for some reason i read "Be sure to read Eminem's commentary on this." The barrage of images was amazing.

All right, I'll wade into this one. Assuming the comments of one reporter about what happened while she was at one network (MSNBC, as it happens, not CNN) reflect a broader phenomenon, they do not necessarily mean the media are "conservative" or inherently pro-Bush or pro-war.

A more likely explanation is this: Management of the various media outlets expected a quick 5-day war like Gulf War I and felt they had more to gain, from a business perspective, from ending up on the right side of that outcome than by being portrayed as pessimistic naysayers. Inasmuch as this reflects a particular outlook, it is one of going along with whatever the majority opinion in America is at the time to stay in the good graces of the consuming public. I don't have a data set to measure this, but I'd bet that media coverage of the war became sharply more critical as the war dragged on beyond the quick initial invasion period and Bush's approval rating fell, making it safe to be negative on Bush. This doesn't mean that the media switched from being conservative to being liberal, and neither does it say anything about the personal political views of individual reporters.

It's true -- media outlets are never political, whether they tend to lean toward the left or right. They're guided and controlled by the pursuit of money. Every time there is a question about a particular news story or image or video, the entire debate begins and ends with the reaction of the advertisers. The fact is that the media will say whatever they're paid to, ultimately.

media outlets are never political

That's absurd.

That's absurd.

That's only too true. Mass media serves the interests of its owners. Mass media political coverage is necessarily biased towards the views shared by its advertisers (big businesses) and its owners (big businesses and the wealthy). Pretending otherwise is either pure naivety or dis ingenuousness.

To say that the monied class were "not necessarily" conservative, pro-Bush, or pro-war, at least circa 2002-2004, is to invite ridicule from anyone with two functioning brain cells left who wasn't in a coma at the time.

In short, you've got to be fucking kidding me.

I don't think it's absurd at all. Media serves money, not politics. The fact that it can be shown that a particular outlet has a particular bias (like Fox News) is incidental to the fact that their owners and major advertisers have a bias and want that bias played out to keep their target audience of consumers happy.

I'm not saying that the media doesn't have a political slant -- THAT would be absurd. I'm saying that it is money that guides this slant, and not a political media. From the reason why local news always starts with disasters and murders (keep those commercial watchers riveted) to why public television and radio news tends to be "more objective" (far fewer commercial interests to answer to), it's all about money.

Blaming the media for the bias misses the real problem. It's the whole "framing the argument" thing. The accusation of a "liberal media bias" keeps people arguing about the medial, and never reveals the real problem or mechanism. I think the way Gaijin described the situation above is right on. You phrase your stories and pick your reporting based on offending the least number of customers and selling the most SUVs. A wealthy media owner or large corporation with political motivations can use this mechanism to their advantage.

Media serves money, not politics.

What's so apolitical about money? If the business incentives of various big media corporations invariably leads them to endorse conservative politics - pro-war, anti-regulation, pro-militarist, pro-nationalist, etc. - then business incentives are political incentives. It's Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model. And Chomsky and Herman stress that they aren't describing any overt conspiracy, but a "guided market system" in which the corporate profit motive leads corporate media to propagandize on behalf of the state.

Media is also a competitive business where the players constantly posture for the approval of viewers/readers and sponsors. With the populace freaking out over 911, it was easy to spot the opportunity to wrap themselves in the flag and prove their superior patriotism by slamming any opposition. Partisanship was whole idea.

The Bush regime was more than eager to exploit this abandonment of objectivity and played the press for the fools they are. By howling about that liberal bias, their mouthpieces like Limbaugh made it clear to the stenos how their stories should tilt. The real journalists had already been driven out because the papers couldn't afford to do research and TV wanted pretty faces to show. Our media stars are all about self promotion and they do what they must to get ahead.

strasmangelo -- there's nothing apolitical about money. I said that media serves money, not politics. I think it's important to make the distinction that, in my opinion, it's money that cause the political slant to media, and not the media itself. I would agree with the characterization that the output from many media sources is politically slanted. I only wanted to clarify that money causes the slant, and not the media itself. I thought it was a small point, but an important one because if one wanted to fix the "biased media" by working on the media itself, I think the efforts would be inefficient and unproductive. It you have crap spewing out of a pipeline, you don't work on making a better pipeline, you find the source of the sewage and fix that.

What I'm saying is that it's more like the "guided market system" and not a "biased media", though the resulting output is the same. Blaming Fox news for the slant of its output misses the point, or the source, of that slant and, in missing it, allows it to continue.

Again, it would be absurd to say the the output from media is apolitical or unbiased -- I only wanted to state that claiming that the MEDIA is biased is doublespeak. If you get hit in the head with a hammer, you don't blame the hammer.

Different media outlets have different political spin, based on who's paying the bill and who's doing the talking. By and large, your basic reporter on the ground tends to be fairly liberal. The edit boards tend to be kind of Rockefeller Republicans with a pro-Israel bent to foreign policy. Fox news is crawling with CIA and is bought and paid for by Defence contractors.

PBS tends to be liberal (i.e, Bill Moyers--whom I admire and like but disagree with--can you get any more liberal than that?) However John McLaughlin is Old Right, one of the last of that dying breed of Taft Republicans.

Money or politics? I fail to see the difference.

GB, the media simply sucks. The right's "message" is that the MSM is liberally biased - which is only partially true, but this masks the deeper and more important truth that institutionally, they are spineless, don't rock the boat types who really no longer investigate or report news, have very little self-perception, are easily co-opted and in important ways allow the administration to set the agenda.

This is partly a result of the concentration of media ownership in a few powerful corporations that have no stomach for standing up to abuses of power that in fact frequently benefit them.

Another significant factor is the ruthlessness by which the current administration has shut down transparency, cowed leakers, and insisted on being "on message" - an aspect of the eternal campaigning to which MCClellan refers.

Another factor is the powerful tribal influence of conflict - which clearly drew viewers to FOX when it showed itself willing to cheerlead, pander to patriotism and to shout down and intimidate those willing to question the administration.

A related aspect is the ability of the administration and military to control the flow of information from Iraq: only embedded reporters got any story, the military itself killed a number of reporters, there are no statistics, much less reporting, on civilian deaths, and the military aggressive pushed its own line via its own crew of "analysts" and ability to deprive those disagreeing with information.

The imbalance is only partially offset by the internet - which has also been rife with the echo-chamber of partisan views, including your own contribution until even apparently you got fed up with the dissembling of the administration or, more mildly, the cgnitive dissonance between the administration's line and parts of verifiable reality.

It's unlibertarian, I know, but I am in favor of breaking up the broadcast news in addition to aggressively policing blatant propaganda coming from the administration and military.