Monday, January 25, 2016

Texas Lock-Step Political Media: Can you imagine.....

Quorum Report (of whom I'm not a subscriber) did another hit-piece on Conservative donors and the TLSPM is dutifully playing along.

Tea Party Billionaires Pushing to Make Over Legislature. David Saleh Rauf, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)

I realize that there are still many who don't believe that legacy media has anti-conservative bias. You know the type, those people who lock-on to every story that is even slightly negative toward a Democrat, or positive toward a Republican and says "HA! SEE!"  You know them as low-functional idiots mostly.

Because the bias in the media doesn't lie along party lines, it never did. It's ideological bias.  Think about this.  The Chron has done several stories about Liberal donor Steve Mostyn. In all of those stories he's seen as the scrappy underdog fighting the good fight.  The Wilks?  Or, even worse, the Evil Koch brothers?  Ripping at the very heart of our democracy.

And Texas House Speaker Straus is ALWAYS portrayed as the "Adult in the room" despite the fact that, oft times, his responses to critics are extremely juvenile.

Unlike many I'm not overly concerned by this bias. But I understand that it's there, it's a real thing, and it slants the media's political coverage greatly. My only wish is that they would admit to, and disclose it openly.

It's OK that the Houston Chronicle is a left-leaning publication. That they are not in support of most conservative ideals. We all know that the Chron is pro-higher taxes, anti-2nd Amendment and even anti-1st Amendment when it comes to the free speech rights of private citizens (The Chron clearly believes that free speech protections should only be extended to members of State-approved media). We also know that the Chronicle prefers to see huge government intervention in the private economy, are against Christian groups engaging the the political process, are for abortion on demand with no restrictions, taxpayer subsidized birth control and forced equality through the jailing of the non-compliant if necessary.

This has been established, but still they fall behind the "neither right nor left" fallacy.

How much better they would be if they just owned up to it.  They would go from a place with hackneyed political opinion to a journal of leftist thought almost overnight. We would then understand the viewpoint from which their opinion sprang and could take that into consideration. Some would accept it without question, some would reject it by rote, and some might even use it as a point in their consideration.

Instead we're given the lie of the neutrality of the media.  Can you imagine if we dropped the charade?