Mainstream Media Moments You May Have Missed

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The Washington Post has a story explaining how that Terri Schiavo "talking points" memo got out. In a link-filled post, Hindrocket at Power Line has just about everything you need to know at this point.

And no conservative will want to miss this excellent story from USA Today, about a panel discussion featuring Roger Ailes of Fox News. An interesting tidbit:

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism study found that in covering
the Iraq war last year, 73% of Fox stories included opinion from anchors and
reporters, compared with 29% on MSNBC and just 2% on CNN. But Ailes dismissed
Pew as a "liberal lobbying organization." He said, "Most polls today are not
taken to provide information to the public but to get press for the organization
taking the polls. I took a poll of Pew, and 98% of my organization found that
they were biased." The crowd of 300 roared.

(In response, Project director Tom Rosenstiel said the study "was not a
poll. It was a content analysis designed by a four-university research team and
executed at the University of Alabama." One plus for Fox, he said, was that
researchers found Fox News stories were more forthcoming about sourcing than
their cable rivals.)

I am very suspicious of the 2% figure for CNN. Anyone who has ever sat through a Christiane Amanpour report must wonder how that can possibly be.

My favorite Ailes quotes:

Ailes said Fox News has no agenda. His charge to his reporters and anchors
is simple: "If you make a mistake, get on the air as fast as you can and admit
it. ... Do your homework. Make sure you reach out to a point of view you don't
agree with to be sure you have some balance in your piece, because journalists,
despite the public perception, are not empty-headed fools. They actually come to
the job with some ideas and biases."

When Auletta asked him whether the media have a "conscious bias," Ailes
said: "I don't know whether it's conscious or not. I think people who are biased
to the left and right are by and large honest people who bring their life
experience to whatever their beliefs are. I don't think there's some conspiracy
of bias to the left, but I do think that New York and Los Angeles have different
views than many people that I know from other parts of the country."

Now, I try hard to be open-minded and to keep my own biases from blinding me to the truth. But when I read something like that, I simply want to stand up and cheer!