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« President Musharraf’s Risks | Main | Only the Government may Kill the Weeds! »

July 30, 2005

Reverse Fair-and-Balancism?

Breaking News: There may be bias in the mainstream media.

I have found that the blogosphere delivers news up to 48 hours earlier than traditional media. I first heard about the Air America Radio investigation on Wednesday morning through Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer, and subsequently Michelle Malkin. Since then, only the blogosphere has caught fire over this, while the MSM has been Holloway'd.

A Google News search for Air America returns only blogs and the Washington Times.

At the writing of this entry:
A CNN website search reveals nothing.
A Washington Post website search reveals nothing.
MSNBC, empty.
NY Times, nada.

And perhaps most surprisingly,
Fox News, zilch.

Why hasn't Fox News jumped on this? Are we witnessing reverse fair-and-balancism? Are they perhaps going out of their way to not look biased after the O'Franken/O’Reilly conflict? Or is it not newsworthy to report the fact that a half million dollars of taxpayer money – earmarked for community programs – has vanished somewhere in the seedy halls of Air America Radio?

As a comparison, a Google search of “Tom Delay House Ethics” yields 494,000 results (57,000 w/ ‘House Ethics’ in quotes). Even if every accusation against Tom Delay were true, he still wouldn’t be anywhere near the half-million dollar figure that Air America Radio stands accused of "borrowing." And Delay's funds weren’t intended for children’s clubs and Alzheimer’s patients.

But perhaps most disturbing is Air America Radio's cavalier attitude, undoubtedly emboldened by their immunity from MSM scrutiny. Their statement says

[...] we agreed months ago to fully compensate the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club as a result of this transaction.
and
Regrettably, the camp did not survive the closure of the Gloria Wise organization.

Which begs the question: Do you plan on returning the $500,000 to the government, or are you just going to invest that back into the station? And since no one in the press is bothered enough to ask these questions, I'll go ahead and assume that Tom Delay can borrow Air America Radio's excuse that he "agreed months ago to fully compensate" the American people for his overseas travel.


Rammage Posted by Rammage on July 30, 2005 at 12:05 AM

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Comments

Most definitly, the blogsphere is a much better news authority then traditional news outfits, for two simple reasons: 1)The brain pool of the internet is much larger then even the most established media. 2) Due to the fact that a blogger never has to really worry about ratings (due to the fact that their market is so large) they can always keep with a story and follow it through to the end.

Posted by: Isiah at July 31, 2005 1:22 PM


Nicely said, Isiah. Of course, this is what many of us envisioned when we first heard that newspapers were taking their press on-line. A blogger doesn't need to worry about ratings, in part because readers can skip from article to article, like a newspaper.

I guess Scrappleface would be the funnies.

Posted by: Wulf at August 2, 2005 12:50 AM


I did a search on "Air America" too and it was many pages before any type of criticism appeared. Does George Soros, et. al. now own Google?

Posted by: drjeff at July 15, 2006 1:48 PM