OK, maybe I'm not beyond bias...

Anyone who asserts that the media has a liberal bias needs a good dose of Fox News. It should clear that misconception up in a hurry.

Check this article out: Fox News claims that White House officials, most prominently VP Joe Biden, are inconsistent and now make the same assertions they harshly criticized John McCain for making during the presidential campaign.

I personally find it hard to respect them as a news organization when they've resorted to fabricating their stories. The comparison of screencaps makes it abundantly clear that they recycled footage of Biden criticizing McCain's previous comment. What they portray as Biden agreeing with McCain's statement that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" was actually selected and taken out of its original context, in which Biden quoted McCain as having said that and then vehemently disagreed with its factual accuracy.

Sure doesn't seem Fair and Balanced to me.

Since Fox News doesn't seem too concerned with facts, the investigative journalists over at Media Matters luckily checked them for us. The second part of the article examines discrepancies in the usage of comments made by Austan Goolsbee, a White House economic advisor. On March 15th, Fox included his entire commentary. The following day, they re-used pieces of the same interview to mislead their viewers into thinking that the Obama administration was backpedaling and now agreed with McCain about the strength of our economy.

I find it disturbing that a news organization that is purportedly 'fair and balanced' is so willing to misconstrue events to serve their own ends. They are effectively trashing whatever credibility they may have had- it is one thing to mistakenly distribute unsubstantiated stories, but quite another to deliberately manipulate news footage to convey a message inconsistent with reality. If they want to distribute fiction and pass it off as fact, they should no longer be able to identify themselves as a news agency. A report that is so flagrantly false is something one should expect from the Onion, but they at least admit that they're full of crap.

The professional code of journalists is so closely scrutinized- many news outlets prohibit their staff from making political campaign donations for fear of being accused of a liberal bias in reporting. Any expression of personal opinion in news coverage is widely condemned as part of a greater left-wing media conspiracy to herd unsuspecting Americans over to The Dark Side. These very one-sided accusations have put the media on the defense- no one is ever accused of being conservatively biased, because anyone who would accuse a reporter of such a thing is clearly an agent of the Ideological Left! *cue The Emperor's March*

An attempt to mislead viewers when the facts are so evident to the news agency is a betrayal of the American people. Fox News attacks other media outlets for their supposed bias while they themselves go beyond bias- they lie.

Well, at least the greater right-wing conspiracy is working! Their tactic of demonizing their opponents has made any association with liberalism a taboo, though I doubt this will work for very long. Cracks are beginning to show- because it has become unwise for journalists to imply a conservative bias with a negative connotation, those conservatively biased journalists must have started to feel invincible, because they have gotten careless. To accuse someone of bias is subjective- to catch them in a lie is not debatable. They either told the truth or they didn't, and the proof is in the pudding. Er... footage.

I take comfort in the belief that what goes around comes around.