Sometimes it isn’t so overt. Often you have to really look for it. But Perry Bacon, Jr. of the Washington Post must have skipped out on the subtle bias portion of J-school.
I posted a story from ABCNews.com about Hillary getting booed at the Take Back America Conference. ABC’s headline was:
Clinton Booed Again by Hard Left at Progressive Conference
And the first paragraph was:
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton was booed this morning by some attendees at the liberal Take Back America conference for blaming failure in Iraq on the Iraqi government.
No bias. Just a simple reporting of the facts. It was refreshing. The only hint of bias could be the use of the word “some” to describe the attendees, but it was not all the attendees that booed. Still accurate without bias.
A Washington Post headline caught my eye this evening. Maybe it was the years of telling juvenile delinquents to stop minimizing, but I thought the headline was doing exactly that. Here is the Post’s headline:
Antiwar Democrats Are Less Critical As Clinton Takes A New Tack on Iraq
It took me a minute to get my monitor to stop spinning after reading that headline. Then I read the first paragraph.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) drew only modest boos at a gathering of liberal activists yesterday, a sign of how well her changing position on Iraq is playing in the antiwar wing of her party.
The bias in the headline and lead alone is outrageous. “Only modest boos?” “Less Critical?”
They booed her and there is video of the booing her. But the Post sees that as a sign of progress for Hillary. I wonder who they will endorse for President in ‘08.
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