Montana Independents
Mainstream Media Bias

"
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored" - Adious
Huxley, English novelist

It is a common but mistaken belief that media
outlets like Fox News are
biased while "mainstream" media like the New York and LA Times,
CNN, the three broadcast TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) etc. are
unbiased. Most mainstream media outlets are institutionally
Democratic, meaning that the great majority of reporters and columnists
are Democrats or Liberals. Long gone are the days when
journalists took great pains not favor one political group
over another. Mainstream media today filter stories to
fit their political agenda
as the examples below demonstrate. The filtering (a
polite word for censorship) involve leaving out parts of or
entire news stories with the intention of giving the reader a view he
would not have if the "rest of the story" (Paul Harvey) were
published. Note that we are not claiming that Fox is unbiased -- we
focus on the mainstream media since they collectively
reach the largest audience by far, about 80%. Every news
organization selects what news to run and in how much detail. Our
objection is when this editing is done for partisan political
purposes.

In July 2013 during jury selection in an attempted
murder case in Bozeman, Montana, the County Attorney started off
by asking prospective jurors if they had heard about the case. Almost
all raised their hands. He then asked if they had formed an opinion based
on what they heard and again almost all raised their hands. He next asked
where they had gotten their information and most jurors indicated it was
from newspapers, radio or TV. Finally he asked how many believe
everything they read in the papers or hear on radio and TV. Not a single
hand was raised! The point the attorney made was that every
person had formed an opinion based on information they agreed was not
totally reliable.

Why is information in media not
always completely true or even deceptive? News stories are written by
reporters and then edited by the editorial staff before publication
. The golden age of
objective reporting by newsmen such as Edward R. Morrow is long gone.
Today news organizations routinely leave out factual details which
conflict with their political agenda. There are three ways news is biased:
emphasis, censorship and fabrication. No news organization, either
Liberal, Conservative or Independent fabricates stories. Fox
News' bias is easily seen by its emphasis on news detrimental to Liberal
politics. Censorship is more insidious than emphasis as the reader is
unaware of the bias (missing news). Censorship is routinely practiced
on certain issues by the mainstream media. For example in late 2013
stories of children (of illegal immigrants) "appearing spontaneously" on
the US side of the border with Mexico made the news. The mainstream
media reported the children as "unescorted" and censored out the fact
that paid human smugglers were delivering these children -- the
mainstream media did not want to reveal organized crime's role. Another
example is the censoring of the immigration status of criminals. On Nov
22, 2010 a jury convicted Ingmar Guandique an illegal immigrant from El
Salvador of the murder of Chandra Levy in Washington DC. The
mainstream media did not report that the killer was in the US illegally as
this contradicts their story-line that illegal immigrants are all honest
and hard working (15% of Arizona's prison population are illegal
immigrants).  These are just two examples but there are many more.
Immigration
Law 101: Immigration law and border controls prevent criminals from
entering the US and is why we do not have open borders.

No one likes being deceived, even children, as
this  Ally Bank
commercial
shows.

"A half truth is regarded by the law as a lie" - Alan
Dershowitz, Harvard law professor

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