Contrary to Dan Rather: Most Journalists are Liberal
Dan Rather told Jon Stewart that most journalists aren’t liberal. This is the same Dan Rather who tried to sink George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election by presenting forged documents as the real deal when they were an obvious fake.
Liberal media bias is so prevalent that very little true news reporting ever gets through the liberal gatekeepers today. To prove this, all any objective observer has to do is apply the Conservative/Republican test to any news story. It goes like this: If a Conservative or Republican were in office, how would a news story be reported? It’s that simple.
For example, during George H. W Bush’s presidency, the liberal media talked down the economy every chance it could. They made it sound like we were in a depression. Today, we’re being told that the “recession” ended two year ago even though the official unemployment numbers are above 8 percent. Unofficially, the number is in double-digit territory.
If a conservative were in office, we know that the media would be pulling all kinds of numbers out of their hats, telling us that there are the underemployed, teenage unemployment that’s nearly 50 percent in Washington, DC, those who have given up on finding employment, etc.
Let’s apply the test to Rather’s predecessor, Walter Cronkite (1916–2009), who was America’s go-to guy when it came to news reporting. NPR’s Scott Simon claimed that events like the Tucson shootings “Didn’t happen when 63 million people watched Walter Cronkite every night.”
How quickly we forget. There were the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), his brother Robert Kennedy (1968), and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968). King was assassinated on April 4th, a number of cities were set ablaze that evening. The National Guard had to be sent out. There were campus riots and bombings and city riots. On August 11, 1965, a routine traffic stop in South Central Los Angeles was the trigger for what became known as the Watts Riots. They lasted six days, leaving 34 dead, over a thousand injured, nearly 4,000 arrested, and hundreds of buildings destroyed.
Let’s not forget the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders led by Charles Manson (August of 1969) and the Kent State shootings (May of 1970). Manson was “inspired” by lyrics from a number of Beatles’ songs.
Cronkite isn’t to blame for these tragedies, but to imply that when liberals report the news life is better is insane. But this is the way liberals read history.
“Uncle Walter,” as he was affectionately called, reported during a time when there were only three major TV news sources — ABC, CBS, and NBC. There were no comparable conservative competitors. To put it plainly, during Cronkite’s era, liberals had a near monopoly on the news.
Cronkite was never the objective newsman that most Americans thought despite his honorary title of “the most trusted man in America.” The September-October 1998 issue of Modern Maturity magazine ran a lengthy interview with the former war correspondent and CBS news anchor. In it Cronkite stated, “We ought to be increasing our taxes. We who have it ought to be paying a lot more, but should insist on efficiency in expenditure.”
Do doubt times have changed. The big three networks have competition. The internet no longer lets the establishment media get away with much. For these developments we should be thankful.