It must be the new math, jk. Or else some other aspect of public school education.

"We don't need no ed-yoo-cai-shun. We don't need no thought control..."

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Hey! Macho! Leave them topics alone!

I don't know how people can deny media bias in the face of this story and in the comparison of Senator Dodd and Senator Lott imbroglios.

I don't deny that there is bias in the media, I just deny that it is all biased one direction. The conservative reaction to this believed bias of a liberal media distorting facts is to counter with a conservative media distorting facts in the opposite direction. Both sides engage in "gotcha journalism" where the motivation is to show the other side in as bad a light as possible. The goal is not to inform, but to outrage, as that is what seems to keep viewer/listener/reader interest. The rules of this new journalism are wide open, quote out of context, twist words, use creative semantics, leave out rational circumstances, whatever works best to invoke outrage in your audience. I used to think that I could watch/listen/read two known different sides to be able to discern some reality somewhere in the middle. Now however, the misrepresentation is so bad that it seems that nothing can be believed at face value.

Silence, I am sure that there is some bias that goes the other way. Yet when polls show that Washington media people voted 96% for VP Gore in 2000, it's easy to explain why most of the bias favors liberal causes and candidates.

I hold with Bernie Goldberg, that the bias in unintentional and not a nefarious plot, yet I defy you to give me an example of conservative bias on the order of Lott vs. Dodd.

My favorite has always been the crucifiction of Al Gore by the conservative media (so effective that most mainstream media joined in) for his claim to have created the internet. He is certainly guilty of either grandstanding, not unlikely during a presidential primary, or at the very least mis-speaking during his Mar. 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, but the portrayal of Gore as supposedly coding the internet late at night was certainly also taken to a ridiculous extreme. So we all know that the internet started as the ARPANET in 1969, but the ARPANET actually ceased to exist in 1990, replaced by USENET and the Internet as we know it today, including the creation of the World Wide Web in Nov. 1990. But of course at this time nearly all the hosts were in academia or industry. It was in Jan. of 1991 that Sen. Al Gore sponsored S.272, the US High Performance Computing Act, creating the National Research and Education Network (NREN), passed into law in Dec. 1991, which dedicated and organized federal funding to expand the internet. This was in fact a very notable piece of legislation that did indeed contribute enormously to the expansion of the internet to what we know it as today. So "promoted" would have been a much better word than "created" but Al Gore is not off his rocker to take some credit for being part of the success of the internet. Keep in mind also that the ubiquity of the internet comes in large part because of its beginnings as (GASP!) a government program! I would love to see the ROI numbers for this federal investment. Would the internet really be the incredibly powerful force it is today, crossing politically closed borders and providing the freedom of information exchange if it had been developed by private industry in the free market with profit as the prime motive?

I think the real media bias is that journalists are lazy and love to run with stereotypes. Quayle is dumb. President Ford was "a klutz" &c.

VP Gore got himself hooked into a stereotype of grandstanding: Love Canal, Love Story, I took the initiative in creating the internet -- it was an easy play, probably ill deserved although I don't think it holds a candle to VP Quayle's abuse.

Selling UNIX software, I was on the Internet in the early 90's when it was moving commercial to the antipathy of the user community. Maybe it wouldn't have developed without government, but it CERTAINLY wouldn't have developed its current reach and bandwidth without the for-profit-Internet-bubble-capitalization-three-digit-multiple-craze. I am getting nostalgic just thinking about it...

You and I should write a sci-fi book, Silence. In one reality is an all-government and academic internet, in one an all-corporate one. Kind of "The Stand" meets "Neuromancer."

Excuse me, WHAT conservative media? Talk radio? Conservative magazines? Al Gore's internet taken over by evil conservatives? These are not "the news" media. What I was taught about journalism is that newspapers are OBJECTIVE and that opinions about the NEWS stories are placed on the EDITORIAL page. This is ONE wall that we could stand to rebuild. Television news supposedly follows the same model. (I now know that there has been, for decades now, a philosphical crusade to destroy the very meaning and concept of objectivity, but that's another discussion.)

And "so effective that most mainstream media joined in?" Did you ever consider that in this case, perhaps they WERE objectively reporting the story?

Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of the profit motive, and the internet is a child of both government research and funding and market capital. The government has the ability to fund long term research projects such as the internet and get the system to a point where it becomes viable for private enterprise which I don't believe private enterprise would have been able to do. So JK, in your sci-fi version are the internet protocols and standards open or proprietary when developed solely by private enterprise?

I agree that journalists can become lazy and just adopt the stereotype, but I really believe that the goal is to outrage to boost ratings. I recently heard from a liberal friend that the Bush administration had boosted the manufacturing jobs number by including workers at fast food restaurants who "manufactured" hamburgers. Just a little research showed this to be false. It seems that the claim came from a recent White House study on the classification system and definition of a manufacturing job. The study was questioning how a manufacturing job was defined and whether a fast food worker could be included in the current definition. A little further reading showed that the intent of the question was not to reclassify such workers but to look at whether a corporation might be able to meet the definition if tax breaks were given to the manufacturing industry. Maybe the writer of the original story legitimately mis-read or had a different understanding than I, but I can't help but note that the story is much more compelling that way.

John, there is an interesting point that you may or may not have intended to make, namely that there should be a distinction between NEWS and MEDIA. We have come to lump in everyone from news writers to talk show hosts to editorial writers to bloggers as MEDIA. Some have objectivity, some strive for it, some pretend to have it, and some blatantly refute it.

There are certainly "news" outlets such and the Wall Street Journal and NRO and as you pointed out the ratings leading Fox News that are of conservative slant. Unless of course you are admitting that these are really just media outlets and not even pretending to be objective news? I don't think the mainstream media were reporting the Al Gore story, or many other stories at all, the have come to report ON stories reported in other places rather than on the story itself.

Okay, side road #397: The Wall Street Journal does not lean right. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page leans extremely right but its news pages are the most objective I have ever seen (in fact, I think they tilt ever so slightly to the left).

I wish that the New York Times could do the same and keep its liberal Editorial Page.