Unequivocal Spin

Bias in the blogosphere is pretty obvious, and most bloggers wear it like a badge. Most readers seek to find content they are prone to agree with. It’s easier to adopt a religion and follow its teachings than it is to constantly consider how each new event or situation fits into your homemade belief system. “I mostly agree with you, so tell me how to think and act.”

Despite being libertarian and agnostic, I can’t say that I am always above this particular coping mechanism. When it comes time to vote, especially on local issues where a bill might sound good but the details are possibly antithetical to my beliefs, I do rely on pundits of known bias to inform my voting choices. If you go right to the high profile conservatives and liberals and see what they are harping over, it’s usually easy to discern what is actually in the bill and decide from there.

While we expect and allow bias from sources where such bias is evident and advertised, we don’t support it from supposedly neutral sources like the hard news.

It seems the New York Times doesn’t even try to hide it’s rampant liberal bias any more. Here are two headlines which are clearly trying to spin a win into a loss, a defeat into a victory, and both for the benefit of a liberal audience:

Mukasey Wins Vote in Senate, Despite Doubts
vs.
Dropping License Plan Wins Praise for Spitzer

The liberal mantra over Mukasey has been “he failed to take an unequivocal stance against the torture of terrorism detainees.” It’s in the first line of that article and somewhere in almost all of the NYT articles that deal with Mukasy. It’s also parroted back to the NYT by people (read: civil rights attorney Diane Goldstein Temkin) who write letters to the editors: “Judge Michael B. Mukasey was wrong not to take an unequivocal stand against waterboarding.”

That’s the mantra, and the goal is to recast any Bush Administration win as a loss and to taint any bill that the way-left Democrats couldn’t prevent from passing and discredit any nominee they couldn’t filibuster or otherwise prevent from being approved.

Compare this with Spitzer’s utterly ridiculous plan to give de-facto citizenship to illegals via drivers licenses, which has become a self destructive topic for the Democratic Presidential hopefuls, especially front runner Hillary Clinton. This is the kind of out of touch stupidity and egocentric leftism that the Republicans pray for every election cycle. Let the lefties tear themselves apart with a really stupid measure, and we’ll use all the sound bytes to hammer it home during the general election.

The NYT article on Spitzer spins spins spins for over 500 words before it even mentions Hillary Clinton, the real reason this issue is so divisive:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has taken fire in recent weeks for failing to make clear whether she supported Mr. Spitzer’s plan, was not present at the delegation breakfast. But she issued a statement Wednesday afternoon in which she expressed support for Mr. Spitzer’s decision and stated that licenses for illegal immigrants would not be on her own future agenda.

“As president, I will not support drivers’ licenses for undocumented people and will press for comprehensive immigration reform that deals with all of the issues around illegal immigration,” Mrs. Clinton said.

I guess “failed to take an unequivocal stance” isn’t in the NYT vocabulary when they have to talk about liberal darling politicians. I’ll bet that if you polled 1,000 people on the streets of New York and asked them, “Fill in the blank: Recently, ______ failed to take an unequivocal stance on a divisive political issue” almost all of them would have answered Clinton. I’d expect the same results in Washington D.C., and nationwide.

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