Journalism: The Real Loser In The 2008 Election

Carl Cannon casts a skeptical eye on his own profession and doesn't like what he sees.

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don't know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I'm not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

And, Carl Canon gets to a point that I've been making for years. He acknowledges that newsrooms are liberal and that liberalism seeps into the news articles they produce. And this liberalism is contributing to the demise of newspapers.

If being "liberal" now meant sympathy for the Democratic Party, and being conservative implied sympathy for Republicans, all those liberal newsrooms across the country were gradually going to alienate themselves from about half their readers.

Read it all the way to the end. He chronicles newspaper history, then tells how the pretense of objectivity was abandoned last year and how the press was particularly venomous in its treatment of Sarah Palin.

Remember her callous decision as governor to cut Alaska's special education budget by 62 percent? After receiving emails to that effect, CNN's Soledad O'Brien cited the figure on-air. Oops. Palin actually tripled the state's spending on special needs kids.
Did you hear the one about her membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which favors secession from the union? That made The New York Times, and it was wrong, too.