The media lean overwhelmingly to the left. This should be obvious to anyone who is a serious consumer of news and information. But here’s a very timely and illustrative example of this bias, courtesy of eagle-eyed John Tabin.
It concerns the New York Times’ coverage of former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), a highly principled conservative who, sadly, passed away Saturday at the age of 72 due to complications with prostate cancer.
Coburn was always “direct, thoughtful, and principled,” tweets Washington Examiner executive editor Philip Klein. “He will be sorely missed. RIP.”
He “was one of the finest public servants of my lifetime,” adds Klein’s colleague, Washington Examiner columnist Quin Hillyer:
[A] practicing obstetrician, [Coburn] combined fierce devotion to principle with rigorous intellectual integrity and tremendous personal decency.
One of the most hard-line conservatives in first the House and then the Senate, he nonetheless enjoyed the respect and friendship of many liberal Democrats.
Not the least of these was President Barack Obama, with whom he reportedly spoke in private, as a friend and sounding board, almost weekly throughout Obama’s White House tenure…
When Coburn arrived on Capitol Hill in the “Gingrich Revolution” Republican class of 1994, he was an unyielding ideologue.
Even then, though, there was a difference: Whereas some super-hard-liners are full of sound and fury without much thoughtfulness, Coburn obviously had depth and intellect…
Rather than being a gadfly, Coburn became an effective leader, without ever doing the “go-along to get-along” kind of games.
He began publishing an annual Wastebook highlighting absurd government spending and also a weekly “pork report” listing egregious examples of wasteful projects from almost every federal agency.
He took the lead in opposing Obamacare while pushing real healthcare reforms of a conservative variety, some of which have gone into law piecemeal over the years even without passage in a single, comprehensive bill.
And, often working with Democrats, he became a leader in providing effective congressional oversight and insisting that government operate with public transparency.
As Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan put it, Coburn was “tough, fearless, and more interested in facts than politics.”
Yet, the lead sentence of the New York Times obituary of Coburn describes him as an “ultraconservative” “crusader” and legislative obstructionist whom “frustrated legislators” called “Dr. No.”
In other words, Coburn wasn’t a very pleasant fellow. He was ornery and disagreeable, and he was always blocking and obstructing legislative progress. Boo!
By contrast, the lead sentence of the New York Times obituary of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro describes him as
the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died on Friday.
The Times’ obit is accompanied by a glamorous photo of Fidel smoking a cigar and looking cool, thoughtful, and contemplative. Castro must have been an interesting and colorful character! the reader is lead to believe.
I mean, who is this “fiery apostle of revolution” who, almost miraculously, outfoxed the United States decade after decade?!
In fact, Castro was a sadistic dictator who authorized the murder of tens of thousands of Cubans, while forcing the island into a decades-long immiseration that continues to this day.
People streamed out of the country, if they were able,” recalled National Review…
Over the years of the Castro regime, one million Cubans have gone into exile. Some Cubans have been shot in the water, in their attempts to flee.
On one day—July 13, 1994—there was an infamous massacre, the Tugboat Massacre: Castro’s forces killed 37 would-be escapees, most of them children and their mothers.
What kind of regime does this? What kind of regime would rather kill people, in cold blood, than see them leave? Than see them have a free life?
The Castro regime, and it has been very popular, though not in Cuba.
This is how the media’s left-wing bias works. It’s not that they report outright lies and falsehoods, or blatantly “fake news.” That would be too egregious and noticeable.
Instead, it is that they use language and prose that shows real sympathy, understanding, and indulgence toward political figures on the left, but considerable skepticism and hostility toward political figures on the right.
And that is how and why the New York Times—one of the greatest newspapers in history and one of the greatest newspapers still even today—can write admiringly of a vicious tyrant like Fidel Castro, while writing critically of a dedicated family man and patriot like Tom Coburn.
Don’t call it fake news. Call it twisted and distorted news.
Feature post credit: Poynter.