Imagine

Imagine that a man who has brutally murdered several people, including children, is testifying at his own trial. Cameras are allowed in the courtroom and a television network is taping his testimony. The tape is played on the evening news.

When he see the news the murderer is incensed. The network, he claims, played only the part of the tape that showed him confessing to the killings. It edited out the part of the tape where he explained his very good reasons for doing so. The network, he claims, has materially misrepresented him.

I would not see media malpractice here. What the man did is so utterly unacceptable that his reasons for doing so are irrelevant. There is literally no reason for the network to broadcast them.


Now imagine that a major newspaper prints an article on child sexual abuse. The article praises the social workers who identify the abused children; the police and prosecutors who work to put the abusers in prison; and the counselors who help the victims have a chance at a normal life. They barely mention the abusers, except to express disgust that anyone would commit such an act.

After the article comes out, a pedophile advocacy organization protests that their side of the issue was not considered. No one interviewed them; the article’s author doesn’t even mention that such organizations exist. Perhaps, they acknowledge, the author of the article doesn’t agree with their position but he has an obligation to at least know what their arguments are, explain them honestly, and rebut them if he can.

I would not see media bias here. The advocacy organizations are not legitimate players in any public discourse. There is no need to take their views into account or even to acknowledge that anyone holds those views. They exist outside the realm of decent, serious society.


Perhaps what look like media malpractice and media bias to people on the Right; what look like deliberate decisions to deceptively edit and knowingly omit; what look like actions in service of an ideology and a goal; perhaps all that is simply a result of a mindset that defines certain people as existing outside the realm of decent, serious society and that believes no reason is sufficient to explain their utterly unacceptable ideas and policies.


*****

Related reading:

If It Will Save a Single Life, We Must Get Piers Morgan's Stupid Fat Face off the Television - The idea for this post has been running around my head for a while. Reading this over at Ace of Spades made me decide to write it:

This is the underlying assumption that they simply will not confess, for if they did confess it, it would be game over for them. All of their conclusions -- all of their bias, all of their double-standards -- flow from this premise, which they will not admit, but will only dance around.

The premise is simply that liberal speech is much more valuable than conservative speech and this is of course because liberal politics are much more valuable than conservative ones.

Perhaps it’s not that they “will not confess” so much as that they do not realize there is anything to confess.


Conservatives need to create powerful, “sticky” messages that lead the electorate to a tipping point - From Bookworm:

... for decades the Left had created an intellectual atmosphere in which it was easy for people to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that Romney was an evil, soulless man, and that a Republican America would be, as Ted Kennedy so memorably said about Robert Bork,

a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….

That none of this came to pass during any Republican ascendency is irrelevant. 

Obama’s Thunderdome - From the Wall Street Journal:

What is striking about the Obama technique is that it's not so much criticism as something closer to political obliteration, driving his opposition out of the political arena altogether.
After the inaugural speech, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer said that Democrats don't have "an opposition party worthy of the opportunity."

The problem with starting an alternative media on the right - From Neoneocon:

The much more basic problem with an alternative conservative media is that the media on the right has been so demonized—and any alternative media would be equally demonized—that Democrats and even many of those in the middle have been taught that it’s unreliable and will not watch it, and/or they automatically discount what it says.

So God Made a Fawner - Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. At the end of this piece, she writes:

... Mr. Kroft is a reporter whose job it is to be impartial and nonpartisan, and who works for a towering journalistic institution, "60 Minutes."

People like him are supposed to approach political figures with no fear or favor.

Their job is to grill. What are they afraid of?

I suspect the answer to that question can be found here:
In response to: The left is quite open about its intentions - From Breitbart (via Ace who is doing some interesting writing on media bias):

People don't want to be thought of as "extremist". No one wants to think their opinions are stupid, hateful or unpopular.