Obamaville March 1 - Pundits Punt on Veracity

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Apples are Oranges to Media Experts

Time goes by ever so slowly in the race for the Republican nomination but a few things are already quite obvious.  First, there is no effort for some media to hide, disguise or claim balanced coverage because media objectivity has been thrown to the winds with a little over 8 months left in the campaign.

Not that it makes a lot of difference because the public long ago assumed media bias was a new facet of journalism in America.  Of course Fox News is the conservative standard but they are not necessarily Republican leaning as no one has done more to undermine efforts by Romney to pick up conservatives than the Fox personalities.

Sometimes it seems they are in cahoots with MSNBC and their parent NBC the way they keep implying Romney is struggling to get the backing of leading conservatives.  Back in the days of honest philosophical differences all the Republican candidates used to pledge to support whomever won the nomination at the convention.

That was how Reagan was so successful in capturing cross over voters from the Democrat and Independent ranks.  Now it seems the candidates put themselves above the party by threatening to withhold support for the eventual nominee, threatening a third party candidate, and even threatening to back someone new who might be seduced into entering the race at the last minute.

Loyalty to party seems to have become a lost principle.  Accommodation of all views from conservative to moderate to liberal also seems to be lost on our present flock of politicians.  Perhaps they have hopes of demanding a litmus test on proper conservative attitudes before pledging support, a narrow minded view that has failed miserably in the past.

It would seem rather obvious from the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush years in the presidency that America has become far more moderate than conservative conservatives might like but reality is a powerful motivator to put philosophical loyalty in the middle where it belongs if one intends to serve all Americans.

Reagan proved you could be conservative and compassionate while the Bush family and Clinton proved being moderate was the only way to survive.  No doubt the nation needs a strong dose of fiscal conservatism to get out of the mess the liberals and conservatives have left us but eliminating budget deficits, reducing the national debt and fixing the entitlement mess also requires a lot of compassion to minimize the damage on people.

On the Democrat side of the media ledger very few media outlets show any desire to be anything but an extension of the Obama press office.  In the fifteen presidential elections I can remember I've never experienced anything like the media intimidation from the White House.  Not even Johnson or Nixon had the mainstream and cable media eating out of their hands like Barack Obama.

I suspect it is partly a response to the often heavy handed treatment of the media by Bush II insiders who never trusted the media and probably for good reason.  Backing Obama gave the media a chance to get even.

There is clearly a left leaning tendency on the part of most of the media which has come to the surface as the media lost all sense of balanced coverage and objective reporting.  And of course there is the fact Obama is Black, a Democrat and clearly wants big government, all draws to a liberal media.

It has been a long time since the liberals had a chance to influence the government gravy train, to dominate the news through reporters and anchors, and to control most of the cable news talk shows where they can sell books and book speeches.

Over the past few decades there were liberal stalwarts including The New York Times and Washington Post on the print side and PBS on television but the success of cable mouthpieces, first conservatives and then liberals, broke down the objective principles of journalism and opened the floodgates to news media stars interested more in making news than reporting it.

Rush Limbaugh is one of few media stars honest enough to admit that the role of talk shows is to entertain.  I suspect most of the public still thinks they report the news, fair and balanced news, choosing to ignore the advocacy and lack of objectivity of most of the media stars.

CNN has come a long ways from the days when Ted Turner ruled falling off the cliff of objectivity into the abyss of liberalism.  Some supposedly news shows like Soledad O'Brien and others make no attempt to hide their anti-conservative bias while the prime time news tries to downplay it but always stacks the panels of "experts" with liberals and Democrats, usually liberals as well.

Well there is still one place in CNN where you get balanced news coverage, that is the HLN (Headline News) Morning Express Show with the ever bubbly Robin Meade who has gradually taken over the morning news and entertainment slot and has the only six hour time slot, 6 am until 12 noon, on television.  She is also the only news personality who is part Native American.

MSNBC might as well be located in the Obama White House because even their so called Republican voices or pretenders defend Republican principles like France fought off the German invasion in World War II.  In other words, from Joe Scarborough's ego to former GOP National Chairman Michael Steele's outsider status they are far more concerned with protecting their own personal image than defending the Republicans.

NBC as a matter of principle still seems to project the GE party line which means you give homage to anyone who gets you $9 billion in tax free profits a year and Obama did just that.  Yet sometime NBC contributor Tom Brokaw and Meet the Press anchor David Gregory have both continued to avoid being caught up in the liberal stampede.

CNBC, the financial news network, is the exception to the rule in the NBC family as any blatant liberal bias would cost them their dominate position as the financial news source of America.  Of course their preoccupation with Warren Buffett, staunch billionaire Obama backer, who gets more CNBC air time than anyone on the globe, is an ongoing source of aggravation to conservatives but Buffett always has some common sense financial advice, not to mention he is the most successful investor on Wall Street over the past 50 years so he deserves to be heard no matter what his political beliefs.  No one can say he is not a successful capitalist.

CBS used to be the most liberal network but NBC might have stolen the crown away.  At ABC you at least have a balance between anchor Diane Sawyer from the Republican battlefields and George Stephanopoulos, a Clinton/Obama creation, although George has far more air time to promote the liberal cause with other ABC news programs.

Ironically, if you really want balanced news coverage of politics in America your only hope is to turn to BBC whose world news coverage dwarfs anything on American networks and whose political coverage of America may sometimes be bewildered by the bizarre political and campaign process, but always seem to give it objective coverage.

Now you still have one last choice when it comes to the mainstream and cable news coverage and that is to turn off the television.  You might even do it for health reasons.  It would certainly lower your blood pressure.  It would keep you from believing all those lies.  And it might give you a chance to find out what your kid is doing on the Internet social media.

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