Baskin: Liberal media bias is deterimental to our democracy

Our media, when surveyed, shows that 70 percent of all journalists are democrats who continue their crusade to obscure the truth to save Barack Obama's presidency.

In short, the mainstream media has failed to report accurately, fairly or at all on Obama's policies.

The lack of reporting on the gas crisis is one example. This past February gas prices rose for 24 days straight. Under President Bush there was a point when gas prices rose for 20 days straight.

The Business & Media Institute conducted a study of the coverage on both presidents as gas prices rose. The research showed that President Bush was mentioned 15 times more in stories than President Obama was as gas prices rose. Why? Rising gas prices hurts a president's popularity.

Another example is from Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The Center studies the stories covered by the news. In August after the Dow Jones dropped 600 points, the study showed coverage of the economy dropped from 45 percent to 32 percent. One would think that as our economic situation worsens, the media would put more emphasis on the economy, not less.

This August 2011, economic reports showed unemployment remained high at 9.1 percent with no net jobs created. The last time no net jobs were added to the economy was February of 1945. One would think the media would play continuous sound bites of President Obama claiming his stimulus package would keep unemployment under 8 percent and add millions of jobs to the economy. After all, how often did we hear "mission accomplished" when President Bush was in office?

The dishonest reporting was once again on display with the tragedy in Tucson, Ariz. After the shooting, the media reported for weeks on the "toxic discourse" in Washington, D.C. as being the cause behind the shooting. If you remember, it was originally this "discourse" by right-wing nuts that motivated the shooting, until we found out it was done by a lunatic who was called by his friends "a left-wing pothead." Suddenly the story was dropped because the narrative the press wanted to pursue lost all its plausibility.

Last week there was "toxic discourse" at Obama's Labor Day rally. Democrat Jimmy Hoffa Jr. introduced the president by stating, "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong." According to the news, this statement is neither toxic nor incendiary.

CNN, the news source that played a pivotal role in critiquing the conservative rhetoric in the wake of the Arizona shooting, interviewed Hoffa after his speech and didn't ask him a single question regarding his statements. Better yet, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's response was that the president didn't hear his comments.

The only toxicity we have in Washington is with the economic, social and foreign policies coming from this White House.

More evidence of the liberal bias is the constant argument that Obama  "inherited an economic crisis, two wars and everything else bad with the world." Granting much of that is true, do you ever hear that President Obama inherited a winning surge in Iraq, a path to killing Osama Bin Laden, a Triple A rating and much smaller debt than we currently have?

Another example is with national gas prices averaging $3.70 per gallon and a historic credit downgrade, the media coverage has been benign at best in terms of blaming him and supportive of his policies at its worst.

Do you remember hearing the sound bite with the president pleading for a debt deal because that would insure our credit would not be downgraded? He scolded us that we needed to get the debt ceiling raised because without it, a downgrade would happen, in turn creating horrible economic consequences. When the deal was struck and the downgrade still happened, Obama had his staff go after the CEO of Standard & Poor for the downgrade and then told us it didn't mean anything anyway because "no matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a AAA country."

It is deplorable for Obama to be the new "Teflon" president not because the benefits of his policies are overwhelming, but because the media refuses to report on the ineffectiveness and detrimental effects of them. Does anyone remember reading 1984? Control the press and you control the people.

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