{"id":22455,"date":"2013-10-07T10:22:54","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T15:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22455"},"modified":"2013-10-07T10:22:54","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T15:22:54","slug":"harsanyi-better-openly-partisan-than-impartial-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/10\/07\/harsanyi-better-openly-partisan-than-impartial-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Harsanyi – Better openly partisan than “impartial” media"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Harsanyi<\/a> thinks the political scene would be better if more media outlets were up-front about their partisan stance rather than pretending to be objective and impartial:<\/p>\n

As much as it pains me, let me take a few moments to defend MSNBC. Last week\u2019s much-talked about testy exchange between anchor Thomas Roberts and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus has been predictably negative. Media bias is a perpetual grievance of the Right \u2014 for obvious reasons. But maybe the only way to improve on the situation is to champion more openly ideologically driven political journalism? By any measure, it\u2019s a lot less destructive than what we had for decades: a media feigning impartiality.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It can be uncomfortable watching a head-on collision of hackery, but the truth is the entire exchange is weirdly honest, entertaining and informative. It\u2019s not often a TV anchor admits to viewers that he\u2019s reading \u201cdirectly from what the president just gave us.\u201d Roberts is standing in for the president. Perfect. It\u2019s not as if Reince Priebus was on MSNBC to offer his dispassionate impression of the situation, either. He should be challenged. And though the table-setting question is preposterously biased, it\u2019s exactly the kind of question Priebus should be able to deflect. And he gets to do it in front of an audience that generally detests Republicans. I saw many people on Twitter wondering why Priebus does it to himself. They should be wondering why he doesn\u2019t do it more often.<\/p>\n

We all know where MSNBC or FOX News stand. It\u2019s establishment media masquerading as impartial that has the real impact. This bias is rooted in insularity, showing a lack curiosity about the other side\u2019s worldview \u2014 the ignorance about religion, guns or free-market economic ideas are the most glaring example \u2014 and, even worse, a lack of skepticism towards its own conceptions about how things work.<\/p>\n

To the untrained eye, the Obamacare rollout may seem like an unmitigated disaster. But editors at Reuters (\u201cWeb traffic, glitches slow Obamacare exchanges launch<\/a>\u201d) or the Associate Press (\u201cRollout of \u2018historic\u2019 Obamacare in California hits some snags<\/a>\u201d) will try to dissuade people of this notion. Bias doesn\u2019t only manifest in what you write but what you don\u2019t, in what goes above the fold and what sort of delicate nouns and adjectives you sprinkle in your headlines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Harsanyi thinks the political scene would be better if more media outlets were up-front about their partisan stance rather than pretending to be objective and impartial: As much as it pains me, let me take a few moments to defend MSNBC. Last week\u2019s much-talked about testy exchange between anchor Thomas Roberts and Republican National […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[768,213,517,101],"class_list":["post-22455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-democrat","tag-newspapers","tag-republican","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Qb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22456,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22455\/revisions\/22456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}