Monday, February 20, 2012

News Media Has Huge Bias in Favor of Rick Santorum – Mainstream Media is Not Reporting What Mr. Santorum is Saying

Maybe They Just Don’t Believe He is Saying What He Says

Conservatives always cry “media bias” whenever a news story is critical of Conservative dogma, which they will be by just reporting the facts of Conservative dogma.  In truth, the media is highly biased in favor of Conservatives, in large part to try and avoid the criticism that Conservatives level at them.  The Washington Post is one of the biggest offenders, in fact it employees a columnist, Jennifer Rubin, whose sole job is to funnel spin from the Romney campaign and present it as independent commentary.

A large part of the media bias is contained in what the news media fails to report.  By either ignoring or burying news stories on what Conservatives are actually saying out there, they provide cover for the ridiculous positions that Conservatives often take, and by portraying these people as legitimate they distort elections in favor candidates whose true positions would be an anathema to the voters, if only the voters were honestly informed by the media.

Case in point is Rick Santorum.  Over the recent weekend the New York Times has reported what he has been saying, but not as a headline story, but in a “sidebar” where the outrageous positions will viewed by the few, and not the many.  Here is just a few examples of comments by Mr. Santorum that will lose an election, if there were real reporting.

Rick Santorum on Sunday tried to clarify his comment that President Obama subscribed to a “phony theology,” saying he was referring not to the president’s faith but to his view of man’s relationship to the world.
It was during a campaign stop in Ohio on Saturday that Mr. Santorum described what he called the “phony theology” of Mr. Obama’s agenda. “It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said. “But no less a theology.”

That’s right, Mr. Santorum has set himself up as judge of the President “theology” as a way to explain and support his policy differences with the Obama administration.  But wait, there’s more.  Mr. Santorum it seems is kinda down on public education.

Mr. Santorum, at another appearance on Saturday, in Columbus, Ohio, called the idea of schools being run by the federal government or by state governments “anachronistic.” Mr. Santorum did not say public schools were a bad idea, and he said that there was a role for government help in education.

Notice how the author defends Mr. Santorum, even though Mr. Santorum later goes on to say

“But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly — much less that the state government should be running schools — is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

Of course the Federal government is not running the schools, in fact the only major recent program involving the Federal government in public education was No Child Left Behind enacted by the Bush administration.  The Obama administration has handed out waivers like a neighborhood mom on handing out candy on Halloween.  And while everyone has issues with the public school systems, is there anyone who wants to eliminate public schools or state and federal financial support for them?  Really, anyone?

Ok, Mr. Santorum does not want to end government funding so he says this

While he said he did not oppose government financing of schools, Mr. Santorum said that “public education should be a dynamic process that’s locally run.”

“I think the parent should be in charge,” he added, “working with the local school district to try to design an educational environment for each child that optimizes their potential.”

Now at least as far as everyone knows, every school district in the nation is controlled by a locally controlled school board, meaning Mr. Santorum is either ignorant or a fool.  And finally Mr. Santorum says this.

Mr. Santorum also defended his criticism of a requirement in the president’s health-care policy that insurance companies to cover prenatal testing. He had said earlier that the policy was included to save money “because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”. . .

Asked whether he was suggesting that Mr. Obama lacked sympathy for the disabled, Mr. Santorum did not back down, saying, “I think the president has a very bad record on the issue of abortion and children who are disabled.”

So we have one of the vilest accusations of modern American politics, that the President wants pre-natal testing made available to women so they can abort disabled children to save money and cull the population of disabled children.  Gee Mr. Santorum, why not just call the President a pureveyor of Nazi eugenics policy and be done with it.

Reporting such comments as part of a regular news story would be detrimental to the candidacy of Mr. Santorum, so the unspoken agreement of the press is that they will not publicize these positions.  After all, accurately reporting what Conservatives like Mr. Santorum actually say would be a terrible bias.

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