So now, it seems, we have rather a good test for the elite media. We know how reporters and commentators would be reacting to this story on the arrest of an Occupy Wall Street protestor and his girlfriend if the people arrested were (or were thought to be) tea party activists, do we not?
So how will they react now?
I predict that the story will be covered by Fox News and some conservative journalists (the link I provided is to the report in the conservative-leaning New York Post) and largely ignored by most of the mainstream media—print, broadcast, and on-line. I hope I’m wrong about that. In any event, the folks at the New York Times, NBC, CNN, etc. will certainly not use the story to blacken Occupy Wall Street or the political left. They will not do what they almost certainly would be doing if the persons arrested had been tea party people. Of course, we’ve all more or less gotten used to this double standard; at this point even most conservatives have resigned themselves to it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. The common good of a democratic polity does not require a pristinely unbiased media, but it requires far more evenhandedness than ours gives us. Especially in circumstances of pluralism such as ours, groupthink in the media is not a good thing. It is even worse than groupthink in academia, though that too is bad—for everyone.
January 1st, 2013 | 1:44 pm
I usually think of folks who invent so called “tests” to see if others see what they see and hold them in the same sense of importance in the context of the day as having a bit of paranoid tendencies. However, I’ll play. A quick web search found articles about the arrest on Reuters, CBS, NBC, Miami Herald, The Atlantic Wire, and the UK’s Daily Mail, Huffington Post, and many others. Granted, not on the LA Times, yet.
January 1st, 2013 | 4:00 pm
I predict that the story will be covered by Fox News and some conservative journalists (the link I provided is to the report in the conservative-leaning New York Post) and largely ignored by most of the mainstream media—print, broadcast, and on-line. I hope I’m wrong about that. In any event, the folks at the New York Times, NBC, CNN
Step 1. Followed your link to the NY Post, copied the name of one of the people arrested (Morgan Gliedman).
Step 2. Went to Google News, pasted the name in and hit search.
Step 3. Went to CNN, sure enough same day as the NY Post they had a story up, although they didn’t make Google’s news search.
In top search results:
Huffington Post
NYT
NBC
Below the pics links to The Atlantic, The NY Daily News, as well as some UK papers.
Almost all of the stories made it online on the 31st., the NY Times says it’s online story made it in the Jan 1st 2013 print edition.
Especially in circumstances of pluralism such as ours, groupthink in the media is not a good thing
couldn’t agree more, yet groupthink here seems to in many places doesn’t it? Did it not occur to you to actually check the major media sources before assuming bias?
January 1st, 2013 | 4:09 pm
also speaking of bias, where are you getting that these were OWS protestors? The NY Post story says nothing about OWS, only references an unnamed friend who says she had ‘extreme political views’ but giving no details. According to the NY police, the couple has no known links to any political movement, are both herion addicts and the literature found in their apartment were army technical manuals and an internet literature on bomb making….
January 1st, 2013 | 4:19 pm
Boonton, the OWS connection is made in the first sentence of the story:
“The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.”
January 1st, 2013 | 4:57 pm
It remains to be seen if this ensues: ” the folks at the New York Times, NBC, CNN, etc. will certainly not use the story to blacken Occupy Wall Street or the political left. They will not do what they almost certainly would be doing if the persons arrested had been tea party people.”
I won’t hold my breath.
January 1st, 2013 | 5:23 pm
It seems a little strange that those who are extraordinarily suspicious of the “mainstream media” nevertheless are willing to make so much out of the words “Occupy Wall Street activist” in the New York Post. Had the Post identified Aaron Greene as a “tea party activist,” I think conservatives would be asking (quite correctly), “Who says? And what exactly is that supposed to mean, anyway?” And they’d be pointing out that the New York Times reported that “the police said they did not believe that Mr. Greene was active in any political movements.”
January 1st, 2013 | 6:18 pm
HuffPo and other news outlets do not reference the OWS connection of the boyfriend. You can bet that if he belonged to the Tea Party that would be in the headline. I think that constitutes bias.
January 1st, 2013 | 7:49 pm
Odd that some forget the Tea Party activist misidentified by the media as the shooter in the Colorado theater because he had the same name. So much for fact checking.
January 1st, 2013 | 8:11 pm
peg,
Fair point about the OWS connection, but I wonder where the Post is getting it. The NY Times is quoting the police themselves who claim they know of no political association of the would be bombers. Perhaps the Post is making an assumption or has scooped the story by finding someone who knows them personally. It is interesting that no easy source like a Facebook profile has been cited yet. Perusing Google a bit I’m not seeing any obvious OWS connection like a Facebook profile, a name on a press release, etc. How was she or an OWS activist? Did she attend a sit in?
sounds like goal posts are being moved here. The original prediction:
I predict that the story will be covered by Fox News and some conservative journalists (the link I provided is to the report in the conservative-leaning New York Post) and largely ignored by most of the mainstream media—print, broadcast, and on-line.
As that was written, all those sites had the story up for nearly 24 hours.
The second part was the prediction that those outles wouldn’t ‘use’ the story to ‘blacken Occupy Wall Street’. Well I suggest you search for ‘rape at Occupy Wall Street’ and you’ll find the well publisicized story of a woman raped at OWS back in Sept., reported amply in the NYT and other mainstream sources.
Searching on Morgan Gliedman and Occupy Wall Street together reveals nothing other than the Post story and the Huffingtonpost (which is referencing the POst story) and denials from OWS that they know anything about Aaron Greene (her BF).
January 1st, 2013 | 9:24 pm
Odd that some forget the Tea Party activist misidentified by the media as the shooter in the Colorado theater because he had the same name.
Note that “the media” = “anything said by a single blog, newspaper, pundit, or any outlet no matter how big or small for any amount of time”. The bias here is clearly insisting on thinking about a very non-monolithic thing as monolithic.
That and let’s face it, the reality is we live in the world of Google which means the moment it is announced “Bob Smith” done something everyone under the sun is going to see if they can be the one to find Bob’s Facebook page, his rants about rap music on obscure websites from years ago, who he dated in HS etc. If you happened to be named Bob Smith too, that’s going to be bad for you for at least a few hours. It’s probably only a matter of chance that the last few famous shooters seem to be the only 20-something males in the US without any digital presence.
Both low end media like bloggers and high end media like newspapers share a common desire for fame by their reporters. Hence they both have a burning desire to be the first to unearth key facts about some new member of the famous club. Most consumers of media, though, probably would rather wait a dozen extra hours or so and get a story that’s really fact checked instead.
What’s ironic is that we aren’t going to get that because we don’t have a monolithic media. If this was 1950 and all our news was coming from the BBC or the big three networks each outlet would assign a seasoned reporter to the Big Story and an editor would carefully review what he comes up with. Instead with thousands of outlets fighting tooth and nail for eyeballs, the ‘facts’ that are the fastest to find will be the ones to get play first., not the ones that are the most true.
January 1st, 2013 | 9:58 pm
“Fair point about the OWS connection, but I wonder where the Post is getting it”
No idea. I only saw the one mention of OWS (and only in reference to the boyfriend) which was easily missed.
I guess we will see if these folks get the “tea party treatment” or not.
January 2nd, 2013 | 4:13 am
A Tea Partier pushed an Indian man in front of a subway train last week because she thought he was a Muslim and the media hasn’t even mentioned it.
Oh wait, you say there’s no evidence she was a Tea Partier? Well, there’s as much evidence that she was a Tea Partier as this pair had anything to do with Occupy Wall Street.
So let’s see, the NY Post reports that “some people say” Morgan Gliedman and Aaron Greene were involved with Occupy Wall Street but produce no evidence. The rest of the media takes the bait and piles on.
I think the media’s passed your test. They’re not only conservative. They’re engaged in Cointelpro tactics against Occupy Wall Street.
January 2nd, 2013 | 7:34 am
IMO bias is best measured not by whether incorrect facts are reported (that happens as a fact of life) but about whether important facts are ignored or shaded.
So far the NYT tells us the police themselves said the couple had no record of political activity, technical but not political documentation found in their apartment. We have no reports yet of anything that would link the bf to OWS except an anonymous statement from ‘a friend’ that they had ‘extreme’ political views. We also have press releases from OWS saying they have no idea who either of these people are.
So now we are 3 days since the story broke. I rechecked the Post article and found no added references to OWS’s denial that either had anything to do with them. A new article has appeared on the Post, though, (see http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/bomb_mom_thief_cops_htnIDbg5l1f9cvLGwGBonJ) and interestingly no mention is made of OWS anymore.
We do get a picture of what seems to be two petty criminals probably suffering from heroin addiction. The timelines presented are kind of interesting.
Feb 17 Gliedman meet a man at a bar, went to his apartment and stole his computer, phone, wallet and credit cards.
Feb 22 Greene (the bf) was spotted shooting up heroin in a car, he also had a rifle in the trunk and got five months in jail.
Given that OWS started on 9/17 this wouldn’t have given him much time between to suddenly launch into the leadership of a political organization after leaving jail.
More importantly is this article posted on 12/31
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/31/ny-couple-not-terrorists-say-cops-just-rich-kids-with-drug-habits.html
Here the reporter spoke with neighbors who knew the coulple and we get the picture of an upper class ‘happy-go-lucky’ girl when she moved in who, after descending into addiction, withdrew into ‘her own world’ letter her hygene and apartment go to pot, with neighbors becoming alarmed as her pregnancy clearly advanced.
The reporter also checked their Facebook pages as well….in fact so did the Post since that’s where the photo of the girl came from! No connection to OWS seems to have been found.
So now we have enough evidence IMO to turn this post on its head and ask about Conservative media bias. The Conservative media seems to have invented the OWS connection out of thin air, even claimed on some other links that Greene was not only in OWS but an ‘organizer’. Key facts such as OWS’s claim that they know nothing about the couple seem to be left out and the Post seems to be doing a ‘memory hole’ operation on the whole idea.
I’ll be fair, though. It may not be simple anti-left bias that drove Robert George and the Post to this state. It may simply be narrative bias. We have an apartment with explosive chemicals and bomb making manuals. We have a girl and guy who are the sons of very well off people. This *sounds* like a story we’ve heard before….Patty Hearst or the Weather Underground…..upper class white kids get radicalized and go into terrorism. Since the narrative is already out there, it’s easy for those in the right wing media to fall into the narrative bias and start making leaps that aren’t there in the facts.
January 2nd, 2013 | 8:12 am
I don’t know that this story rises to the level of a test story, but the overall point is correct and worse, I think, than Robert George describes it.
As for those who did a Google search and found coverage in other news outlets, I think they are missing the point. The question isn’t whether or not the NYT gave a few paragraphs to the story (in perhaps their metro section) or whether or not the NYT identified them as OWS. The question is the level of coverage.
For instance, let’s imagine that an underling from an opposing campaign followed Joe Biden around everywhere he went with a video camera, and one day Joe flippantly said “that macaca with the camera follows me everywhere I go.” Would the Washington Post even cover such a thing? If they did would it be the subject of a whole story? If it were the subject of a whole story, would it run on the front page above the fold? Would they run it front page five times over the course of the campaign? Would they then run NINETY-TWO stories subsequent stories on the comment to the point that it is the only thing anyone could really remember about the campaign? Would every major news outlet in the country follow up by covering the comment? All this, of course, is exactly what they did with George Allen.
Doing a Google search isn’t quite dusting your hands of the matter.
January 2nd, 2013 | 8:37 am
The point by Mr. George is well taken. Do a search of top headlines at each of these sources and no one else that I saw had it listed on the home page under top stories except for NYP. The news media shows its bias by what it considers news – meaning what it thinks people should read about. Even more embarrassing, see what passes for news ahead of this: NYT: Evidence of Energy Drinks is Scant CNN: Family fights to keep ice rink Huff Post: Bachelor Party goes Seriously Wrong. Yes, Virginia, there is bias at the top news outlets.
January 2nd, 2013 | 10:37 am
One more general comment I want to make about this: I doubt that “media bias” exists in the way we commonly understand it. Bias implies that reporters can see what most people would identify as the “liberal” side of the story vs. the “conservative” side of the story and then select and write stories in a way that favors the liberal side.
Media bias also implies its opposite: reporters who go into journalism with no political inclinations and only a desire to describe in dry terms what happened (and for poor job security and little pay).
I see no evidence of either implication. When reporters respond to charges of bias they rarely betray even an understanding that their story could possibly be construed as unfair or opposed to another reasonable position.
And the second implication is almost impossible to imagine. I knew a couple guys from my old school who went on to work in print journalism. They both would assert that they are unbiased reporters today, but I also remember them as being very fired up politically in college and they saw journalism as the place where they wanted to put that fire to work. I never met a single kid in college who hadn’t a political bone in his body but simply wanted to go out and report that “…at 3:58AM on Tuesday morning a fire broke out in…” In my experience, print journalists in college were most politically plugged in guys around.
To say journalists are biased gets us about as far as saying that university professors mostly vote for Democrats.
January 2nd, 2013 | 10:42 am
Davin,
I think you’ve put your finger on the more important point. The media decides what stories we will hear about and the media decides how much we will hear about them. To go back to my earlier comment about “macaca,” it’s not as if the larger culture was pining to read about this flip comment. Rather, the Washington Post decided that they would make a big enough story out of that until no one could talk about anything else.
January 2nd, 2013 | 10:53 am
Douglas
As for those who did a Google search and found coverage in other news outlets, I think they are missing the point. The question isn’t whether or not the NYT gave a few paragraphs to the story (in perhaps their metro section) or whether or not the NYT identified them as OWS. The question is the level of coverage.
1. In terms of space, both the Post and the ‘liberal media’ sources are at least equal or the non-conservative source gives more. Sometimes liberal sources cite the Post story to provide copy over a holiday…which you wouldn’t think they’d do if their agenda is bias.
2. In terms of facts, the non-Post sources have provided more facts with clearer documentation and sources.
3. Leaving aside the merits of reporting a OWS connection, when the facts seemed to turn against the biased Conservative media they were not reported. Instead of reporting OWS’s assertion they had no knowledge of these two or providing more support for the alleged connection, the Post simply dropped the OWS line and reported about the couples history of petty crime and drug problems.
For instance, let’s imagine that…
So when the facts fail to fit the theory the response isn’t to modify the theory….or even just humbly admit that in this case the assertion was wrong but instead call us to play an imaginary game of trying to imagine what various papers and outlets would write if something that hasn’t happened did happen?
January 2nd, 2013 | 11:01 am
but I also remember them as being very fired up politically in college and they saw journalism as the place where they wanted to put that fire to work. I never met a single kid in college who hadn’t a political bone in his body but simply wanted to go out and report that “…at 3:58AM on Tuesday morning a fire broke out in…”
If you have faith that you’re side is objectively right then you could tell yourself that ‘simply reporting the facts’ is in itself sufficient to make the world a better place…even if in a particular story ‘the facts’ may not clearly aid your perferred political party.
I notice here that your way of approaching bias is to just assume it’s there and then come up with reasons for why we can’t see it. In this one little example the only objective evidence of political bias in the media is in the hands of the so-called conservative outlet. One would think if conservatives have really been victimized by biased reporting for so long that they would use the opportunity to show the world what unbiased reporting really looks like.
January 2nd, 2013 | 11:27 am
Douglas Johnson,
I think you make some important points. The question, then, is who can actually point out biased reporting? Who reads the news from a totally neutral point of view? I think it is at least sometimes the case that people who charge a story or a reporter has a right-wing (or left-wing) bias actually have a left-wing or (right-wing) bias and their criticism is off-base.
There are two stories about Aarone Greene in the Wall Street Journal, not known for its liberal bias, and neither mentions Occupy Wall Street.
January 2nd, 2013 | 11:32 am
In the amusing rush to defend the poor, defenseless media (to whom we all owe SO much) through the combox tone of “oh yeah, well…” history suffers again. The Aurora, Colorado shooter WAS identified as Tea Partier and we all remember the Geffords shooter as Sarah Palin-inspired.
January 2nd, 2013 | 1:06 pm
After at least three elections since 1990 the Washington Press Corps have been polled, asking who they supported in the last election. Every time the Washington reporters supported the Democratic candidate somewhere between 94-97% as I recall (maybe it was as low as 92% in one survey; it’s been awhile since I reviewed that data).
It’s just silly to call that bias. That’s not bias. That is a radically homogeneous makeup not found anywhere else in society (academia is “conservative” by Washington press corp standards).
January 2nd, 2013 | 1:14 pm
Boonton thinks my suggestion that the media wouldn’t have given Joe Biden the George Allen treatment that destroyed his political career is fanciful.
Please. Joe Biden said that Barack Obama is THE FIRST clean and articulate African American. He’s second in line to the Presidency.
January 2nd, 2013 | 2:20 pm
Joe Biden said that Barack Obama is THE FIRST clean and articulate African American. He’s second in line to the Presidency.
Douglas Johnson,
Well, if it was as offensive, intentionally or unintentionally, as you seem to think, why in the world did Obama pick Biden to be his vice president? No doubt it was an awkward statement, but Biden said:
Surely even the most uncharitable interpreter would not claim Biden really meant Obama was the first mainstream, first articulate, first bright, first clean, and first nice-looking African-American. A much more charitable (and plausible) reading is that Obama is the first “sort of mainstream” African-American candidate, and he’s bright, clean (or clean cut), and nice-looking. Biden did indeed get in hot water and apologize profusely for the remark, but it is simply not plausible to claim he was a racist at heart, accidentally let it slip, and then covered it up with the help of the liberal press. Why would the liberal press cover up racism? What was Biden’s record? (And, by the way, what was George Allen’s?)
January 2nd, 2013 | 3:21 pm
The Aurora, Colorado shooter WAS identified as Tea Partier
And he was…or at least the first guy who came up in Facebook with the guy’s name listed himself as a Tea Partier. Do you want your news superfast or superaccurate? That’s not bias its a trade off. At least there was a valid reason to think, upon a fast search, that the Co shooter was a Tea Partier. I’m still waiting to hear what valid reason there is to think this NYC guy was part of OWS or why the right-wing media neglects to point out OWS’s denial that he had anything to do with their leadership.
That complaint is more about the market than media bias. If you need your news superfast then point your browser at a newsite and keep hitting refresh. If you want your news superaccurate then ignore major stories for at least a week. If you did that with the Aurora shooting could you find a single serious news source, not matter how ‘leftwing’ claiming the guy belonged to the Tea Party?
Boonton thinks my suggestion that the media wouldn’t have given Joe Biden the George Allen treatment that destroyed his political career is fanciful.
Fanciful = fictional by definition your example is fiction since it hasn’t happened. Again I’m not going to buy into the idea that we should ignore looking at what really happened to indulge in a game of “let’s imagine what the NY Times would write if X happened”.
David
There are two stories about Aarone Greene in the Wall Street Journal, not known for its liberal bias, and neither mentions Occupy Wall Street.
Indeed the bias question is now on the side of the conservative press which seems to have simply made up the OWS link with no real evidence at all. Yet amazingly some here still seem to think the ‘problem’ is other media sources NOT reporting the OWS assertion!
The question, then, is who can actually point out biased reporting? Who reads the news from a totally neutral point of view?
No need to embrace relativism here, IMO. It seems pretty objective to me to say unsupported assertions are trumped by well documented facts. One can hate and despise the OWS movement yet at the same time acknowledge you can’t just make up that some guy who just got arrested was a OWS organizer.
January 2nd, 2013 | 5:43 pm
Boonton writes:
Okay, what really happened was George Allen said “the macaca with the camera,” pointing out an employee from his opponent that filmed him everywhere he went. The Washington Post ran 92 stories on the comment, four front page above the fold. It was a word no one associates with anything but the Washington Post was determined to ruin his career one way or the other. When he was finally defeated the WP’s own ombudsman said they went too far. So hey, mission accomplished but at least they admitted they were wrong.
And second, what really happened is that Joe Biden said Barack Obama was like “a storybook” because he was “the first clean and articulate” African American. WP columnist Krissah Thompson said Joe was just being Joe and that works well for some. He is now vice president of the United States.
There Boonton, that’s what really happened.
January 2nd, 2013 | 7:15 pm
A small detail, but I didn’t see any claim that Greene was an OWS “organizer” or member of the OWS “leadership”, just that he was an “OWS activist”.
January 3rd, 2013 | 12:26 pm
David Nickol,
I don’t think Biden’s own press office was as brazen as your re-write. Could you also supply us a re-write of this one:
My overall point is that reporting of the Washington press corps is so far beyond the real meaning of bias that it is absurd to refer to it as merely “bias.” And as one example I compared the Washington Post’s destruction of George Allen over ‘macaca’ to their treatment of Joe Biden. Or, how about their favorable treatment of, say, the Kleagle and unanimously elected Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, Democrat Robert Byrd who spent a half century in the Senate receiving praise from the Post, even after his 2001 declaration when he told Tony Snow that “there are white n*ggers…I’ve seen a lot of white n*ggers in my time.”
You indicate that the Post is justified in this disparate treatment because of the actual records of these politicians. Well if George Allen’s actual record is the justification, then why did the Post write 92 stories about ‘macaca’ instead of writing about his actual record?
You naïvely state that all that stuff can’t be racist because:
In other words, it’s only racist if the Wasington Post says so. Thus, Democrats who say “clean,” “white n*ggers” and join the Ku Klux Klan aren’t as comparatively bad as ‘macaca’ because if they were the Washington Post would have destroyed their careers too.
Your reasoning astounds, but on the other hand, I’m sure it’s identical to that of the Washington press corps.
January 4th, 2013 | 9:40 am
Turns out the OWS connection was baseless:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/01/new_york_post_h.php
This was indeed a good test of the media, and they failed, revealing bias against OWS.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact