Silver anniversary of bias watching

I’m now going through my judge’s ballot for the 25th year of the Media Research Center’s “worst reporting” awards. I’ve volunteered each of those years and so can say that liberal bias during the quarter-century has become more overt—and that’s probably a good thing, since I like truth in advertising. The other change is that many on the right now get news from Fox and talk radio hosts, don’t hear the left’s agitation, and are shocked to find out, as we did on Election Day, that many millions buy it.

Some examples of overtly left-wing journalism: New York Times columnist Charles Blow said Mitt Romney “does not have a soul … not even a heart,” but is a “robot who will do whatever it takes, whatever he’s told to do, to make it to the White House.” Martin Bashir on MSNBC said Rick Santorum sounds “like Stalin.”New York Times columnist Bill Keller added Santorum to the list of Christians who purportedly want to impose Sharia law. Newsweek editor Allison Yarrow suggested that Dick Cheney is “one of the most evil people in the world.”

Propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays, an atheist, boasted of his ability to create human gods, and many emulated him in their praise for Barack Obama in 2008, but we saw only dull echoes of that this year. (Yes, Chris Matthews on MSNBC spoke of President Barack Obama as “the perfect American,” a person who has “never done anything wrong.”) This year liberals emphasized the easier task of creating human devils: Best in show here was former Boston Globe writer Charles Pierce’s description of Paul Ryan as a “zombie-eyed granny-starver.”