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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Media Bias?

This is the lede of a reported piece published by the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - The House passed a $463.5 billion spending bill Wednesday that covers about one-sixth of the federal budget as Democrats cleared away the financial mess they inherited from Republicans.

That's not a quote from a source or part of an editorial piece. That's the reporter's first paragraph in a "news" story.

Wow. Who needs a quantitative study on media bias?

(HT to both Donald Luskin and David Hogberg for noticing this one.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In order for this to be biased, it would have to be factually untrue. It's not. Calling a spade a spade might hurt, but you're a generally honest guy: The Republicans didn't exactly leave a tidy House, now did they? (Was the pun sufficiently Homnick-esque? I tried...)

Hunter Baker said...

I'm not with you here, James. In my book, calling the federal budget a "mess" that one party created without the help or involvement of another party which is then going to rescue things strays well past the arena into fact into the domain of opinion. What would have been the correct way to go about this would have been to say that the Democrat House addressed deficits the occurred under the previous leadership or something along those lines. Even then, one would be commenting short term on a very long term problem, but it would be more dispassionate as is proper for reportage.