With the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Thursday night, the liberal media has gone beyond bias into outrageously mendacious agitprop.
If one assumes they aren’t completely out of touch with reality, the only conclusion is that the media outlets are being willfully dishonest. If one assumes they don’t recognize their own astonishing inaccuracy, then they must be adjudged to be embarrassingly untethered to ordinary American life outside of their elitist, woke bubbles.
EYES TURN TO GAVIN NEWSOM AS FEINSTEIN DEATH CREATES SENATE VACANCY
Before I go further, though, it is important to emphasize that none of what follows should be taken as criticism of Feinstein herself. May she rest in peace, and may God comfort her family and friends.
Instead, this is about media prejudice so horrendous as to be unethical. It involves the repeated, insistent use, by supposedly “straight news” reporters and outlets, of political labels that consistently disfavor conservatives while favoring liberals.
For decades, study after study has shown major “news” outlets are quick to use labels such as “hard-right” and “ultra-conservative” for Republicans while almost never using “hard” or “ultra” for those on the Left. This labeling is the result of deliberate choices. Straight-news editors should insist that their reporters be sparing with labels that amount to pejoratives. Habitual labeling such as this, in articles purporting to be neutral news, is essentially unethical.
Sometimes, for context, the use of political labels does serve to help the reader. Even then, though, ethics creates an obligation to be even-handed. There actually are well-established ways to adjudge the political ideologies of people in Congress. So many outside groups provide ratings using transparent criteria based on actual votes cast that it is easy, with rough accuracy, to assess how far leftward or rightward an officeholder is.
The two most prominent and well-established ratings, for example, come from the American Conservative Union and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. If someone scores, say, 65 in the former’s ratings and 35 in the latter’s, those numbers are obviously somewhere near the mid-point of 50. An unbiased reporter can call such an official a “centrist.” Republican Susan Collins of Maine, for example, most recently scored in the 30s on both scales. Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia recently scored a 55 from the ADA and a 26 from the ACU.
Anyone in the 90s in one rating and below 10 in the other, though, is quite obviously either very liberal or very conservative by American standards — or at least defensibly labeled as such by a careful reporter.
Consider, instead, how the three biggest national “news” sources described Feinstein in their reports on her death at age 90. In its lede sentence, the Associated Press labeled Feinstein a “centrist Democrat and champion of liberal causes” and later said she was “known as a pragmatic lawmaker who reached out to Republicans and sought middle ground.” The Washington Post headline actually called her a “centrist stalwart of the Senate.” And in the caption of its leading photo accompanying news of her passing, the New York Times wrote Feinstein “called herself a political centrist and often embraced conservative ideas.”
None of these were spoof sites such as The Onion. These were actual news reports. And they are objectively hogwash.
In no existing universe was Feinstein anything other than very liberal. Her ACU ratings regularly ran not in the 40s, 30s, or even 20s but down near zero. Her ADA ratings didn’t inch down to the 60s, 70s, or even as low as the 80s but ran consistently in the 90s. Several times, she earned a zero from the ACU and a 100 from the ADA. And the same ideological disposition was evident about Feinstein from interest group after interest group, issue after issue: Feinstein was measurably, always, near or at the very most liberal end.
To the increasingly hard-left big media, though, the idea is to portray the far-left as normal and anybody to the right of “old-fashioned liberal” as a knuckle-dragging extremist.
Hence, the entirely counterfactual — meaning “flat-out dishonest” — labeling of Feinstein as a pragmatic centrist who took some conservative positions.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
If anyone wonders why conservatives detest most big, establishment institutions in the country, this is why: The institutions are almost all manifestly, inarguably rigged against anyone or any group right of center.
This mislabeling of Feinstein is a microcosm of what causes societal fury. In this case, editors can and should, quite easily, avoid the abuses. That they don’t do so is unprofessional and inexcusable.