Bush's Legacy - Hero for Africa

[Tim Elston]

I harken back to this Chicago political mess. To think that everyone else is involved and somehow Obama has come out of this sparking clean is absolutely ridiculous. That insults my intelligence. Now we are finding out that they shut this down to fast as it was pointing to our President Elect?

The agenda driven mass media FAILED to fully vet Obama and his personal associates... and we are paying the price for the agenda driven news choice. What he represented or the action template was much greater than the ugly details .

I hear you, Chris, and I agree with your particular point about needing to press Obama's camp regarding its connections with Blagojevich. But the same thing happened in the runup to the Iraq War. The media, for the most part, acquiesced and bought into the public mood. Only after the fact did they own up to their journalistic duty.

I am not mentioning that to deflect from their responsibility to chase every story about Obama's political dealings in Chicago. I am saying it to point out that cases that you interpret to be liberal media bias are sometimes the populist and even conservative impulse of the media. To a large extent the media have turned their profession into an economic science. They have made themselves reluctant journalists; the bottom line is not the bottom line of journalism. That problem cuts right as well as left, depending on the national mood.

But, yes, there are both rightist and leftist biases in the media. The hoopla that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh will make out of a news story that strokes their bias is not the same hoopla that MSNBC and Al Frankin will make out of a news story that strokes their bias.

Do you watch CNN and MSNBC? How do you know how much they covered the story of Palin's church burning? For that matter, Bush's work in Africa seems like the stuff of a news cycle. The media seemed to report it at about the same time and were off to a new cycle. Are you sure that it lasted for more cycles at Fox? How many different articles can you find about it on Foxnews.com, compared to how many you find about it on CNN.com or MSNBC.com?