The Left/Right Bias WITHIN a Right-Media

So I was talking with my LSAT teacher today who happens to be in journalism school (We were talking me, him, and another guy from our media and politics class), and the teacher had an interesting view on the bias in the media. According to him, almost all journalism in America is geared towards the right. He argued that the entire American Psyche is fairly right-thinking. Things such as a strict, unwaivering belief in capitalism and a belief in a police-state (as he called it) with incarceration levels nearing 800 for every 100,000 us citizens (nearly 1%), showed that our state, according to his view, was already right wing.  Also with big business and government interest and influence, the journalism in the states is influenced to keep the status quo and not challenge authority.

The only variance in the right-left spectrum, he argued, occurred on the right side, aka, more right as opposed to less right.  What do you guys think of this?

DC Mayoral Office Scandal

I read in the Washington Examiner (not sure how refutable this paper is) that there is a number of scandals in the DC mayoral office. Just two months into his Term, Vincent Gray is already in a mess of turmoil from a number of scandalous discoveries. First, the salaries for some of his top advisors/officials is over, or poised to breach, the legal limit. Second, he has been accused of abusing campaign funds and overspending on consulting by advantageous contacts or close friends. Last, some of his higher officials have hired their children to work in for their office, which seems to be fine in the private sector, but unjust in the public one.

Bad start for this new Mayor it seems.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2011/03/scandals-scrutiny-mount-gray-administration

Al Jezeera is Winning

This morning Hillary Clinton spoke to the US Foreign Policy Priorities Committee on CSPAN. She said that Al Jezeera is winning the war of information over American broadcastors. She is quoted as saying that "Our private media cannot fill that gap. Our private media, particularly cultural programming often works at counter purposes to what we truly are as Americans. I remember having an Afghan general tell me that the only thing he thought about Americans is that all the men wrestled and the women walked around in bikinis because the only TV he ever saw was Baywatch and World Wide Wrestling."


She seems to hint here that since commercial media is driven by profit, there is not enough incentive to pursue the better and more full news story. An idea that came to me is that perhaps there does need to be some state-run news group. It could be semi-independent, as in the case of the new york federal reserve, where the government cannot simply dictate it's operation. If a news group can be freed of profit incentives and commercial interests, maybe we can get closer to a kind of objective journalism. On the other side, it is of course dangerous to give government any level of control over the media, then again, are commercial interests any better?

What do you guys think?

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-al-jazeera-2011-3#ixzz1FUusWuxJ

At the end of the article it mentions that "Clinton says she is leading an effort to spread U.S. propaganda through new media, with twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi."  Which is also interesting...talk later on this