MEDIA BIAS….Yesterday, after seeing the news of Nick Berg’s beheading, Glenn Reynolds’ first thought was to use it to bash the press. “No doubt this will lead the news tonight,” he snarked.
Can we cut the crap? What happened to Berg was an act of savagery and of course it led the evening news. What’s more, it’s also become a staple of cable news and, as you can see at PressDisplay (just click on USA and ignore the Sunday papers), pictures of either the al-Qaeda video or the Berg family led above the fold on practically every American newspaper as well. It was front and center on my copy of the Los Angeles Times this morning.
This is all part of the game of trying to pretend that the media systematically reports only bad news from Iraq, a game that’s getting way old. Face it: they report lots of bad news because there’s lots of bad news. Clapping your hands won’t make it go away, and neither will the modern equivalent of claiming that it’s nothing more than media bias.
Crikey.
