It was about thirty years ago that the reality of media bias first hit home. I was becoming a pro-life activist and had finally made the six hour trek to Washington DC to protest legalized abortion and stand for the right to life of every human being. The crowd was awesome! People came on buses from the mid-west and the south, whole familes, whole schools, every ethnicity, every color, Jews, Christians, and just plain pro-lifers. When I stood before the Supreme Court and looked down the avenue there were people marching as far as the eye could see, curb to curb, singing, praying, witnessing. It was estimated that several hundred thousand were present and I looked forward to reading all about it in my local paper where I hoped to learn the official estimate of the crowd size.

Duh. Now I know. Don’t expect anything like decent coverage just because several hundred thousand are amassed. Inside my home newspaper (nothing on the front page, of course) were two black and white photos, one of a few pro-lifers holding their signs, another of a couple who were pro-choice. I imagine they called that coverage fair and balanced. I didn’t remember seeing any pro-choicers at all. The reporter surely had to hunt for them!

Since then I’ve read time and time again that mainstream media (MSM) leans heavily to the left. Of course those on the left think that is nonsense and of course they think we conservatives don’t know what we’re talking about.

Tim Groseclose, Ph. D.,  author of the recently published Left Turn:    How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, thinks that within political science there is a small area of real science in which truths can be demonstrated with graphs and mathematics.  It is possible to accurately quantify the number of times an event is reported and the minutes spent reporting it. He has come up with what he calls a PQ (political quotient) which is a valuable indication of bias in media or in politicians.

According to Groseclose media bias is more a sin of omission rather than deliberate inaccuracy. They cover what suits their ideology. You hear nothing about evidence to the contrary.

Another such book is Bias:  A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News, by Bernard Goldberg (2003).  He followed this by A Slobbering Love Affair:  The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media (2009). An award-winning journalist several times over, Goldberg is now with Fox News.

On August 28, 2010, Glenn Beck held the Restoring Honor rally in Washington DC. I was impressed enough to blog about it, calling it a “watershed event.”   I know better now than to be disappointed that it got little press or TV coverage.

Those who rely on television and newspapers are going to get a severely skewed picture of what is actually going on in the world. Were it not for blogs, social media and radio would there, could there, be a Tea Party?

Last month over a million young folk from around the world gathered for a week in Madrid, Spain, to pray and to listen. It seems to me that would be a matter of great import. But did you hear about it?

World Youth Day, Madrid, 2011

Keep tuned, but not just to MSM.  At the above World Youth Day Pope Benedict told the young folks that they “will be swimming against the tide in a society with a relativistic culture which wishes neither to seek nor hold on to the truth.”  Right on,  Benny!