Bias 101: Nitpicking Bush, Hailing Kerry.
RatherBaised.com
Covering President Bush's Thursday acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Dan Rather and his colleagues Bob Schieffer and John Roberts provided a textbook example of liberal bias. After praising Democratic candidate John Kerry's "excellent delivery" and managing to say only one negative thing about his speech (see transcript below), Rather & Co. treated Bush's address with far more skepticism critiquing him on numerous points, both political and oratorical.
After arguing before the speech that Bush's theme of compassionate "rings pretty hollow considering some of the policies his government has pursued in the last three-and-a-half years" in the view of "some critics," John Roberts gave what amounted to a Democratic response:
"It's interest interesting to note he seems to have forgotten about Osama bin Laden who remains at large," the would-be anchor told the man he wishes to succeed. "There was no talk about him. Also no talk about a couple of the other great challenges facing America on the international stage, and those are the problems with nuclear programs in both Iran and North Carolina. -- North Korea."
Rather's veteran colleague Bob Schieffer was hardly fairer. He focused mostly on style.
"The last part of this speech was the best part of the speech. But it took him a long time to get there. I think the speech, quite frankly, was too long. We were told that he was going to lay out a bold program, a bold agenda for the next four years. I'm not sure he did that. As you say, he did lay out a list of ideas. Many of which have been around for quite some time."
Not to be outdone, Rather injected the viewpoint of the Kerry-Edwards campaign several times into the discourse and giving free coverage to a speech that Kerry was going to deliver later that night in which "they're going to say the Bush-Cheney team has misled the nation into war in Iraq, they've done nothing wrong. The nation has lost millions of jobs, they've let 45 million Americans go without health care and so forth."
We'd have no problem with the above statements had Rather & Co. made similar points after Kerry's speech. But they didn't. And there was ample opportunity for criticism. They might have commented on Kerry's rushed and clipped delivery, remarked that all the Vietnam references were over-the-top, or simply repeated some of the rebuttal material that the Bush campaign staff had sent them earlier in the day. Schieffer did manage to come up with a hypothetical Republican response but that was it. Each CBS reporter did, however, manage to come up with a number of positive things to say about Kerry's speech, some of them almost sickeningly star-struck.
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