Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/the-boys-who-cried-fox/
The problem is that some bad memes from the US are infecting Australian political discussion. One meme is that the media is biased towards left-wing ideas. The above article has some interesting background information on this. The fact that Fox News gets accused of a left-wing bias is proof that such bias claims are not based in reality.
'After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias.' -- Stephen Colbert (US political satirist)[1] The notion of the mainstream press being biased towards the left wing was debunked thoroughly more than a decade aga, and nobody in the USA takes that claim seriously outside diehard Faux News wingnuts. The tiny grain of truth behind that 1980s claim is that working reporters tend to skew liberal in their personal views, but the larger point is that the people who fund their pay cheques (management) skew heavily to the right, and the coverage follows the Golden Rule. (He who has the gold, makes the rules.) Said Faux News wingnuts are quite worried, by the way. They're increasingly outvoted and are being reduced to a core of retiree old guys with pasty faces. FWIW, when Gingrich accuses Faux News of slanting its coverage to favour the less conservative candidate, and when far-right pundits Floyd and Mary Beth Brown quote unspecified, unnamed 'activists' as charging that Faux News is 'morphing into just another liberal-leaning voice', what they really mean is that founder Roger Ailes created Faux News as an unofficial political advocacy arm for the Republican National Committee. Hence, it agitates for candidates deemed electable, which Santorum and Gingrich most definitely were not. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_White_House_Correspondents'_Association_Dinner -- Cheers, Actually, time flies hate a banana. Rick Moen -- Micah Joel rick@linuxmafia.com McQ! (4x80)