Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his
eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past
week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into
a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending.
That's not news (fact), that's commentary. That belongs in the Opinion section, not the news section. This helps explain why I canceled my subscription to Newsweek over a decade ago.
5 comments:
It's hard to take this blog seriously with statements like "I don't know if it's a "conservative" news source or not." I'm not saying other news sources are in any way unbiased, but to say that Fox News doesn't lean to the right is either extreme self deception or an outright lie.
You probably think it's "conservative" because the network actually *considers* conservative viewpoints, unlike others. Whenever I read about studies of media bias, Fox usually comes out as more balanced than any other network.
And no, it's not the Heritage Foundation doing those studies! Usually they're done by universities. Search my archives under "media/press" for links to these studies and evaluate them for yourself.
Darren: Must be one of those perspective issues. He doesn't recognize that his reference is shifted. As conservatives, we can see that Fox is centrist. Which of course is to the right of most everything else out there, but hardly hard core conservative!
Before I started listening to Rush Limbaugh (and one of the reasons I took so long in getting around to it) was that I got the impression from my liberal friends that he was a frothing right wing reactionary. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he is well-reasoned and hardly an extremist. I don't think you could get most liberals to sit still long enough to "get" that. I am sure Rush would find it insulting that he might be considered mainstream conservative ... but I think he is, and that explains his popularity. I think the bulk of conservatives are still actually Reagan Republicans, and that is one reason this last election was such a fiasco. There was a real disconnect between the leadership and these conservatives.
If it helps any the phenomenon of advocacy journalism isn't exactly a new one and some very famous names in journalism have been enthusiastic practitioners.
Walter Durant of the New York Times received a Pulitzer for his coverage of Stalin's Soviet Union which for a long time was known to be the most blatant advocacy journalism.
Finally, after 70 years, his Pulitzer was rescinded but I'm quite sure there are plenty of journalism profs who wouldn't impart that bit of knowledge to their classes as they lecture them on the importance of leading in the class struggle against the capitalist oppressors of the working class.
Newsweek has been very partisan since Clinton. Elinor Clift is among the True Believers and will be the last of a long list to admit there are problems. Watch her on the Sunday news shows and even when other liberals are aghast, she forges on through with unbridled support for all things Obama.
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