Categories
media and media people

Palin, 11 — Biden, 0

The old guns in the major media marshal their resources as subtly as they can to turn minds their direction, usually leftward. That’s so obvious that I don’t talk about it much. 

My regular listeners know that this is not a major obsession of mine. I comment on media bias only now and then. But when a spectacular, or just funny, example comes up, I do have to recognize it, right? 

To not comment would be to ignore the wild donkey in the room.

The Associated Press fact checked the new Sarah Palin memoir, Going Rogue, finding a few errors, some self-​serving spin. Mrs. Palin provocatively noted that the AP had devoted eleven reporters to attack her book, when they could have been fact checking health care reform costs, for instance. 

She got that fact right — the AP did hire eleven “fact-​checkers.” In contrast, the AP set not one reporter to check Joe Biden’s book, even after he received the VP slot nomination last year.

Yes, the Palin book merited AP coverage eleven-​to-​zero over the Biden book.

Liberal bias, anyone?

In the AP’s defense, one could say that Palin is good story … Biden? Not so much. True enough. But eleven-​to-​one better copy?

Well, maybe. But the AP fact-​checked her book, and not books by the Clintons or Barack Obama. The press’s Palin obsession looks a little indecent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
individual achievement media and media people

A Prince, Indeed

Richard Nixon once called him “the enemy”; he was my favorite columnist and TV talking head.

Robert D. Novak passed away in August. I’ll miss him. Not only was he a tremendous advocate for term limits, he was a great guy.

While Novak was certainly a conservative, he wasn’t in the tank for anyone. A columnist from 1963 to 1993 with writing partner Rowland Evans, and then until last year writing alone — as well as in 25 years on CNN — Novak broke a lot of stories, and made more than a few politicians angry.

No wonder. Never a fan of  politicians, Novak wrote in his autobiography that his initial negative “impression of the political class did not change appreciably in a half-​century of sustained contact.”

Early in his career, Novak was tagged as the “Prince of Darkness” for his bearish attitude on politics. The name stuck.

But Novak was really a prince of open-​mindedness, or that’s how it seems to me. Born Jewish, he spent most of his adult life as a Protestant, and then converted to Catholicism in his late sixties. Few of us remain open to profound change so late in life.

And in other ways he was simply a regular guy. Whenever I see a Corvette, the car he loved so much, I’ll think of Bob Novak.

And whenever I see a politicians pinned by a pundit, then too, I’ll remember Bob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.