The Media Diet Challenge: Democratic News Sources

As another proud liberal, I approached my challenge without fears or doubts. In fact, I didn't really change anything about my media habits. My job was to consume a lot of liberal media, and that wasn't difficult at all. (I could say the blatant hypocrisy of deploying standard variety Californian high school liberals to analyze both liberal and conservative media was a satiric decision to depict our newspaper as falling prey to the very biases that these articles seek to identify in others, but it should be painfully obvious that we just don't have any conservative writers. So much for impartiality.) Day One: I began my epic journey into the bowels of liberal slanted media with CNN. Though generally considered by studies like AllSides to be Slightly Left of Center, CNN has been labeled 'fake news' on multiple occasions by our commander-in-chief. It's not anywhere near a liberal equivalent to Alex Jones, or even FOX News, but CNN has its biases, just like everybody else. Much of CNN's political news of the day centered on allegations of assault by two ex-wives against Rob Porter. After Porter's resignation, Trump praised his character but seemingly forgot to condemn domestic violence. A slew of CNN articles reported on that fact, taking care to note that "Trump hasn't tweeted about nor mentioned Rob Porter's alleged victims since the news broke last week. He has, however, expressed support for Porter's future endeavors.”  CNN News managed to remain mostly impartial, revealing an implicit bias in their handling of a partisan scandal but generally reporting the news as they saw it.  Day Two: On “The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell” on MSNBC, a tediously reasonable liberal equivalent to “Hannity”, O'Donnell condemned the complacency of reporters at the Feb. 13 White House press conference at length, suggesting that they should have forced a response from Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other speakers about the president's seeming disregard for domestic abuse, despite Sanders's request that the news corps "stay on topic.”  The point O'Donnell reiterated again and again was his disgust for the president. He called him the "most incompetent president in history,” said he lives "in a fantasy land,” and repeatedly referenced Trump's own history of mistreating and disbelieving women. O'Donnell's withering condemnations show the unconditional hatred that many Democrats feel towards the White House. Day Three: Feb. 14 was the Parkland shooting, a national tragedy which left 17 dead and sparked a nationwide push for gun regulation. “The Huffington Post” immediately began documenting the growing movement. In multiple arguments reporting on the incident, “The Huffington Post” cited a statistic from Everytown for Gun Safety (a gun control advocacy organization) that called Parkland the 18th school shooting of the year. This statistic has since been debunked by “The Washington Post”, as it defines "school shootings" so broadly that it includes a gun suicide just outside a school that had been closed for six months, the first "school shooting" of the year by their measure.  The use of the "18th" statistic (by “HuffPost” but also a slew of other news outlets and Senator Bernie Sanders) unfortunately showed that liberal media sources aren't infallible, and sometimes embrace convenient statistics designed to mislead. Day Four: On Day Four, I read “The Huffington Post” again. After Day Three's boilerplate liberal response, I was curious to see how the publication would cover the evolving gun control debate. One article, "Trump Suggests Florida Students Could Have Done More To Prevent Deadly Shooting", addressed one of the president's tweets and noted that one of his first actions as president has been to repeal Obama-era gun legislation, making it easier for mentally ill people to buy guns. An interview with an ex-GOP lawmaker encouraged readers to vote Republicans out of office in November, arguing that "Republicans will never do anything about gun control.” Another article told people opposed to gun control to "shut up”. The feeling that pervaded every Parkland article was of rage, frustration and disgust towards the GOP and supporters of the NRA. Wrap Up:I'm not ready to leave my echo chamber just yet; I still believe that CNN is a more credible source than FOX News, and that NPR is better than Breitbart. I did, however, notice a few unfortunate trends and inclinations in liberal sources, and I'll be squeezing every last drop of epiphany that I can out of that. Liberal media is flawed because all media is flawed. Even the most trusted news source is sometimes prone to accidental confirmation bias, political bias or even simple error. My conclusion is this: don't take anything for granted. Read both “The New York Times” and FOX News. Fact-check anything that sounds too good to be true or too terrible. Use judgement and find the truth.