Walking Wounded

One of the things that I am doing in all my spare time, is reading the book "Regret The Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press And Imperil Free Speech" by Craig Silverman. It is an entertaining look into media errors, the history of biased media reporting. For anyone who is interested in media coverage of anything (and especially for bloggers) it is must reading.

The charge of media bias is no longer one leveled by bloggers on the right (although we were the first to sound the warnings). Many on the left have also started to notice a bias in media reporting.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give “closing remarks” during this afternoon’s Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators — NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s George Stephanopoulous and CBS’s Bob Schieffer — but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election. Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

“MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

Chris Matthews, Rendell said, "loses his impartiality when he talks about the Clintons.”

Of course, the progressive bloggers will tell you that the media is biased toward Republicans which is not the case at all. Oh sure they point to Fox News but they have MSNBC, CNN (or as conservatives called them in the 1990's the CLINTON News Network for it's fawning coverage of President Bill Clinton), HNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the NY Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the LA Times and many many more. That is what gave rise to the success of talk radio superstars like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Hugh Hewitt. It is no secret why these alternative media outlets have seen such success...the mainstream media has forgotten the main purpose of reporting - to bring people the facts about what is going on and letting the PEOPLE form their own opinions based on those facts.

There is a reason why circulation and viewership numbers are way down for these media outlets and why the number of alternative media sources (talk radio and the blogs) are going up. People know what they are getting with talk radio and blogs. Rush and Laura and O'Reilly and most bloggers readily admit that they are opinion based in their writings and utterances. They don't pull the wool over their listeners and readers eyes by claiming to be "journalists". That is the difference and why alternative media will continue to grow and conventional journalism shrinks.

Mainstream media needs to get it's act together quickly and get back to basics or they will be replaced by the main STREET media.