Public Radio

We had the classical station on in the car for a few minutes yesterday.  The lovely piece, by someone who was considered the greatest of the Spanish Renaissance, ended and the news came on.

Conservatives get irritated by slants they consider ubiquitous and fairly obvious, but in the hands of liberal journalism natives I can see why the bias might not be obvious at first. There was a story from a Palestinian source that the Israelis had killed twenty in a strike on a hospital. They noted that it was one of their last functioning hospitals. The station did report that hospitals are sometimes used as cover by military forces - according to the Israelis. That is, they reported it briefly, then in the same sentence went on to quote a Palestinian source that there was no military presence in the hospital, but women and children were killed and there was a neonatal unit. So Public Radio can truthfully report that everything they said was a fact, and that they pointed out both sides.

Except they didn't. They led and closed with the Palestinians and stressed the children and babies. They want you to feel bad for the Palestinians and to wonder if the Israelis are lying. They could have quoted other sources at different length to give the opposite impression.

The next story was about the Utah Senator who replaced Mitt Romney saying that he supported Trump and wanted to see him succeed, but was sometimes going to disagree with him and wanted the President to understand this was a good thing. I have no doubt they reported factually, but what are they trying to get you to think, and in fact make happen in self-fulfilling prophecy? That the Trump coalition is already starting to fracture. They could have quoted other senators or featured a different story.  This was one of only three in the news break after all.  Not everyone would think the Utah senator's thought were the most important thing at 6:30pm just before Christmas.

I forget what the third story was.  I asked my wife to turn it off anyway, but it had an equally sly slant.

I can see why a person who already had a similar POV even mildly would fail to notice that they were being manipulated, drip by drip, all year every year, and even when they changed to other carefully curated news sources, certain that they were independent thinkers who were coming to their own conclusions.  That's part of the art, to convince you that you arrived at the station all by yourself.