Here’s another prime example of biased reporting on President Obama and his agenda from The New York Times today in this article entitled “Aides Say Obama Is Willing to Work With or Without Congress to Meet Goals”. The piece by Emmarie Huetteman details how Obama plans to use executive orders to bypass Congress in order to advance his agenda, which he will lay out in the State of the Union address on Thursday.
First, there’s a long, almost comical, parenthetical description of the Sen. Ted Cruz:
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the Tea Party Republican who helped provoke the government shutdown in October when he insisted on linking funding for government operations with defunding the president’s health care law, also called it “irresponsible” to continue increasing the nation’s borrowing limit without reining in spending.
The only purpose of that description is to disqualify Cruz’s statement before you can read it. Look at the inclusion of these words and phrases that ooze bias by the reporter: “Tea Party Republican”, a phrase intended to evoke the media’s characterization of the movement as fringe and extreme; “provoke” and “insisted”, words that oversimplify the government shutdown, implying that it’s Cruz’s fault that it happened and that his motivations were ill-considered and rash.
In the longer version of the article that appeared in print in today’s Boston Globe, the bias rolls on where the Times’ own version stops.
White House officials have said Obama would use the State of the Union speech to announce a series of executive actions he can take without congressional approval.
They will include expanding economic opportunity for middle-class workers in areas such as retirement security and job training. The officials expressed hope that these actions would press Congress to take further steps.
Notice they are now “executive actions”, not “executive orders”. Action is a much more positive noun. It implies progress and getting a job done. “Orders”, on the other hand," can have a negative connotation of requiring you to do something against your will, of the imposition of your will on another.
Then there’s the description of what those “actions” will include. In fact, it’s not a description of the order at all, but a description of the hoped-for effects the way a White House press release would describe it. The hope is that it would expand economic opportunity, but what is the actual order?
Instead of being a mouthpiece for the administrations efforts to win over the public to his dictatorial style of governance, perhaps the media could do their jobs and report the news in an unbiased manner that lets the pubic make up their minds.
The sad part is that the reporters and editors don’t even see the bias in their own work.
