Right, Left, and Left Out

Biased news coverage is politics, not journalism. It fulfills a maxim in community activist Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it..”

The broadcast TV networks consistently portray right-of-center people and issues as extreme and left-of-center attitudes as the norm, a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC) finds:

An MRC study found that between November 9, 2022 (the day after the 2022 midterm elections) and March 21, broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC used such labels as “far-right,” “extreme right,” and “ultraconservative,” a total of 101 times on their flagship morning and evening shows, as well as their Sunday political talk shows. During that same period, analysts found only one instance in which a journalist used an equivalent “far-left” label.

The only case in which a network used the term “far left” was in suggesting that Roe v. Wade was the middle ground between two extremes. That, of course, is another attempt to skew the perception of what is normal in political and cultural discourse today.

This campaign of mischaracterization is part of a strategy to portray the far left as the norm and anything to the right of that as extreme, by rhetorically connecting everything on the right to extremism:

“[F]ar-right” and similar labels were applied to a very wide array of individuals. Republican members of Congress were by far the most heavily labeled group (38 times), followed by general references such as “the far right,” or “extreme rightwing Twitter users,” (19 times). There were 12 instances of labeling for the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 11 cases for the Oathkeepers, 10 cases for the radical German group that attempted a coup in late 2022, and five for the supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. All others were labeled only once or twice.

The press quashes coverage of leftist crimes and abuses, making it appear that the Right is the sole source of unjustified extremist violence, the MRC notes:

This 101-to-1 disparity tracks with the broadcast networks’ well-established habit of obfuscating or outright ignoring extremism from the left.

For example, the pro-abortion radical who attempted to murder Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family received a tiny fraction—less than 10 percent—of the coverage that Paul Pelosi’s attacker received during the first five days following each incident. The attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life also received several orders of magnitude less coverage than the January 6 hearings did during an equivalent time frame.

Back in 2018, ABC and NBC ignored attacks by a left-wing mob on the home of Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson. That same year, NBC covered up an assault on their own camera crew by a pack of antifa members.

And earlier this month, ABC and CBS downplayed a case of violent arson against a police and firefighter training center in Atlanta, Georgia. ABC dismissed the attack as mere “foolishness,” while CBS referred to the arsonists as “demonstrators.”

Of course, we all remember the peaceful protests of 2020 and how the media pretended that this very real insurrection was just a great big block party, a far cry from how the media characterized January 6. The coverage of politically motivated violence carries a distinct tone of “no enemies to the left”:

There is no arguing that far-right extremists exist in the U.S. and abroad. Rather, what’s at issue here is the media’s inability to acknowledge extremism on the left. It seems that whenever they do bother to report on the misdeeds of far-left actors, they meticulously avoid ideological labels.

Such prejudicial coverage of events is politics, not journalism. It fulfills a maxim in community activist Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” Alinsky wrote. It should be no wonder at all that political violence is on the rise when the nation’s most powerful media outlets routinely demonize half or more of the nation.

Children and elderly people in Nashville are only the most recent victims of this media-generated climate of hate. The broadcast media are complicit in those capital crimes.