how slanted the MSM's reporting is in favor of liberals and Democrats take a look at how slow to pick up on controversy surrounding Obama’s Green Jobs Czar Van Jones and the videos showing ACORN employees assisting a supposed pimp and prostitute in hiding their income and arranging for underage girls to be smuggled into the country to be used as prostitutes.

In writing about the MSM's reluctance to cover these stories Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander mentions a likely reason: “Why the tardiness? One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like The Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints." It "can't be discounted," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, noting that "Complaints by conservatives are slower to be picked up" by the liberal MSM because "there are not enough conservatives and too many liberals in most newsrooms. They just don't see the resonance of these issues. They don't hear about them as fast [and] they're not naturally watching as much."

Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he worried "that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view."

And on writing about the New York Times dismal coverage of the ACORN scandals and the Van Jones resignation, the paper’s Public Editor Clark Hoyt criticized them for "looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself" especially since when the Times finally got around to it the emphasis was about Republicans trying to dig up dirt to damage Obama: “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe.” According to Hoyt, “Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was ‘slow off the mark,’ and blamed ‘insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.’”


None of this is surprising considering that several polls and surveys of those in the MSM find that they are far to the left of the American public. Well over 90% are pro-abortion whereas the country is much more evenly split with a majority even favoring limitations (something the MSM staunchly opposes). The same is true with nearly all social issues and things like gun control.

As a 2004 editorial in the “Dallas Morning News” entitled “Unvarnished Truth?: Perception of bias undermines media,” the editorial staff admitted that,

"it’s time we in the Fourth Estate admit that the liberal media isn’t a figment of Rush Limbaugh’s imagination. Studies by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Knight Foundation have shown that, on average, journalists are much more politically and culturally liberal and secular than their readers."

And again citing Evan Thomas on this

"There is a liberal bias. It’s demonstratable. You look at the statistics. About 85% of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. Particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias. There is a liberal bias at Newsweek, the magazine I work for – most of the people who work at Newsweek live on the Upper West Side in New York and they have a liberal bias."

This seems inevitable when several polls of reporters covering national news and politics, bureau chiefs and editors consistently found that self described liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by between 7 and 12 to 1 in the newsroom (depending on when the poll was conducted) but all show the gap widening in recent years with at least 90% voting Democrat in elections.









1. "Let’s talk about media bias here. The media, I think, want Kerry to win. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic, and this glow is going to be worth maybe 15 points."

2. Okrent would go on to describe the editorial page as being "thoroughly saturated in liberal theology," as well as the Sunday magazine, Arts and Leisure front page, culture pages, fashion coverage, Styles section, Sports section, and Metro section. He wrote that finding a culturally conservative view in The Times was like a creationist trying to find “comfort in Science Times,” and accuses the paper of negligence.

3. At one point he even pontificated that "I think most newspapermen, by definition, have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen."

[rogue06]

And from a year and a half ago:

Then there was the JournoList (a private Google Groups message board for discussing politics and the news media established by Ezra Klein who limited participation to several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics saying he excluded conservatives to keep conversations from degenerating into flame wars) incident in 2010 when it was revealed they they were discussing ways of explaining away or outright ignoring stories that were detrimental to Obama. One of their primary goals appears to be to kill stories about Jeremiah Wright, Obama's radical, racist pastor for 20 years and who Obama praised in his memoirs and early campaign speeches

Obama also credited Wright with introducing him to his Christian faith

The contributors were obsessed with finding ways of killing the Wright story, as it was reflecting negatively on Barack Obama. Chris Hayes, a top editor for The Nation and host of a daily program on MSNBC, encouraged his colleagues to avoid covering Wright because talking about it at all would hurt Obama. Spencer Ackerman, one time associate editor at the New Republic and then part of the American Independent Institute (which funds liberal investigative journalism efforts which, as they say, exposes "the nexus of conservative power in Washington") went further making the following suggestion:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them -- Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists"

And right after John McCain nominated Sarah Palin to be his running mate members of JurnoList had only one concern -- how to take her down. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.

"Okay, let’s get deadly serious, folks," Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly wrote. "Sarah Palin’s just been introduced to the country as a brave, above-party, oil-company-bashing, pork-hating maverick ‘outsider.’ What we can do is to expose her ideology."

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin.

"This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away ... bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant ... I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama]."

Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN American Center, which ironically purports to defend free expression by writers and others (as long as they are conservative I guess) made the following suggestion: "I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views."^[1]

Jonathan Stein then with Mother Jones was giddy about this approach writing: "That’s excellent! If enough people -- people on this list? -- write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket."

Nick Baumann, then senior editor with Mother Jones and now senior enterprise editor at Huffington Post added: "Say it with me: ‘Classic GOP Tokenism’."

Chris Hayes, a writer for The Nation, wrote: "Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get."

I think it is pretty clear that these journalists and their friends were acting as an unofficial wing of the Obama campaign. After all it wasn't uncommon for them to portray him as some sort of Messiah figure.

Who could ever forget when Newsweek editor Evan Thomas declared to on MSNBC's "Hardball" to host Chris Matthews (who notoriously once said that he felt a “thrill up his leg” while covering then-Senator Barack Obama): "I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."

Ezra Klein (the aforementioned founder of JurnoList) gushed about Obama in The American Prospect that, “He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.”

And then there was Mark Morford, columnist and culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com, remarks about Obama "isn’t really one of us" and how "many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul."














1. Let's see if the left takes that tact as Hillary keeps relying strongly on the fact that she's a woman as the reason women should vote for her (her husband's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, even suggested that women who don't support Hillary are earning "a special place in Hell.")

[Adrift]

To add to that, here's a conversation between Bob Garfield, the host of the NPR show "On the Media", and Ira Glass, the host of the NPR show "This American Life" from 2011,

Bob Garfield: You and I both know that if you were to somehow poll the political orientation of everybody in the NPR news organization and at all of the member stations, you would find an overwhelmingly progressive, liberal crowd, not uniformly, but overwhelmingly.

Ira Glass: Journalism, in general, reporters tend to be Democrats and tend to be more liberal than the public as a whole, sure. But that doesn't change what is going out over the air. And I feel like, well, let's measure the product.

Former NPR CEO Ken Stern also acknowledged the far left leaning nature of NPR in a recent NY Post piece.

[carpedm9587]

Normally I'd agree with you but I'm having a hard time swallowing the idea that this monumental shift just happened to begin precisely when Trump was elected president. Too much of a coincidence to be... um, coincidental.

Monumental? Rogue - the economy was on a path of recovery throughout Obama's term. The trajectory has not adjusted all that much. What "monumental" shift are you seeing in the data? And where is that data?

[carpedm9587]

IIRC, there have been a couple shows that revealed that a large portion of our society, primarily the younger generations, get their news from such shows like the Daily Show. That makes their impact pretty important and not worth hand waving away.

That's a good point - young people do indeed turn to such shows and do treat some of them as news.

But I have a hard time equating a 10-minute stand-up comedy routine with the hours-long, relentless thrashing from the list I provided. And where comedians are not making a pretense to be "news outlets," many of these opinion shows stage themselves as news programming. They are not alone in that. I fault CNN, and all of the other outlets for adopting the model - there is simply not enough difference between "news" and "opinion" in todays media outlets, IMO.

[JimL]

That's a good point - young people do indeed turn to such shows and do treat some of them as news.

But I have a hard time equating a 10-minute stand-up comedy routine with the hours-long, relentless thrashing from the list I provided. And where comedians are not making a pretense to be "news outlets," many of these opinion shows stage themselves as news programming. They are not alone in that. I fault CNN, and all of the other outlets for adopting the model - there is simply not enough difference between "news" and "opinion" in todays media outlets, IMO.

Disagree, there is a big difference. Opinion shows as you call them are not only agenda driven but some, such as those you mentioned, outright lie in order to further that agenda. Watch Sean Hannity and you can see that every night.

[JimL]

If you listen to the MSM the definition of bipartisanship is when a Republican agrees with the Democrats.

No, actually it's called compromise which is a word no longer in the republican party vocabulary.

[carpedm9587]

I certainly do, and I think it's the height of dishonesty when people like Stewart or John Oliver claim that they shouldn't be held accountable because all they're doing is comedy. Limbaugh is as much an entertainer as Stewart, and Stewart is just as much a commentator as Limbaugh, they just approach the subject from avenues that most appeal to their audience.

Yes they do. Sorkin had over 17 million viewers for the West Wing, All Things Considered pulls in over 14 million, Limbaugh pulls in roughly the same amount. That you're not able to recite any of the names I mentioned from memory really lays out your left leaning bias. I'm not even that into politics, but you maintain a political page on Facebook! Most of the names I mentioned should have sprung immediately to your mind.

Oh come on. You're telling me that SNL and Late Night shows weren't leaning heavy left before Trump came on the scene? Really? If that's something you really think, then again, your bias is showing. If you were the centrist you claim to be, then you would know, without a doubt, that that is bunk.

You think that because you really do lean left, and you're so used to hearing your own talking points in your ear that you think it's normal. If you were really a centrist it would be plain as day to you that the the "bad old MSM" mantra was plain fact. The article I linked was from 2015. It spells out in no uncertain terms that the mainstream media leans heavily left. There's not even room for doubt about it. It's a proven fact.

Yes, I've seen you link that website probably about a half dozen times now. We get it, it's the bees knees. As far as I can tell, even with Allsides.com on your side, your judgement is on the blink.

Well I had responded to this, but the response got lost, so maybe that's a good thing as I have no inclination to repeat the whole thing. I'll sum up.

• I have no idea what it means to hold a comedian "accountable," or what you're trying to help them accountable to.
• I do not conflate television shows with news media outlets. TV shows are made ot make money, so if a left-leaning show makes more money that a right-leaning show, that's what't going to be made.
• I think comedians and comedy shows go where the comedy is. Right now, Trump is the comedy. And, frankly, the right takes itself so damn seriously, they are pretty easy targets. After all, when the groups claiming moral superiority line up behind a man like Trump - that has enormous comedic value.
• I've seen the articles - and the accusations. None of them have convinced. It's certainly not a "proven fact," AFAICT. If it is, then please give me a link to your supporting studies and data. Are the media dead center? No. As best I can tell, most are slightly left of center, pretty much like me. Are they "leftists" to the degree Fox and Brietbart talk it up? No. Fox and Brietbart need to keep pushing that button to justify their existence. I don't buy it.
• www.allsides.com is not "on my side." They aren't on anyone's side. They are simply a good place to go to get news across the spectrum with the bias of the various outlets clearly marked, and based on the reader's opinions. Anyone can go and vote for any media as left/right/center. In general, the distribution is pretty close to what I would have voted for.

[carpedm9587]

Some of those in the MSM quite openly admit to a liberal bias.

I'll never forget how then Newsweek editor Evan Thomas nonchalantly admitted to liberal bias on the now defunct Inside Washington show on PBS saying that it was worth up to 15 points For John Kerry in his bid to be president in 2004^[1]

Speaking of Newsweek this little gem from USA Today founder Al Neuharth from a 2011 column is worth noting:

"When Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post, it was predictably left-wing, but it was accurate. Under Tina Brown, it is an inaccurate and unfair left-wing propaganda machine."

Here are just a few of a whole lot of such admissions that I collected over the years:

• "I think we are aware, as everyone who works in the media is, that the old stereotype of the liberal bent happens to be true.” --Emily Rooney while “ABC World News Tonight” Executive Producer

• "Of course there’s a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left." --Andrew Heyward while CBS News President

• "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat." --Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post’s “Book Word”

• "Well it’s there and it doesn’t show itself in everything that is printed or broadcast but it is there." --David Brinkley, news broadcast icon discussing Liberal Bias on CNBC back in 1995. Many would argue that it is much worse now

• "I’ll give you that a lot of the media is liberal. In fact, I think that’s probably a gimme." --Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, CNBC “Power Lunch” co-host, while interviewing Ann Coulter

• "I don’t know if it’s 95 percent...[but] there are enough [liberals] in the old media, not just in ABC, but in old media generally, that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction....It’s an endemic problem. And again, it’s the reason why for 40 years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake." -- ABC News political director Mark Halperin in 2006

• "Personally, I have a great affection for CBS News....But I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me." -- Former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter (who was also an Executive Vice President of the CBS Broadcast Group)

• "There is just no question that I, among others, have a liberal bias. I’m consistently liberal in my opinions” … and that CBS anchorman “Dan [Rather] is transparently liberal” who “should be more careful.” --Andy Rooney, the late long time lovable curmudgeon on “60 Minutes”

• "Could anyone deny that most Washington reporters tend to move more aggressively to bring down Republicans in trouble than Democrats in trouble?” --ABC News’ political unit (Mark Halperin, Marc Ambinder, David Chalian and Brooke Brower), in a 2003 “The Note” column.

• "Of course it is....These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed. -- New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent and proud Democrat in a 2004 column asking, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?"^[2]

• "Everyone knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.” --Walter Cronkite, former CBS Evening News anchor and news legend (widely regarded as being responsible for turning the American public against the Vietnam War). This was a view he would express again and again up until his death in 2009^[3]

• "Many in the media have been one-sided, sometimes adding to Obama's distortions rather than acting as impartial reporters of fact and referees of the mud fights.... We hear a lot less about Democratic sins such as President Clinton's distortions of Bob Dole's position on Medicare in 1996 and the NAACP's stunningly scurrilous ad campaign in 2000 associating George W. Bush's opposition to a hate crimes bill with the racist murderers who dragged James Byrd behind a truck." -- Stuart Taylor while at National Journal and now Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the liberal Brookings Institution

• "It would be on "Frontline" tonight. It would be a documentary already. If [it was] Newt Gingrich, it would be on the front page of the “Globe” every single day since this happened; but because it was a bureaucratic snafu [laughs], it’s not much of a story." --Mike Barnicle while with the "Boston Globe" and now frequent contributor and guest on MSNBC, on the "Leher News Hour" on PBS during the first week of the "Filegate" scandal, in response to the question: "Do you agree with the Republicans when they say that if it was a bunch of Republicans, everyone would be all over them like a blanket?"

• "Oh, my God. Are you kidding? That George W. Bush was a crybaby, that he was the spoiled son of a failed president. You know, you could just hear the personal attacks on Bush would be just absolutely vicious." --Howard Fineman, while Newsweek's Chief Political Correspondent and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, admitting that things would have been very different if the 2000 post-election results were reversed and Bush was contesting a Gore victory.

• "Having spent time in...both the Hillary and the Trump bubble, I will tell you that...the reporters who are following around Hillary -- a lot of them are Hillary fans. They're just in awe of her. They're very patient with her....with the Trump people, it's a feeding frenzy...[they] are the most aggressive ones; the ones who they hope will dig up the one piece of dirt that will -- you know, kill the Trump monster" --David Martosko of the Daily Mail

• "No person with eyes in his head in 2008 could have failed to see the way that soft coverage helped to propel Obama first to the Democratic nomination and then into the White House." --New York Magazine political reporter John Heilemann

• "The mainstream press is liberal.... [T]he press corps at such institutions as the Washington Post, ABC-NBC-CBS News, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, etc. is composed in large part of 'new' or 'creative' class members of the liberal elite.... If reporters were the only ones allowed to vote, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won the White House by landslide margins." --Thomas Edsall veteran Washington Post political reporter in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review, called "Journalism Should Own Its Liberalism."

I should add that recently during a panel discussion at the left-leaning POLITICO's Playbook Breakfast with the New York Times' Peter Baker and Mark Leibovich, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CNN's Jake Tapper they unanimously agreed that the news media leans to the left.

To focus in on an example of how slanted the MSM's reporting is in favor of liberals and Democrats take a look at how slow to pick up on controversy surrounding Obama’s Green Jobs Czar Van Jones and the videos showing ACORN employees assisting a supposed pimp and prostitute in hiding their income and arranging for underage girls to be smuggled into the country to be used as prostitutes.

In writing about the MSM's reluctance to cover these stories Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander mentions a likely reason: “Why the tardiness? One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like The Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints." It "can't be discounted," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, noting that "Complaints by conservatives are slower to be picked up" by the liberal MSM because "there are not enough conservatives and too many liberals in most newsrooms. They just don't see the resonance of these issues. They don't hear about them as fast [and] they're not naturally watching as much."

Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said he worried "that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view."

And on writing about the New York Times dismal coverage of the ACORN scandals and the Van Jones resignation, the paper’s Public Editor Clark Hoyt criticized them for "looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself" especially since when the Times finally got around to it the emphasis was about Republicans trying to dig up dirt to damage Obama: “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe.” According to Hoyt, “Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was ‘slow off the mark,’ and blamed ‘insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.’”


None of this is surprising considering that several polls and surveys of those in the MSM find that they are far to the left of the American public. Well over 90% are pro-abortion whereas the country is much more evenly split with a majority even favoring limitations (something the MSM staunchly opposes). The same is true with nearly all social issues and things like gun control.

As a 2004 editorial in the “Dallas Morning News” entitled “Unvarnished Truth?: Perception of bias undermines media,” the editorial staff admitted that,

"it’s time we in the Fourth Estate admit that the liberal media isn’t a figment of Rush Limbaugh’s imagination. Studies by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Knight Foundation have shown that, on average, journalists are much more politically and culturally liberal and secular than their readers."

And again citing Evan Thomas on this

"There is a liberal bias. It’s demonstratable. You look at the statistics. About 85% of the reporters who cover the White House vote Democratic, they have for a long time. Particularly at the networks, at the lower levels, among the editors and the so-called infrastructure, there is a liberal bias. There is a liberal bias at Newsweek, the magazine I work for – most of the people who work at Newsweek live on the Upper West Side in New York and they have a liberal bias."

This seems inevitable when several polls of reporters covering national news and politics, bureau chiefs and editors consistently found that self described liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by between 7 and 12 to 1 in the newsroom (depending on when the poll was conducted) but all show the gap widening in recent years with at least 90% voting Democrat in elections.









1. "Let’s talk about media bias here. The media, I think, want Kerry to win. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic, and this glow is going to be worth maybe 15 points."

2. Okrent would go on to describe the editorial page as being "thoroughly saturated in liberal theology," as well as the Sunday magazine, Arts and Leisure front page, culture pages, fashion coverage, Styles section, Sports section, and Metro section. He wrote that finding a culturally conservative view in The Times was like a creationist trying to find “comfort in Science Times,” and accuses the paper of negligence.

3. At one point he even pontificated that "I think most newspapermen, by definition, have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen."

I'm not arguing that people in the media are not broadly more liberal than conservative, Rogue. I'm saying that the news itself tends to be more balanced. We can all come up with list after list of examples and quotes to make our individual cases. I can point to the 10 NYT articles in six days just before the 2016 election that were about Hillary's emails. But as I have said multiple times, examples are not arguments - they're just examples and anyone can find examples to support any position if they look hard enough. The data does not support the hype. I have seen no one do a definitive study about this - so what we are all left with is "impressions" and the "rough" data of social networking sites like www.allsides.com and the wide array of published articles about media and media bias (search for them), which pretty uniformly put the so-called "MSM" slightly left of center.

The accusation that it is grossly "left" is just not accurate, IMO. But if you have data (not anecdotes) to support your position, I'll be happy to look at it. I have no such data other than the informal surveys I have pointed to.