> Gautam again: > Would you care to guess what proportion of the US media votes Democratic? > The odds that the Washington Post, New York Times, and so on will endorse > the Democratic candidate in any given election? Fairly low, let me assure > you. These are not neutral observers. Most of my _Democratic_ friends > agree with me on that.
What fraction of the owners vote Democratic? Who is in charge, the workers or the owners? You can indeed find papers, like the Post, privately owned by wealthy Democrats. But, on the whole, the interest of the papers are the interests of its owners, who tend to be Republican. If you would do a weighed average by circulation, of the ownership of the media, I cannot imagine that it would be leftist. Dan M. So what? Every major American media outlet has a _very_ high wall between news and editorial product and ownership and advertising. The media person who demonstrates otherwise gets to be made a hero and celebrated by the entire profession - yet it happens almost never. You keep making this argument to me, Dan, but you don't have any evidence for it. I mean, none. Apart from the fact that both the New York Times and the Washington Post are owned by Democrats, that doesn't _prove_ anything. You'd have to show that the owners have control over the product - and, with the striking exception of the Washington Post and The New Republic (both owned by liberals), it's very clear that they don't. The Weekly Standard (the conservative version of the New Republic, btw) by contrast once published an article that said Rupert Murdoch should be ashamed of himself for sucking up to the Chinese government. I'll give you one guess who owns the Weekly Standard. If he exerts control over them he's got a funny way of using it. The whole system is set up to make sure that they don't. Conservative media people are rare and generally segregated into the conservative media (Fox News, National Review, and the Weekly Standard, pretty much). Dan Rather has publicly stated his belief that the New York Times editorial page is right down the middle of American public opinion. Do you really think so? You can't just say - the owners control everything. They don't. Most reporters would say that they don't. Certainly at major newspapers everyone in the media would say that they don't. So give me _some_ form of evidence other than your assertion that the owners have a nefarious conspiracy to rightwing bias the media. You use evidence to back up every other point you make - how come this one argument is apparently immune to it? Gautam
