5 Liberal Media Techniques

[SWJED]

From the Ray Robison blog - 5 Liberal Media Techniques.

1. Discredit by association. This one is near and dear to me, as it is exactly what Scott Shane of the New York Times did to me. Scott referred to me as the “Alabama blogger”... Scott saw fit to describe me as the “Alabama blogger” to create an image of some redneck in his out house.

2. Wave the magic wand. If there is more than one source for a fact, and the writer has to discredit a fact to make a point, then find one or two people to discredit one source (which may or may not be accurate), wave the magic wand by lumping all the other sources together as “the rest” and then the same discrediting of the one source applies to all the sources...

3. The three paragraph story. Make unsubstantiated charges in the first 3 paragraphs then bury the balancing or even exculpatory evidence two pages away in the 15th paragraph, where most people don’t have time to get to.

4. Discredit by turning it into a joke. The media (especially the Guardian) used this technique with catchy phrases like (paraphrasing) “think you know more than the CIA?” “now you to can play CIA analyst” in articles about the release of Iraqi documents. What they failed to acknowledge is that the CIA did not and could not possibly analyze every document captured in Iraq. This is a very serious matter. Unanalyzed documentation of a brutal, murderous regime is a serious matter. Can you imagine the media saying Simon Wiesenthal was playing Nazi Hunter? This is exactly what Wiesenthal did. He used Nazi documentation to locate and prosecute murderers.

5. The fact sandwich. Mix the reporters conclusions in with the expert’s conclusions to mislead the reader into believing it is all the expert’s conclusions. Find an expert to say A is not true. Then put a statement that B is not true that is not from the expert but is actually the reporter’s conclusion. Then put a statement from the expert that C is not true. Make sure you do this in one paragraph so it is not too obvious in a quick read through. That way it is the reader’s fault if they get the wrong impression.