Compare the front pages from both the National Post and the Globe and Mail from yesterday.
The National Post:
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The Globe and Mail:
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One represents the interests of the taxpayer and the other represents the views of the Entitlement Society. Can you guess which one is which?
Answer: I wrote about the latter yesterday.
In a recent column concerning the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race, Rex Murphy mused perplexedly over the paucity of confabulatory prose by this nation’s columnists and news writers on the topic of the race.
Rex, the leadership race is not dead. Your editors have merely found another story and they’re running with it. I’m talking, of course, about the American Democratic Party Leadership Race. Why is our nation’s news media so focused on a topic that they usually abhor? Indeed, our national news peddlers tend to give American news less attention than its worth. Yet, why does our opposition’s leadership race get so much less coverage than the American’s opposition leadership race receives? The American Democrats and the Canadian Conservatives are trying to do the same thing, in effect: change the government. However, Peter Mansbridge has spoken more about John Kerry than Belinda Stronach, and we’ve heard more about Lieberman’s Joementum (or lack thereof) than we have heard about Tony Clement.
Our leadership race is news. Rex, you should ask your editors why they’re choosing to ignore the story. Without media coverage, our leadership contenders can only be heard as far as they can shout. Mr. Murphy has declared that Belinda Stronach, Tony Clement and Stephen Harper have all climbed inside a “Trojan horse”, ready to attack the Liberal party’s stranglehold on power. It’s not that the three intend to stay within the horse, rather, it’s that nobody has told the city of Troy that the horse is waiting outside its gates.
Has anyone ever noticed where the bias may lie within a particular news report/article merely by the method in which the reporter describes the government?
If the reporter has a positive bias towards the government they will laud the organization. Conversely, if the reporter has a negative bias towards the government, they will vilify the individual.
For example:
The Liberal government declared today that…
The Harris government announced its policy concerning…
See the difference? It is easier to vilify a person because one can put a face on a target whereas media reporting concerning an unpopular policy by a favoured government is easily distributed across an organization when made faceless.