James Joyner reponds to an article from Alicia Colon in which the latter criticizes Matt Drudge.
Matt Drudge, who may or may not be a willing accomplice to the distortion of news reporting, must be held responsible for the dissemination of the bias in the liberal press. Studies have shown that the readership of the Times is down — as it is in other liberal publications — and so are the television ratings of the alphabet networks and CNN and MSNBC, while Fox News is up.
Nevertheless, the propaganda of the enemedia — an excellent descriptive term coined by one poster to Lucianne.com — continues to sully news coverage, thanks to Mr. Drudge. A study of press bias by a professor of political science at the University of California-Los Angeles, Tim Groseclose, listed the Drudge Report as one of the most liberal sites on the Web because it consistently posts articles from left-of-center sources.
My patience with the Drudge Report ended when I saw a photo of Frank Rich of the Times posted on the site along with his words: “We are losing in Iraq.� It isn’t too encouraging to the morale of the nation, but posts like this are common on Drudge.
The site gives top billing to every possible negative statement about the Iraq war and the Bush administration, and it gets about 13 million hits a day. Is it any wonder that President Bush has record low approval ratings?
James (although I do not always agree with him, he’s one of my favorite right of center / conservative bloggers by the way) responds:
While I admire Drudge as an entrepreneur, I’ve got little respect for him as a journalist. Even by tabloid standards, his headlines are distortions of truth designed to garner attention. Still, he’s certainly no Democrat or liberal.
The reason Drudge touts so many negative stories about Iraq and the Bush administration is because both are going very badly. While there are doubtless more cases of good news than bad in Iraq, there are more bad big stories worthy of a flashing siren and H94 font.
Well, personally I wonder about the accuracy of “while there are doubtless more cases of good news than bad in Iraq”, I do agree with James when he writes that there are, at least, more c.q. quite some bad big stories worthy of coverage regarding Iraq.
It’s simple: an entrepreneur publishes stories that sell. No matter what he or she thinks about the news him- or herself. Combine that with the above and… lots of negative headlines about Iraq (and the Bush administration) are the logical result.
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