From Biased to Partisan

The mainstream media moves left.

Stanley Kurtz argues that the reason for CBS stonewalling is because of conservative flight. As conservatives go elsewhere to get their news and information, the viewers who remain are more concentrated on the left side of the political spectrum and thus CBS has a built in financial incentive to keep them watching by presenting news with an ever greater leftward slant. It's an interesting argument, but not a convincing one to me.

If CBS wished to pick up its last place ratings, they certainly know that they could do so by presenting a more fair and balanced approach. And The Elite Media Monoculture can see for itself the success of FoxNews and Talk Radio and understand that they are tapping a market which is dissatisfied with the status quo of the old media. They may be biased, but they are not stupid. Thus I conclude that events such as this one really are driven by pure ideology.

CBS and Dan Rather thought they could get away with a falsehood and put it on the air, not because they want to report an important news story, but because they want to unseat the current President and replace him with a Democrat, and a liberal Democrat at that. They were driven to put this obviously fake memo and story out there because they are driven by the desire to defeat Republicans in general and this Republican President in particular. There is no other obvious explanation. We now know that CBS had plenty of warning that there were problems with these documents before they went on the air. But they did so anyway, despite the objections of many people along the way. They did not see, because they did not want to see. That's not just bias; it's political partisanship.