It's My Blog

The statist bias of the mainstream media in the United States is readily apparent to anyone with a rational mind. However, claims of such bias in an audience of people who agree with that bias are always met with sarcastic sneers and outright dismissiveness. Those who agree with the “progressive” philosophy of state control of individuals seem to have no problem with state control of information and lash out at any dissenter as some sort of racist who is delusional and paranoid.

A couple of events that happened recently have given us the opportunity to bring this bias to light in a manner that is as clear as day, and that can only be denied by an outright denial of reality itself.

First, the FBI raided a militia group within the United States that was allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against the police. Second, a terrorist group actually carried out a terrorist attack in Moscow.

Let’s point out a few obvious facts about these two events:

• Each group can accurately be called an extremist group or militia.
• One group was allegedly planning attacks, the other group successfully carried out attacks.
• The US alleged terrorists are Christian Extremists, the Russian terrorists are Muslim.

So, these seem like two very similar events, except one actually happened and resulted in 38 dead civilians, and the other was an alleged plot. Let’s see how the media covered these events.

*Note: the following is totally non-scientific as I do not have the tools or expertise to data-mine this information from every US news source; maybe someone at Newsbusters or Media Matters could do a more thorough job.
**Also note: click each image below for the full version.

First, let’s just take a macro-level look at the amount of coverage. A quick search of news.google.com for “christian militia” brings back 10,600,000 results during the last week:

That’s quite a few. Meanwhile, a search for “russia bomb” brings back a mere 9,389:

For those of you keeping score at home, that is 10,600,000 to 9,389. Apparently the media just doesn’t think it’s that important to tell us about an actual terrorist attack carried out by an extremist group when that group includes Muslims.

Maybe my search terms are wrong though. Maybe if I used different words I would get different numbers. Well I tried that, and the disparity actually got worse. I invite you to try it for yourself.

Let’s move on to the coverage of individual news outlets. Again, this is an unscientific study, and I just picked three news sites off the top of my head. I encourage you to go and see how your favorite news site stacks up. What I did was I found the top story relating to each of these events on three websites and I looked at the first few paragraphs of the story to get an overview of what was going on. The difference in coverage is stark.

Let’s start with MSNBC’s article about the Christian Militia:

Now here is MSNBC’s coverage of the Muslim Bombers:

OK, not looking good so far. MSNBC makes it a point to mention the word Christian in the very first paragraph of the militia article, yet you can’t find any mention of the religion of the bombers in Russia. The pictures I’ve shown only include the first few paragraphs, because I think that is what gives people the impression of the overall story, but I’ve also included the links to the full text so please go and comb through them for yourselves.

Next, let’s check out CNN’s story about the FBI Raids:

And on to CNN’s piece on the Russian attacks:

At least CNN was a little more specific about the Russian terrorists, telling us they were Chechen Rebels from the North Caucasus region. Somehow they didn’t feel the need to describe the Christian Extremists as “Caucasian Rebels from the Midwest Region.” Still no mention of the Religion of Peace as the motivating factor behind the 38 dead Russians, and even though they quote the website of the Christian Militia, no mention of the Chechen Rebel website is made, which I found in 0.02 seconds by using Google.

Finally, let’s have a look at the New York Times. The paper is having so much trouble keeping readers that they’re lobbying for a newspaper bailout (state takeover of the press) but yet they can’t seem to figure out why
people aren’t interested in the news they have to offer. Well let’s see:

The New York Times on the Christian Militia:

The New York Times on the Russian Islamic Attack:

It took the NYT seven words to get the point across that the FBI Raid was against Christians, yet no mention of Islam or the word Muslim appears in their article on the Russian subway bombing. When you beat your readers over the head with the billy-club of bias on a daily basis, its no wonder that they’re leaving in droves.

The point is clear that we have an extremely biased mainstream media in this country. Christians nor Muslims who participate in terrorism should be immune from criticism, but journalists should not play favorites. Both groups should be covered under the same objective standards. Instead the media hides the truth about the Chechens and stretches the truth about the Christians. All terrorists are evil, and so are biased journalists who purposefully mislead the public.