This entry was posted on
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 at
9:09 am and is filed
under George W. Bush.

New York Times – Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News: Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

And all the while we keep hearing about the liberal bias of the media. Well…

Editor and Publisher – Study Finds No Media Bias on War, Hits Fox News As Most One-Sided: (The Project for Excellence in Journalism) examined more than 2,000 stories on the war in Iraq and found that 25% of the stories were negative and 20% were positive. “The majority of stories were just news,” said the project’s director, Tom Rosenstiel. Fox News Channel was twice as likely to be positive than negative, while CNN and MSNBC were evenhanded.

Washington Post – On Fox News, No Shortage of Opinion, Study Finds: In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says. By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists’ own views.

Have you got that? The sector of the media that the Bushies claim is rotten with liberal bias isn’t biased at all. The only bias comes from the right. Along with some outright propaganda.

(Cheers to Chris for the heads-up.)