When Republicans Attack…

…other Republicans! Here's the Media Research Center's L. Brent Bozell III (count 'em) latest col, in which the Mullah of Media Bias chides GOPpers for going soft in the trenches:

Memo to: Republican Party Leaders

From: A Friend

Re: Where Are You???

The other day John Kerry had finished addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention and was greeting participants when the C-SPAN camera caught one woman, presumably a member of the Fourth Estate, gushing to the Democratic candidate, ?You?ve got my vote!? There?s no surprise here. It?s almost impossible to distinguish between Democrats and journalists in their passion to elect Kerry and defeat Bush.

But where, oh where, are you?

It?s good to criticize those in the media who long ago lost sight of the word ?balance? (not to mention ?fairness?) and there are plenty of us on the outside pointing this out. But you, who have the mantra of ?GOP leaders? ? where are you? Your silence is shocking to the point of disgraceful. At best you are inept. At worst, you are cowards, unwilling to engage your political foes.

There is no shortage of issues, and opportunities available to you. You should be having a ball exposing and neutralizing the leftist press, not to mention the leftwing political opposition (or do I repeat myself?), yet you?re AWOL from the debate….

A day doesn?t go by wherein there isn?t a golden opportunity not only to show America what the left?s philosophical agenda truly is but also, by distinction, how different it is from yours.

Assuming you have one.

Whole thing here.

Comments

[Hydroman]

Kevin Carson,
"in other words a price support for the oil industry"
How about "the domestic oil industry". It cost the Arab countries about 85 cents a barrel to delivery oil to ground storage tanks. Most of their wells were produced by American companies,then nationalized by their governments.
It cost a min. of $27.00 a barrel to open an existing well in Texas.
Remember about 7 years ago when oil was less than $20 a barrel? It was that low because OPEC
wanted to shut down our DOMESTIC production. They did.They will always control our production , because we let them.

[joe]

No I didn't.

[Paul]

Sorry, Joe, it was thoreau.

Hey Webmaster, perhaps you could put lines between the postings so the author is a little more obvious?

Nevertheless, my bad.

[joe]

Yeah, maybe a little dashed line?

[DanNAlabama]

In July 2000, the non-partisan Pew Center released a study of the Bush/Gore coverage from February through June 2000. Pew?s researchers studied the way our major press organs were treating the two presumptive nominees.
Pew reviewed a range of TV broadcasts and newspaper/magazine stories for five separate weeks from February through June, trying to see how often the press had focused on each of the six basic themes.
Here were the three common themes for Bush:
Bush is a different kind of Republican (positive).
Bush lacks the intelligence or knowledge for the job (negative).
Bush has relied heavily on family connections to get where he is (negative).
Here were the three common themes for Gore:
Gore is experienced and knowledgeable (positive).
Gore is scandal-tainted (negative).
Gore exaggerates or lies (negative).
All told, Pew examined 2004 newspaper stories and 400 TV/cable broadcasts.
Here are the results:
Gore: 613 negative stories, 132 positive stories (almost 5-1 negative)
Bush: 265 negative stories, 320 positive stories (roughly 4-3 positive)
Their report. You decide if the press has a liberal bias.

[Highway]

As to the comment about the separators between posts, there IS a dashed line for people who use IE, but there is no formatting at all for those who don't use the holey-ist browser in existence. In Mozilla Firefox (yeah, it's new, and it's not IE, but it's not gonna let a script take over my computer) there is just a line space between posts. For longer ones it gets a bit hard to follow. Perhaps some H&R folks need to see why the style sheet isn't applied to the comment box?

[Gary Gunnels]

The problem for them is that it appears that 50% of those who vote agree with the Democrats. 🙂

This little tirade only demonstrates how lame both parties are so lame; as if most people who vote don't know what both parties generally stand for. This "if only we could get around the media's bias" speel makes me want to puke.

[joe]

The media is too harsh on George Bush, while going easy on John Kerry. And Republicans don't spend enough time pressuring reporters.

In other news, up is down and left is right.

[Mo]

Gee, dontcha think he'd be wise to wait until it was more than a week after Rummy made the comment about the LA Times to chide the Republicans for this.

[Kevin Carson]

A lot of Democrats are saying the same thing about Kerry. At the start of his campaign, he promised that his "war room" would be on the ball, and ready to give a tit for tat response to everything Bush put out. But his campaign seems to be on autopilot most of the time.

Example: the Bush ad about Kerry's "funny ideas" on a gas tax. Not long after that ad started airing, I saw a story about *Cheney's* proposed tax on imported oil back in the 80s. But the difference was, Cheney's tax would only kick in when the price of petroleum fell *below* a certain amount--in other words, a price support program for the oil industry. If Kerry's people hadn't had their thumbs up their asses, this fact would have been featured prominently in Kerry ads within days. But all you heard were crickets chirping. Kerry's just going through the motions. I really wonder if he even wants to win.

[joe]

Kevin, you may recall, there were some other items in the news at that time that Kerry probably didn't want to distract the country from.

[thoreau]

I thought that conservative complaints about the liberal media are already well known to most of the population. I don't see the damage done if some particular incident failed to attract a rapid response team.

Then again, lambasting the lack of a rapid response will certainly encourage competition in the GOP. The first attack dog to respond to any incident of liberal bias (real, imaginary, or quaternionic, for all you math geeks) not only gets to savage the media, he also gets to mock his fellow Republicans for not being as fast on the response.

[thoreau]

Hmm, maybe this vicious competition among Republicans could lead to a Highlander effect. With each confrontation against the liberals the GOP would also excommunicate the Republican who mounted the weakest response. Eventually there would only be one uber-Republican, and he would rule the world.

There can be only one!

(It would certainly lead to more ideological cohesion when there's only one person.)

[Paul]

Joe wrote:
"I thought that conservative complaints about the liberal media are already well known to most of the population."

Yes, it seems likely that many - if not most - people are aware of the charges. But how many believe them to be true? Until the public sees the media get its collective nose rubbed in its product firmly and frequently, the bias charges aren't going to get much traction.

[Rick Barton]

RE: the idea that Kerry is throwing the election.

Well, weird things happen in politics. He really does seem to lack fight. If we have to be stuck with Bush for another four years, (literally a scary thought) I hope Kerry's weak campaign at least hurts the other Dems.

[Rick Barton]

thoreau,

I think that the GOP members of congress going along with much (though not all) of Bush's big government agenda is probably due to, in part, the post 9/11 "rally round the Pres." sentiment. There are signs that this effect is coming to an end.

The Dems seem all too eager to go along with Bush and much more. They might have more to recommend themselves if they would actually distinguish their foreign policy approach as being appreciably less interventionist than Bush's. But, the number of Dems doing this in congress seems no greater then the number of Republicans doing so.

Also, the senators that will be elected this year will be around at least two years longer then Bush.

I think it would be fitting if your number one scenario comes to pass, and Kerry wins the White House and the GOP's Congressional position is strengthened, that Bush loses because of votes the Libertarian candidate receives at his expense.

[thoreau]

Rick-

If we're stuck with another 4 years of Bush I'd rather not see the other Dems hurt. Yes, I know, the Congressional Republicans have much better instincts on small gov't than the Congressional Dems. The problem is that party discipline causes them to subordinate their best instincts. Besides, I'd rather trust in the mutual antagonism of partisans than the good intentions of Republican politicians. Mutual antagonism is absolutely guaranteed to produce at least some amount of gridlock. The GOP's alleged good instincts comes with no such assurances.

More to the point, look at the past year or so, with GOP majorities in the House and Senate. Hardly a model of fiscal discipline and small gov't. I suppose it's possible that things would change if the GOP had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a more comfortable margin in the House. Then again, there's no guarantee that an unchecked GOP would actually follow through on its rhetoric and downsize the gov't. However lofty their rhetoric may be, at heart they are politicians, and if given unchecked power there is every reason to believe that they would abuse it even more than they already do.

So I hope that either (1) Kerry wins the White House and the GOP's Congressional position is strengthened or (2) Bush is re-elected and the Dems take control of the Senate.

[Paul]

DanNAlabama:

You and Eric Alterman are the only two people left on this planet that believe the press doesn't slant left.

"The Note", ABC's blog, 2/10/04:

"Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

"They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are "conservative positions."

"They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation's problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don't have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories."

As mentioned in "Welcome To The Post-Bias Media" by Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/050504C.html

[joe]

Reporters' feelings don't matter, Paul, except to the extent that they manifest themselves in their reporting. And you've got nothing to refute the Pew study, do you?

It doesn't matter how reporters vote. It matters how they report.

[John]

Kevin Carson,

Putting a tax on oil when it falls below a certain level is not a price support for oil, you bonehead. The money wouldn't go to the oil companies it would go to the government, so it wouldn't do the oil companies any good. In fact it would hurt the oil companies by raising the retail price and thus lowering demand without the benifit of the higher retail price going to producers. If anything it sounds like something the Greens would come up with as a way to reduce the consumption of oil when the price goes down. Perhaps Kerry and the Democrats are loosing because their supporters have such a poor understanding of economics.

[Mn? Saor in Aisce Nike d?ol]

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