When I was growing up, there were some claims that the news organizations were biased, but all the networks tried to give balanced reporting. Newspapers had the rep of being either Democrat or Republican, but not the tv news. That was in the 50's. In the 60's, especially as Vietnam grew as an issue, television news became more and more accused of having a left bias, particularly since "experts" said journalism people tended to be idealistic and crusaders. This increased until the late 80's and 90's until FOX was born in 1996. "Fair and balanced." Actually far to the right to balance the perceived left of all the others. MSNBC came into being as the ultra-left news. ABC, CBS, and NBC continue to try to pretend they're impartial, but still lean more left than right. CNN, I think, has actually made the most strides at staying down the middle and exposing issues on both sides, but they're not perfect.
The reason I'm typing this is that journalists used to be our ombudsmen. They would ferret out the truth when claims were made in our elections and our politics. Politicians could rarely get away with outright lies or taking things out of context to make the opponent look bad. They could do it, but they took the chance of being exposed to the general public.
Take the current situation in Missouri. I don't live there, but I get all the political ads out of St. Louis. For governor they have a Democrat, who up to a few years ago was a registered Republican and a Republican who was a delegate to the last Democratic convention that nominated Obama. Yeah, screwed up. The Democrat is accused of spending nearly 3 million dollars on decorating his Secretary of State office. True, but deceptive. The state told him to remodel the entire Sec of State building, and gave him a $3M budget to do it. Not just his office. ALL of the Sec of State offices.
The Republican is accused of stealing $700K from a charity. He came back from Iraq and started a veteran's organization to help vets find jobs. His family put over $600,000 into the project. In the third or fourth year of operation, he took a salary of $700,000 to pay himself for not having taken a salary of any kind the first few years and to repay the loan from his family.
These two issues highlight the mudslinging, and neither is really true, but nobody gives people the real truth. (I had to dig for it.) Where is the press to expose this nonsense? It's why in all our politics today we have outright lies and distortions. It's sexier to promote the crap instead of the truth. It gets better ratings, and cheats all of us of what ideas and policies do the candidates really have.
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