I’ve heard it all my life: the mainstream media has a liberal bias. When I considered myself a liberal, I didn’t really believe it — how can one see one’s on bias? Now that I’m moving more politically to the right, it seems more obvious. Of course one could argue that I see what I want to see, that just as I didn’t see liberal bias as a liberal because I didn’t want to, now I see liberal bias as a moderate because I want to. But as I watched the debate this evening, I couldn’t keep myself from snapping a few screen shots to see if I was right.
I was.
First, there’s the question of selecting which social media comments (Tweets and Facebook updates) to run across the screen. During the few minutes I watched, I saw a few anti-Obama comments:
I saw a few anti-Romney comments:
This is by no means a scientific sampling: I’m sure I missed a lot, and I certainly missed some anti-Obama ones among them. But the vast majority were highly critical of Romney. Now, someone had to choose which Tweets and FB status reports to post, and something had to inform that choice. Perhaps they wrote some scripts to pull random samples. It would be nice to believe that, but it would be naive given the independent polling that shows the two candidates just about even.
The next type of bias came in the form of info-blurbs flashed on the screen while a candidate was speaking. While Obama spoke, all sorts of facts about the administration’s achievements were flashed on the screen. It almost seemed choreographed:
All these factoids do what? They present an image of a man who is faithfully conveying facts, devoid of rhetorical twists or omissions. It’s Cliff Notes, in essence: it makes sure that viewers fully understand all of Obama’s accomplishments.
During the same period of time, I saw two such factoids flashed for Romney:
I didn’t watch the whole debate, so perhaps I was missing something at the beginning. But the somewhat random sample I got, within about a twenty-minute period of time toward the end of the debate, seems to be blatantly pro-Obama.
This of course doesn’t even take into account the moderator’s defense of Obama regarding the declaration that the attack in Benghazi was a terrorist attack and not some spill-over from a protest. K looked at me and asked, as if she were missing some nuance of the language, “Is she defending him?” I nodded. “That’s embarrassing,” she concluded.
Well, it should be.