Libertarian Librarian

Just to pile on a bit. One measure of bias is to look at how the media handles similar controversies when they are created by liberals as opposed to conservatives. My current case in point relates to the Terri Schiavo controversy. When a "talking points" memo from a mid-level republican senate staffer was discovered to include the phrase "great political issue" there was a fair amount of hue and cry from the media. Editorials in papers across the country decried the Republicans for their crassness and the situation was hashed over in the nightly news for a few days.

Now, along comes Howard Dean, newly selected head of the DNC. In Saturday's LA Times, Dean is quoted as saying, "'We're going to use Terri Schiavo later on,' Dean said of the brain-damaged Floridian who died last month after her feeding tube was removed amid a swarm of political controversy." A search through the Proquest Newspaper database I have at work, which yielded a dozen or more editorials condemning the Martinez memo on Schiavo, yielded precisely none condemning Dean. I will keep scanning for editorials condemning Dean in the next week or so, but I'm not holding my breath that any will be forthcoming.

Granted, we're again talking editorials here, but the editors are the people overseeing the reporters, right? So, I find it interesting that newspapers merely "report" that Dean says that Schiavo will be a campaign issue while editorilizing at length about the bad old Republicans for even thinking about making Schiavo a campaign issue. Personally, I think both parties should be ashamed of how they handled, and continue to handle, Schiavo's case, but if the media is going to take one party to task for "grandstanding" as Dean puts it, shouldn't they also take the other party to task for doing precisely the same thing? Often times bias is as clearly demonstrated in what isn't written as it is in what is written.