No bias in the media

On Sunday, I happened to channel surf onto one of C-Span's book shows, this one featuring Tammy Bruce, talking of her current book The New American Thought Police. It was a recorded affair of her given a speech and taking questions on April 9th, 2002, at UC Davis. I found her to be a persuasive speaker and now her book is on my "buy it soon" list.

That aside, what was incredible to watch was her interaction with an audience that was, for the most part, politely hostile. She was saying things they most definitely did not want to hear. One of Bruce's main assertions is that political correctness is strangling the open and free discussion of ideas, and that the current notion of PC is a purely left-wing phenomena. You can imagine an audience made up of UC Davis law school students would not take this well.

All arguments of that aside, the student "question" I found most fascinating was this young woman who called Bruce a "puppet" of the right-wing. To me this was a precise illustration of what Bruce was saying, that PC dictates you label and marginalize an opponent as quickly as possible. Thus, you slap the label "homophobe" on someone and immediately take anything they are saying off the table. Now they have to defend themselves against the charge of being a homophobe. And here was this student doing--or attempting to do--the same to Bruce. After all, a "puppet" can be ignored because it has no will or thought of its own.

Beyond that, this student asserted that all the major media were slanted to the right, that they were all conservative. She started with FoxNews, but then added "CNN is conservative." Argh! When Bruce wanted the student to name names, the stumbling began, and all that was left were the usual "them" and "they" and "you know who" sort of response.

But last night was an illustration of media bias that was so obvious as to be amazing. I surfed to the CNN show "NewsNight with Aaron Brown," and there was Aaron Brown devoting an entire show to Earth Day 2002. At the moment was a segment on the "superfund." The focus of the segment? That Bush was refusing to reimplement a special corporate tax that provided money for the superfund, that for six years Clinton tried to get that tax reinstated but was foiled by the Republican congress. Person after person slamming Bush and Republicans for allowing this poison to remain in the earth because he wouldn't fund the superfund, tax them evil corporate monsters, etc.

Not one rebuttal statement. None. Nothing. Nada. You get the point? There was precisely nothing balanced about this report. There was not one single hint of a contradiction of the environmental party line. While there are certainly huge pollution sites that need major clean-ups (hence the superfund to begin with), the driving assumption was that you must tax all corporations to get the money so the government can fund the clean-ups. No exploration of why the tax was opposed, no presentation of alternate forms of funding, no discussion of the notion that maybe government shouldn't be the one fountain of money here. Nothing but "Bush and Republicans are evil and want this poison to kill us all," of a message to that effect.

Of course, if they had done any homework they might have found out that polluting corporations pay for and clean up over 70% of the sites. Why? Because if the government comes in and does the clean up it bills those companies for three times the actual cost, plus penalties. To avoid the added expense, the companies do their own clean-ups.

This means the superfund handles the remaining 30%. And the tax is not the only source of funding, contrary to the story segment presented last night.

Again, telling this would have upset the party line. Bummer, eh?

Last, while the story started with the question of who should pay, polluters or the taxpayers, it never answered it or even explored that second half. If it had, it would have reported that Bush, while opposing the tax, is still providing money for superfund via general revenues. Why does he oppose the tax? Because it punishes clean companies along with the dirty ones, and is thus patently unfair.

But that would have contradicted the story's message, that there are no "clean" industries, that Bush is anti-environment on this holy day of Earth Day.

No bias here, no, uh-uh, none. Thank goodness CNN is conservative.