It’s not unusual for me to have the TV turned on when I’m working around the house and when the news comes on, it’s like liberal bias dressed up as white noise.  But there was one story last Friday that really caught my ear because the editorializing was even worse than the white noise I usually hear on the news. The story was from Brian Ross of ABC News reporting on a jet engine for a new fighter jet called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

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Normally a subject like this would be far from my usual portfolio of junk science but I have been hearing a ton of ads about this on Washington, D.C., radio lately. And since I have family members that work in defense, my curiosity was piqued and I started poking around.

Let me set this up very quickly.  The Ross piece focused on what amounts to a fight between a couple of different corporations that each want to produce the engines for this new fighter jet.  The Pentagon seems happy with one particular engine – made by Pratt & Whitney – while there’s pretty strong sentiment in Congress to have two vendors for this engine, the second being a joint effort between General Electric and Rolls Royce.

I visited the ABC News website to check out the Ross piece in full and was immediately struck by the headline for the video package:

Pentagon Chokes on Pork

Aside from the gross imagery evoked by the headline, the sheer audacity of this naked editorializing really caught my attention.  Since when does ABC News get to decide what is and isn’t pork, not to mention the whole choking thing?  Within seconds of beginning to watch the story, the editorializing increased:

“Congressional craziness…”

“A pork barrel project…”

“Boondoggle…”

I’m no expert on defense, but it’s pretty common knowledge in Washington that the Pentagon and Congress don’t always see eye to eye on military matters, so my first reaction was to wonder why this is even news in the first place.  Ross’s piece mentioned that this second engine has been funded for many years and the project to produce it is nearly complete so there’s nothing new there.

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Then there was the overall tone of bias, which I found over the top, even for Brian Ross.  But it just didn’t make sense.  Why so much blatant bias in a story that was wasn’t even news in the first place? The key, perhaps, has nothing to do with the subject matter but the competitive pressures in TV newsrooms.

GE, as you may know, is the parent company of NBC, which competes head to head with ABC in the evening news sweepstakes. Here are the Neilsen ratings for the Big Three evening network newscasts for the week of May 10:

NBC       7,910,000 total viewers

ABC       7,320,000 total viewers

CBS        5,570,000 total viewers

For the time being, ABC is right on the heels of NBC for evening news supremacy.  So does it make sense for ABC to launch a proxy war against NBC by doing a hit piece on the parent company of its archrival?  With network news part of the dying mainstream media it certainly wouldn’t surprise me, as networks scramble for the scraps of audience that remain from their once mighty monopoly on information.

Consider a few other things about the Brian Ross piece.  Ross calls GE’s efforts to promote its jet engine, “an end run” to continue making it.  Since when is promoting one’s interests an “end run,” and how could this characterization be considered anything other than an attempt to tarnish the company?  Pratt & Whitney is promoting its position in advertising I hear every day on the radio but that wasn’t in Ross’s piece.

Ross then notes that GE has lobbyists, including three former senators.  Does he really expect anybody to believe that the other company doesn’t have lobbyists too?  Ross doesn’t mention that in his story either.

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Here’s another nifty piece of bias by Ross.  Check this out:

GE and its supporters in Congress say a second engine would create competition for Pratt & Whitney and result in long term savings.

On the surface, it looks fair – even complimentary – but it’s essentially damnation by faint praise.  What Ross neglects to report is that it was the non-partisan Government Accountability Office that concluded in 2009 that a two-engine program would result in $20 billion in savings.

Who has more credibility on cost savings, a company that wants a piece of business or the GAO?  Ross knows precisely who has more credibility, which may account for why the company was cited instead of the GAO. See how slick that is?

Reporting the GAO data would also have sunk the entire premise of the story.  How does saving $20 billion of my tax money amount to a “pork barrel boondoggle”?  The whole basis for Ross’s piece is flawed.  On the other hand, if one wanted to take down a competitor a notch or two, it would be more helpful to associate them with a boondoggle than a way to save a ton of tax money.

The most glaring piece of negligence was the fact that Ross didn’t include a disclaimer in his piece.  You know, the conflict-of-interest disclaimer that says, “General Electric is the parent company of this network’s competitor.”  Simple journalistic integrity presumes such information would be provided to the viewer if for no other reason than to lay all the cards on the table and let the viewer decide whether those facts had anything to do with how the news was presented.  Apparently, that was too heavy a lift for Brian Ross.

Candidly, I don’t know enough about jet engines to have any position one way or another on this issue, but I do know about journalism, drive-by reporting and how they’re served up to television viewers.  If ABC wants to use its evening news product to fight a proxy war against a competitor, that’s fine.  But they should at least be honest enough to let their viewers know what’s going on.