My Tuesday column hits some familiar territory...
Last week, Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post published an extensive item on MSNBC's alleged pro-Obama, pro-Democratic Party bias, as well as network president Phil Griffin's defensiveness about the conventional wisdom's perception of his programming.
I don't have any qualms with Calderone's reporting or the article itself, but the observations he collected were indicative of a chronic and unfair view of MSNBC. Make no mistake, the network has its problems, but a liberal (or Democratic) bias isn't one of them. As fellow liberals have discussed for years, the entire notion of a liberal media bias is a joke. The news media, and especially cable news, is exceedingly deferential to Republicans and is, in fact, predominantly owned by Republicans.
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism published a bizarre and misleading report about the cable news coverage of the presidential election. This study was the centerpiece of Calderone's article.
The most alarming determination in the report was that during the final week of the election, 51 percent of MSNBC news stories about President Obama had a positive tone, while none of the network's Obama stories were negative. [continued here]