Category Archives: Media Bias

By Chrissy the Hyphenated

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The Big Three networks (Evening: ABC’s World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News; morning: Good Morning America, The Early Show, Today) lavished an enormous amount of overwhelmingly positive attention on the “Occupy” protests during October.

Chrissy’s Site Bites: http://news.webshots.com/photo/2440439820056011884SRESRx

The Media Research Center counted:

•  190 (80%) soundbites and 9 (90%) guests were in favor of the movement,
•  10 (4%) soundbites and 1 (10%) guest were critical of the movement,
•  38 (16%) soundbites were neutral.

The Big Three referred to the protests as “teachable moments” for which parents should be glad and absolutely avoided ANY references to the labels communist, socialist or leftist. This despite the undeniable fact that the Occupiers have been open about wanting bigger government and forced redistribution of wealth.

The softer label – liberal – wasn’t even used except for a single reference October 11, ABC’s Good Morning America, when co-anchor George Stephanopoulous asked Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe if he thought the OWS protestors were the “liberal version of the Tea Party?”

In addition, the MRC reported that “accounts of anti-Semitism and sexual assault arrests were completely omitted from the Big Three broadcasts. And when confrontations erupted between the police and the protestors, the networks were much more likely to pin the blame on police for instigating the violence.”

In the stories addressing violence at the protests, only 6 stories didn’t blame anyone in particular side for the violence.

•  15 (54%) stories and 36 (71%) talking heads put most blame on law enforcement officers,
•  7 (25%) stories and 15 (29%) talking heads put most blame on protestors.

Not a single anchor or reporter brought up the anti-Semitic rants found at some of the rallies, like this one caught by MRC-TV:

“The Jews commit more white collar crime than any other ethnic group on the earth, and they go unprosecuted because they can buy their way out of it…. Whenever there’s a billion dollar fraud, there’s a Jew involved.”

Or this one, filmed by reason.tv:

Chrissy’s Site Bites: http://news.webshots.com/photo/2163601240056011884ngJUuM

According to MRC, the only time anti-semitism was even mentioned was October 26 on CBS’s The Early Show:

Newt Gingrich (guest): “If you look at some of the signs, if you listen to some of the interviews there’s a frightening level of anti-Semitism in some of these gatherings, fundamentally different from the Tea Party.”

Erica Hill (host): “Some would say those are the actions of a few.”

According to MRC’s count, the Big Three network reporters weren’t nearly so hesitant to tar the entire Tea Party movement because of isolated signs. In 2009, the Big Three ran only THIRTEEN stories about the Tea Party protests; these harsh statements occurred in two of them:

September 12, 2009, CBS Evening News, Nancy Cordes said, “Homemade signs accused Mr. Obama of socialism, communism and worse.” (No qualifier about the “actions of a few.”)

September 15, 2009, ABC’s World News, Dan Harris said,

“They’ve waved signs likening President Obama to Hitler and the devil, raised questions about whether he was really born in this country, falsely accused him of planning to set up death panels, decried his speech to students as indoctrination and called him everything from a ‘fascist’ to a ‘socialist’ to a ‘communist.’… And all that was before Mr. Obama’s speech was interrupted by a Representative who once fought to keep the Confederate flag waving over the South Carolina state house. Add it all up, and some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President.”

Personally, I found that the most chilling part of my research was hearing what that black woman in LA had to say about Zionist Jews and the Federal Reserve. I just can’t get past the feeling that this woman was parroting something she’d heard elsewhere … say from Democrat apologists?

After all, her flaky opinion that The Fed is run by Zionist Jews and not by the government surely isn’t based on reality!  And wasn’t “Blame the bad economy on Jew bankers” one of Hitler’s big lines?
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MRC report posted @ http://www.mrc.org/realitycheck/realitycheck/2011/20111107102729.aspx