The MSM is heavily biased to the left (authoritarian/socialist -- NOT liberal) and Fox news is actually (their NEWS not the talk show garbage which any idiot can tell isn't a NEWS program) slightly right of center.
Yes, but IMHO a news network (any news network) can't place newscasts (no matter how objective) amid an overwhelmingly one-sided array of partisan news opinion/analysis programs and still call itself objective with a straight face.
Since Fox doesn't follow the trend of most of the news media and slavishly support and report uncritically everything said by Democrats, the rest of the media and the left wants them gone.
I don't really see that the MSM has gone to any great effort to "shield" the democratic party or it's candidates from bad press (Clinton and Obama certainly haven't faired well in the MSM with all the coverage of their petty infighting).
What I have seen is a marked difference in the relationship between this administration and the media vs. the previous administration. The Bush administration's relationship with the press has been far more contentious than the Clinton administration's.
In general though,
To me, the bias in media that some people claim seems vastly overstated at times. I don't doubt that bias exists, I just think the degree to which it exists, especially when considering news broadcasts themselves (not opinion/analysis programming), is often greatly exaggerated.
I personally can't say that I see any great difference in the quality of the straight news brodcasting from any of the major news networks. The networks seem far more driven by ratings and scoops than party loyalties (as evinced by the excessive, IMHO, time dedicated to soft-news/infotainment).
I have noticed that a lot of people tend to judge news stories based on their perception of the network it comes from rather than the content and context of the story itself. What is essentially the same story can be reported by each network and still be seen by some people as a clear example of a particular network's bias.
I have also noticed that the bias (be it liberal, conservative, or whatever) that some people see so strongly in the media is sometimes just that person's inability (or unwillingness) to reconcile the discrepancies between their own idealized worldview and the harsh reality of certain situtations (i.e. that "their guy (or party)" really has done something crooked/asinine/underhanded/illegal/immoral/harmful/etc.).
That's not to say that I haven't been guilty of these very things.
Again, I'm not saying that bias in the media doesn't exist. I just think the pervasiveness and conspiratorial nature of the bias is greatly exaggerated by some.
IMHO of course.
~Mike
