Knowing what you know about the “mainstream media”, allow your mind to wander to a place where a former White House adviser for a Republican was now part of a “mainstream” think tank. On the side, this adviser is involved with other, shall we say, not-so-mainstream organizations. Most of those other organizations revolve around the same subject matter for which he was a White House adviser. They’re just not very well known. For the sake of discussion, we’ll call this person the former “Getting Oil Out of A Rock” Czar. He is no longer a White House adviser because he once signed onto a cause that held some pretty far out views.

After leaving his position at the White House, the former czar kept a pretty high profile as a speaker at “Getting Oil Out of Rocks” events, etc. Despite the controversy which led to his ouster, he remained a well-respected member of the movement. His fans in government and academia still think he shouldn’t have been let go. They think he was a victim of politics instead of a victim of his own unorthodox views. Then one day, it became known that the former adviser was now a board member for a group that believes rocks should have the same rights as humans. Remember, he advised a Republican president. How do you think the media would react to this news?

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Bob Woodruff is a reporter for ABC News who focuses on environmental issues. Woodruff’s career is the sort which convinces Americans to invest their trust in his reporting.

Unfortunately, Big Journalism has learned that Mr. Woodruff has been doing much more than objectively reporting on environmental issues.

Woodruff  has been working with an environmental advocacy group, an action in direct violation of ABC News journalistic guidelines. According to ABC News, Mr. Woodruff’s actions were in violation of the company’s standards policies and ABC will take “appropriate disciplinary action” for his not reporting his advocacy activities to them. ABC News further said that if Mr. Woodruff had sought approval for his environmental advocacy efforts, their standards department would have declined permission.

Mr. Woodruff’s harrowing account of his severe head injury that he sustained while serving as an embedded reporter in Iraq will always be remembered as a courageous and valiant story.  Upon returning to work, he was assigned a position as the host and chief correspondent for the Discovery Channel’s “Focus Earth,” an ABC News-produced eco-program focusing on issues such as “environmental injustice,” climate change, and “population overload.” In that capacity Mr. Woodruff reported on environmental issues.

Big Journalism has learned that Mr. Woodruff has for years lent his name and his network news affiliation to an annual charity event that raises money for the hard-left advocacy group Waterkeeper Alliance headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To make matters worse, Mr. Woodruff profiled the group’s efforts in fighting Exxon in a story about the Hudson River and objectively featured Mr. Kennedy and his personal efforts on behalf of the organization. Are Mr. Woodruff’s personal causes preventing the practice of objectivity required by his profession?

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And they were worried about the appearance of political donations.

Sacramento (AP) – In the current edition of The Nation magazine, California Democratic Party chairman John Burton charges Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and senate hopeful Carly Fiorina behaved badly during the Tehachapi wildfire emergency last summer which destroyed forty homes.

“Whitman and Fiorina had finished lunch after campaigning in nearby Bakersfield when they saw smoke and decided to go sightseeing in Whitman’s German-made EC135 Eurocopter,” Burton told Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation.  “Shortly after lifting off, Whitman radioed the Disaster Operations Center to demand that aerial water and fire retardant dumps cease while she and Fiorina toured the scene.”

One witness, an environmentalist who had chained himself to a Bigcone Douglas-fir to protest the fire, texted friends minutes before being engulfed that he had observed an EC135 hovering ten yards off the ground, deliberately using its rotors to ignite new outbreaks. (more…)

Recently Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008 and prolific journalist/author, mourned “the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms,” the Himalayan glaciers.  In an LA Times opinion piece surveying what no longer works in the U.S., Schell cited areas like the environment, education, and transportation, and found American hopelessness, especially compared to contemporary China.

Schell’s “studying of melting glaciers” was likely related to a much-hyped warning from the World Wildlife Fund, which was revealed to be a sham, based on an anecdotal report.  But Schell’s warnings, along with his list of American failings, suggest a general ideological bias.

A recent challenge has been identifying the bias of the mainstream media.  Oddly enough, exposing ideological bias has long been a favored project in communication studies, usually practiced by leftists.  One method, much used by recent multicultural leftists, has held that consciousness and meaning are contingent social constructs.  Following such post-modernists as Lyotard, these folks regard discourse  as a composite of  linguistic, social, and cultural formulations.  One need only examine these to reveal the consciousness or mentality of an author or work. (more…)