Posts Tagged media bias

Hey — you didn’t even see it the first time!  Until we tell you what it was!  And that’s what makes it so much fun.  And us so special.

I remem­ber when CBS TV decided to try to get some use out of the old Mur­row gang.  After all, they were pay­ing them good salaries, so why not use them?

Prior to this NBC had Hunt­ley and Brink­ley.  They were fun.  I remem­ber them doing the 1960 con­ven­tion with their man-about-town airs and their cool head­phones; it felt like watch­ing the moon land­ing, except back then we didn’t know what that was.  Chet Hunt­ley would tell you the first half of what hap­pened and then David Brink­ley would sub­mit the other half with a wry quip and a sort of rib­ald je né sais quoi.

And then we had CBS.  Well, you can’t really fault them.  They were run by Bill Paley, a failed cigar maker from Chicago who almost bank­rupted the fam­ily busi­ness by bring­ing out a line of cig­a­rettes that gagged peo­ple.   So we had Mr.  I’ve got a voice like Lorne Greene so I know bet­ter than you do Wal­ter Cronkite.  Oh, no.    Then CBS afflicted us with Eric Sevareid.  He’d come on and tell us what the news we’d just heard meant.  I was just a kid so I didn’t know much about news or about jaw­bone and gums reced­ing and so thought it was weird that he had the LONGEST BOTTOM TEETH that I had ever seen.  Like some sort of aquatic mam­mal, for scoop­ing dead sea­weed off the sea bed.  But there he was, every night, a loom­ing pres­ence, lean­ing for­ward, his shoul­ders hunched, his teeth poised to scoop any unwary seabeds, and then we were told what to think of the news.  I remem­ber Nixon going absolutely wild about this.  He’d give a speech and the Sevareid and Harry Rea­soner (what a name for a news­man, eh?)  would tell the peo­ple what the speech MEANT.  Nixon, silly boy, would think that he said what he meant to say.  He was always proved wrong.

So, today, when you read arti­cles in Time and Slate which tell you that you are an absolute moron for NOT ACTING RIGHT I just wanted you to know there is a long and dis­hon­or­able his­tory to it.

Well, he was the first.  But not the only.  As Harry Tru­man said about reporters,

They’re just like a bunch of young pups — once one of ‘em pisses on a fire hydrant, then they’ve all got to do it

And now they are all call­ing us stu­pid.  Boy are we dum­mies for not doing what the cur­rent bottom-scoopers are telling us to.

Good for us.

This is like a reporter liv­ing in a Nor­mandy Beach house on June 6^th, 1944, and not notic­ing some­thing unusual going on.

I lived in Chicago for sev­eral years and one thing I can tell you:  in that town Lech Walesa is both more pop­u­lar and bet­ter known than a movie star.  Just a lit­tle less pop­u­lar than Pope John Paul II.  I was liv­ing there in the 80’s when Walesa’s Sol­i­dar­ity got fired up.

There are Pol­ish news­pa­pers.  There are Pol­ish radio sta­tions.  There are Pol­ish alder­men.  There are Pol­ish Con­gress­men.  There is (or, at least, was) a high-rise build­ing next to the express­way with a big sign on it:  The Pol­ish Union.   At the time I lived there it was said that Chicago was the second-largest Pol­ish city in the world, sec­ond only to Warsaw.

Unless Ed Driscoll is lying and clev­erly fab­ri­cat­ing evi­dence, com­plete with man­u­fac­tured video footage, this is all those words which have been so over-used of late:  stun­ning, star­tling, stu­pe­fy­ing, sur­pris­ing, and pos­si­bly even supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Walesa was instru­men­tal in bring­ing down the Soviet Union.  If the Chicago media did not treat Walesa’s visit to Chicago, atten­dance at a Tea Party rally in single-digit weather, and endorse­ment of a can­di­date for gov­er­nor as the biggest local story of the year it is not com­pla­cency.  It is not bias.  It is malice.

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