"Bias" Of Debate Moderators In Their Own Words

October 05, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Usually, I don’t waste much time watching the presidential or vice-presidential debates; but on Tuesday I watched most of the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. I applaud Vance on a skilled performance. But I particularly want to comment today on the overt hostility that Vance faced from the moderators, which is unfortunately typical of the hostility of the corporate media toward all Republican candidates.

If you watched some or all of the debate, you probably came away with a general impression of the moderators attempting to help Walz; but without a transcript it is difficult to remember specifics. Fortunately, CBS has produced a transcript of the debate. So I thought it might be informative to go through the transcript and compile some of the more absurd efforts of the moderators to give a boost to Walz. The moderators in this instance were Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS. What becomes noticeable when you do this is the extent to which the moderators insert into their questions contested, or even clearly false, Democratic Party talking points as if they were uncontested facts.

The second topic of questioning in the debate, introduced by moderator O’Donnell, was stated to be “Hurricane Helene,” which she used as a proxy for supposed climate change. Here is the text of the introductory question:

Let's turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?

O’Donnell takes her opportunity as moderator to assert as uncontested fact that “scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly.” In fact, the idea that climate change is making hurricanes worse is one of the most clearly false and thoroughly debunked of all the scary claims of the climate scam. On Thursday, Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, went on the Daily Signal podcast to give an extensive refutation of the claim. The link has both video and a transcript. From the transcript:

I’m using data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, from NASA, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change disagrees with her. They all say that there’s been no increase in the big hurricanes. . . . [G]oing back to 1850, we know every single hurricane that’s made landfall since 1850, because they’re hard to miss. And land-falling hurricanes in the United States have been declining. I’ve looked at that data myself. . . . If you look at the U.N. data, go right to the source, and they show clearly that extreme or natural disasters have been declining by 10% since 2000.

As to Helene being “one of the deadliest [hurricanes] on record,” on October 2, CBS itself compiled a list of the top ten deadliest historical U.S. hurricanes (maybe in a failed attempt to support O’Donnell’s assertion). It turns out that Helene has a long way to go even to make it into the top ten. Helene’s current death toll (per AP at 9:30 tonight) is 237. The number one deadliest Hurricane was the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, with a death toll given as between 8000 and 12,000. Other hurricanes with death tolls over 1000 occurred in 2017, 1928, 2005, and 1893. Others with death tolls of 400 and up occurred in 1881, 1957, 1935, and 1856. How this proves that hurricanes are becoming more deadly due to increasing strength in recent years is a mystery to anyone who looks at the data.

At the end of about 10 minutes of the candidates responding to O’Donnell’s opening question, she closed the topic with the following statement, again asserted as if it was an uncontested fact:  

“The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” 

Neither candidate was given an opportunity to respond, the the debate moved on to other topics.

The next instance of the moderators explicitly taking Walz’s side occurred a few minutes later, when the topic was illegal immigration. During his answer on the subject, Vance had said “[I]n Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” After Walz had responded, moderator Brennan interjected:

[J]ust to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.

This interjection came despite an agreement on a ground rule that the moderators would not “fact check” the debaters. In this case, while there might be some room for disagreement, Vance had far the better side of the facts. The Haitian migrants in Springfield have almost entirely entered the country illegally, but the Biden administration has purported to grant them something called “Temporary Protected Status.” So there was nothing false about what Vance had said, and the basis on which the Haitians have at least temporary legal status is a result of dubious Biden administration executive action. When Vance tried to explain that situation, the moderators cut off his microphone.

Finally there is the idea that any difficult problem faced by the people is a “crisis” that calls for immediate intervention by the federal government to solve it. As the debate went on, that became a recurring theme. First up, it was the “housing crisis.” From Brennan:

There's a shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States and this contributes to the high housing crisis.

And then some time later, also from Brennan, it was the “childcare crisis”:

There is a childcare crisis in this country, and the United States is one of the very few developed countries in the world without a national paid leave program for new parents.

I think that the term “childcare crisis” is nothing more than a description of the fact — that has been true since the dawn of human history — that raising children is a difficult and challenging task. Fortunately in the world of CBS and other corporate media, such “crisis” and any others like it can always be promptly solved by the spending of sufficient funds from the infinite pile of loot at the disposal of the federal government.

Clearly, Trump has made a wise decision to decline to do future debates except on Fox.

Is Google News legally liable for bias against conservatives?

By David Wojick | October 5th, 2019 | Civil Rights, Technology |3  Comments

I recently wrote that Google News should be sued for bias against conservative sources, not regulated. Regulating Internet news aggregators is the last thing we want, but Google News is clearly doing something wrong, that needs to be corrected.

To further this line of thought, here is a specific legal argument for the Courts to order Google News to stop discriminating. The Courts might even impose penalties for past discrimination. The Federal Trade Commission could bring such a suit, as could the users of Google News. Mind you I am not an expert on this stuff, hence the question mark in the title.

We are looking for new law so should look at first principles. I posit a variation on the product liability principle called the implied warrant of merchantability. This says the product should work. It is a fundamental principle of product liability law.

As I understand the history of this legal principle, it goes like this. (I am sure this is greatly simplified and I hope the product liability lawyers will forgive me.) A new car malfunctioned, killing the driver. The family sued the car maker, but they argued that the family had no contract with them, just with the dealer they bought the car from. They had received no money from the purchaser.........To Read More..............

Trump Judge's Dismissal of Social Media Case Is Political

By Larry Klayman March 17, 2019

 

While expressing concern about the rank discrimination against conservatives on social media platforms such as Google/You Tube, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Instagram, newly appointed Trump judge — the Honorable Trevor McFadden — strained to dismiss, albeit without prejudice, the class-action suit which I had filed for my public-interest group Freedom Watch and Laura Loomer. Ms. Loomer, a conservative Jewish activist, had been banned from social media and PayPal over her strong views about Muslim congresswoman's Ihan Omar's links to, and association with, Islamic groups like the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the anti-woman and homosexual dogma Islam, and Omar's hatred of Jews and Israel, as well as her overt anti-Semitism.

During a prior time when our Justice Department was not as politicized as it is today, CAIR — not at all coincidentally — was named as an unindicted conspirator in the criminal terrorism trial of the Holy Land Foundation years ago in federal court in Dallas, Texas.

As for Freedom Watch, we have been discriminated against on all of the social media platforms, most particularly Google/YouTube, where our subscriber base had either declined or (for many months in 2018) remained static. In my opinion, this is because Freedom Watch not only has a "Leftist Media Strike Force" which has taken legal action against "Fake News" publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and its CEO Jeff Zucker as well as prime time host Chris Cuomo, the Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, but last but hardly least leftist Hollywood entities like Showtime and Blumhouse Television. And with each passing day, more vile leftist media and Hollywood publications have also been added to the list of growing offenders of the legitimate use of the First Amendment............To Read More.........

Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?

January 12, 2019 By Brian C. Joondeph

American media have abandoned their primary job of reporting the news. Gone are the days of telling readers and viewers the who, what, where, when, and why. Now it's telling the audience what to think, after filtering the news story through layers of bias and activism. The latest trick is "fact-checking" President Trump in "real time."

I don't recall any mainstream news networks fact-checking Barack Obama.

In anticipation of Trump's first Oval Office address, and immediately following, the anti-Trump resistance media went into fact-check mode. There was this CNN headline: "Fact-checking Trump's immigration speech."

NPR jumped in with "FACT CHECK: Trump's Oval Office Pitch for A Border Wall," followed by the New York Times: "Trump's Speech to the Nation: Fact Checks and Background."  And then Politico: "Fact check: Trump's speech on border crisis." A CNN crank even encouraged fact-checkers to prepare for Trump's eight-minute speech as they would for a triathlon, with proper nutrition and rest......  Some degree of fact-checking is reasonable, if it's applied equally to leaders of both political parties, but not when it becomes the entire story.

Before President Trump even uttered a word, the fact-checkers were lined up, ready to provide real-time rebuttals to every word Trump uttered. But who fact-checks the fact-checkers? ......Read more

Merchants of Propaganda

Jill Abramson doesn’t mind bias in the New York Times as long as it is her own.

George Neumayr January 4, 2019

Previews of Jill Abramson’s upcoming book, Merchants of Truth, portray it as a blown whistle on the paper’s incorrigible anti-Trump streak. But is the criticism sincere? Or is she just settling scores with Dean Baquet, an old colleague who bested and replaced her? It appears like the latter........She doesn’t mind bias on the front page, as long as it is her own, which her tenure as the top editor abundantly confirmed................What annoys Abramson is not so much that Baquet is biased but that his version of biased coverage is selling better than hers did. ...........She claims to want editorial standards “without fear or favor,” one of the supposed guiding principles of the paper, but seems to think its employment practices should give female staffers bonus points for showing up. By all accounts, including her own, she was a poor manager. Yet she thinks feminist affirmative action should have protected her anyways. Abramson’s book isn’t a call for the elimination of politics and biases from newsrooms but simply a plea for the renewal of old ones............To Read More......
 

The Media's Credibility Is Dead

November 25, 2018 By R.C. Maxwell

It's common knowledge that distrust in media is at an all-time high. Despite attempts by anti-Trump pundits to blame these figures on President Trump for popularizing the term "fake news," the media will soon have to reconcile how they have been complicit in their own faltering credibility.

According to the last media survey from McLaughlin & Associates, voters who see anti-Trump bias in the news media outnumber voters who don't at about a 5-to-1 clip. In 2018, the mainstream media aren't even attempting to camouflage their hyper-progressive bias. There was a time when news entities worked hard to remain bipartisan, and even if they weren't, they at least attempted to conceal their biases. Bias is inevitable in today's media climate, but we've reached a point where the media's desire to feed their bias has become mutually exclusive with reality itself.

For starters, modern media are an audience-based machine, catering to content more likely to be consumed by their already loyal viewers and readership. The problem has thus arisen that some media organizations have put themselves in a position where they have to create content to feed their viewers' appetite, even if that content is insincere. ..........To Read More

Sloppy and Malignant Bias from the New York Times

November 25, 2018 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 

I periodically mock the New York Times when editors, reporters, and columnists engage in sloppy and biased analysis.

• Claiming Medicaid cuts in a piece that shows rising outlays for the program.
• Asserting that government schools are “starved of funding” when taxpayer subsidies actually have skyrocketed.
• Claiming that budget-cutting austerity nations are doing worse than “stimulus” nations, but getting the numbers backwards.
• Writing that the sequester will mean “deep automatic spending cuts” when the budget actually would climb by $2.4 trillion.
• Claiming that Italy is more prosperous than the United States and that there is less poverty.
• Asserting that U.S. multinationals pay little tax on foreign-source income, but forgetting to include the taxes paid to foreign governments.
• Cherry-picking income data to hide the fact that pro-market policies produce broadly shared prosperity.
• Attacking the fairness of America’s economy by using poverty data that doesn’t actually measure poverty.

But all these instances of intentional and unintentional bias are trivial compared to our next example.

The New York Times has gone above and beyond conventional media bias with a video entitled, “How Capitalism Ruined China’s Health Care System.”



Here’s the part that caused my jaw to drop.

After the sad opening story about the guy with the sick mother, there’s a section from 1:33-2:27 that makes two observations that basically show the premise of the video is totally wrong.

• First, it points out (from 1:33-1:42) that there is a universal, government-run health system that ostensibly covers the guy’s mother, so her unfortunate status is yet another example that coverage in a government-run healthcare system is not the same as treatment.
• Second, it points out (from 2:05-2:27) that life expectancy soared once the communist party relaxed its grip on the economy and allowed some liberalization, which would seem to be powerful evidence that capitalism leads to better health outcomes.

These are astounding mistakes.

But it gets worse. Sarah Lilly, who lives in China, debunked the rest of the video in a column for FEE.

The New York Times…attempts to blame capitalism for the many problems in China’s health care system. …As a resident of China and a recipient of outstanding private health care here, I was confused as to why the Times would show us the horrors of a capitalist system without actually visiting a private health care facility. …All of the horrors depicted in the high-quality video—the long lines, the scalping, and the hospital fights—occurred at government-run health care facilities. …At the very least, failing to feature a single private medical facility while blaming capitalism for the dysfunction of China’s public health system is intellectually dishonest.

She points out that the big-picture analysis in the video is wrong.

In the video, the Times praises Chairman Mao’s introduction of “free” health care and claims that when capitalism was introduced into the country, the state retreated and care was no longer free. Neither statement is true. First, health care was never free; it was paid for by tax revenues. Second, the state never retreated; rather, its regulatory apparatus became vaster and even more invasive. Out of sheer necessity, China allowed for the creation of private hospitals to ease the burden of the country’s heavily bureaucratic and deteriorating health care system.

And she also explains that the details of the video are wrong.

The Times video depicts the ungodly long line most Chinese face to see a physician. …It’s an appalling scene. …There’s just one problem. The Shanghai Cancer Center is a public hospital, not a private one. The long lines, scalpers, bribes, and physical fights with hospital staff—all of these exclusively happen in the public, communist, government-run hospitals. …In an egregious bit of sleight-of-hand, the Grey Lady asserts that capitalism is ruining Chinese health care while presenting us with a hospital where capitalism is not practiced.

To be fair, we get the same type of mistake when journalists look at the flaws in the American health system. They blame capitalism when the problems of ever-higher prices and uneven coverage are the consequences of government intervention.

P.S. My columns about sloppy bias at the New York Times don’t include Paul Krugman’s writings. Debunking those mistakes requires several different collections.

The Racism Liberals Don't Recognize -- Their Own

Bernard Goldberg May 29th, 2018

Commentators, almost always from the right, have documented liberal media bias for many years now. And the response by the perpetrators of this bias has been both constant and predictable: Circle the wagons and blame the accusers.

Accuse us of bias for seeing their bias. The bias we've been talking and writing about is usually about partisan politics and hot social issues like abortion. But there's one kind of liberal media bias that hasn't gotten much attention. It's a bias that liberals both in and out of the media often attach to conservatives, but almost never to themselves.

It's racial bias. My friend Lee Habeeb, a conservative radio executive who appears on cable TV from time to time, has written a piece in Newsweek about how too many journalists have played down -- and often downright ignored -- the murder of young black men in places like Chicago. "In Chicago, it's Parkland every week," Habeeb writes about a city that had more than 1,400 homicides in 2016 and 2017. And in just the first week of May 2018, 84 people were shot -- nine of them wound up dead..........Habeeb believes that liberal journalists don't like the storyline. "Journalists and activists can't blame the deaths on assault style weapons like the AR-15. Or the National Rifle Association." It's true. Black on black murder doesn't fit the liberal journalists' template ......... To Read More.....

WikiLeaks Exposed April Ryan as More Than ‘Just a Reporter’

Brendan Kirby February 17, 2017   | Updated 18 Feb 2017


Correspondent acts confused by Trump meeting quip, offered to set up similar engagements for Clinton .  April Ryan, White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, protested that she’s an old-fashioned reporter Thursday after President Donald Trump suggested she could set up a meeting between himself and the Congressional Black Caucus.

“No, no, no,” she said during the president’s news conference. “I’m just a reporter.”.....To Read More....

Yes, the media need to listen rather than bark

February 19, 2017

 

For the last few days, we've seen the media rediscover their bark.  They are suddenly curious about everything after eight years of just going along.  Best of all, they don't understand why the public, or their consumers, don't take their barking seriously anymore. The media's problems did not begin today. The Gallup polls about the media tell you the same story over the last few years:

2004: Media Credibility Reaches Lowest Point in Three Decades
2015: Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Historical Low   
2016: Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low

Maybe all the polls are wrong again. However, there is reason for the media to take their credibility problems a bit more seriously..........More