But I wasn’t prepared for what happened today.

As my flight from Cincinnati to Atlanta was beginning its descent, the flight attendant began her normal spiel about landing and gates, and assistance finding your connecting flights and so on. Then she announced that I was on board and on my way back to Afghanistan after spending two weeks with my family.

The plane erupted into applause. I was stunned.

Post here.

What I don’t understand is how are American in this country not aware of the moral corruption of our soldiers. I mean it’s not like the liberals at the NYTimes haven’t been trying. They only had the Abu Ghraib story on their front page for 44 days in a row.

Glen Reynolds over at Instapundit understands how history will view MSM coverage of the war:

Yes, it’s almost as if undermining morale on the domestic front were a key goal. When the history of media reportage on this war is written, it will not be kind.

It will be interesting to see if journalism’s left leaning attitude towards news coverage will change once the full scope of how poorly covered this war has been is fully realized. More likely is a further balkanization of news coverage in which smaller and smaller groups of people find niche news organizations that matches there attitudes. Either way, people will benefit from the dismantling of the monolithic MSM.

More on the media atrocious coverage of the recent good news in Iraq.

NYPost has a story about how current surveillance laws hindered out intelligence agency’s ability to listen on Al Qaeda causing them to miss an opportunity to rescue a capture soldier.

U.S. intelligence officials got mired for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping Queens soldier Alex Jimenez in Iraq earlier this year, The Post has learned.

Thank god my rights to talk to a suspected non-citizen terrorist in a different country are secure. Who cares about acquiring the intelligence needed to bring back a solider when my right to talk to non-citizens outside the country is in peril?

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the NYtimes to make this a front page story. They were the turncoats that made public this program while we were at war. See they betrayed the country because they care about it so much. Makes sense when you think about it. Inform our enemy of our actions to make our country better.

Reflecting the MSM bias, most news organization ignored the bulk of a general’s speech strongly denouncing media coverage of the war and focused only on the parts that criticizes the way the war is being currently ran. Captain’s quarters has more details.

Given that, it seems highly ironic that the journalists covering the story attempted to cover up the acidic, biting, and mostly accurate criticisms of their own performance in this war while giving front-page treatment to Sanchez’ criticisms of the political structure at the same time. If Sanchez has such credibility and standing to bring this kind of criticism to bear on Washington, why didn’t the Post and other news agencies give the same level of exposure to his media criticisms as well? He basically accuses them of cynically selling out the soldiers to defeat American efforts to win the war, and made sure that those accusations came first before his assessment of the political failures, but you’d never know that from the Post.

The Post then goes on to obfuscate a key part of the second half of Sanchez’ speech. While he criticizes the Bush administration in sharp terms, Sanchez blames the Democrats in equal measure. He calls out partisans on all sides for exploiting the war for their own political benefit rather than the good of the nation, and blames the lack of range for strategic options on the corrosive debate that has hamstrung the range of choices.

According to a post on Wired.com:

Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act (.pdf) Tuesday that allows the nation’s spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.

I’m confused. Where is the extensive media coverage about how democrats are violating our constitutional rights?

Several MSM ‘reporters’ were asked to explain why the record low fatalities in Iraq was hardly covered. Their responses reflect a degree of bias that is simply astonishing. Watch the clip.

To argue nuance when you freely admit such nuance would never restrain MSM coverage of record fatalities is effectively incoherent. These are the people making decisions about is news. Can there be any doubt there is left leaning bias in the MSM?

Work requires effort. The impetus needed to overcome the cost of work is is often supplied by the violation of expectation. When one’s expectations are violated they experience an invigoration that motivates them to do the work needed to discover the cause of the violation. This law of frustration is very basic and explains many things about man including the power of free markets. By pitting people against each other one generates perpetual violations of expectation which leads to countless innovation.

The law of frustration is useful for something else. It helps reveal one’s bias. When one’s expectations are not violated they will fail to interrogate statements as throughly as they would if those statement violated their expectation. This is basic psychology. Its the reason why I get more comments from Jamie, Darwin and Dan then I do from Mitch, Diatribe and Boose.

The one way nature of the law of frustration is another way in which one can see the liberal bias in the media. Take for example a story in the Baltimore Sun attempting to show the ‘real’ cost of George Bush vetoing the federal health care bill for children (which is an example of very bad legislation). The reporter attempts to tell a story of a middle class family that doesn’t make enough money to afford health insurance for their children. The story uses two facts to reveal the family situation.

Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work.

She and her husband have priced private health insurance, but they say it would cost them more per month than their mortgage - about $1,200 a month. Neither parent has health insurance through work.

These facts paint a nice story. They match the liberal narrative concerning the purpose of this legislation. They show that a working class family needs this federal relief to give health insurance to their children. These facts match the liberal expectation that there are real people in the world that need this legislation. I’m not arguing that nobody could benefit from this legislation I’m simply making the argument that these facts are consistent with the reporters expectation that such people must exist.

The problem is that neither of these facts are true. However, to discover this required several bloggers to have their expectation violated while reading the story. This gave them the impetus to do the investigative work needed to check the veracity of the statements. The bloggers discovered these two facts.

Mr Frost, the “woodworker”, owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc.

A check of a quote engine for zip code 21250 (Baltimore) finds a plan for $641 with a $0 deductible and $20 doc copays.

Adding a deductible of $750 (does not apply to doc visits) drops the premium to $452. That’s almost a third of the price quoted in the article. Doesn’t anyone bother to check the facts?

There is nothing outright in the story that reveals the reporters political disposition. However one can infer that they are most likely liberal. The reporters expectations were met by a family that was hurt by the failure of the liberal legislation from passing. As a consequence the work needed to check the facts was cost prohibitive and thus the reporter failed to scrutinize further. One can also infer the politics of the bloggers. The violation of expectation generated impetus which made further investigation cost effective. The story’s liberal theme was consistent with the reporters expectations while it was inconsistent with the conservatives expectations. Thus one can infer political disposition by only examining who does the work of interrogation.

From an institutional perspective, its much more common to find the MSM getting a conservative themed story’s facts correct then the other way around. The same can be said for notoriously leaning right sided news organization like Fox News whose left themed stories are more carefully scrutinized than the more conservative themed stories.

Combining the law of frustration with editorial decision and you start to get a very clear picture as to what is meant by MSM bias. MSM organization are much more likely to highlight liberal themed stories, ask liberal questions, and highlight big liberal stories. They are all editorial decision. MSM is also likely to get the facts wrong on a liberal theme story while they get the facts right on a conservative themed story. Specific instances is not enough to condemn the MSM as left leaning but in the aggregate it becomes pretty clear which way most journalist vote.

A National Review post makes an observation about current Washington Post coverage of casualty reductions.

Today, on the front page of The Washington Post, we see the third in a three-part series on roadside bombs in Iraq. The stories in this series have been centered on the top half of the page and highlighted in red (a device I don’t recall seeing before). Next to that is a huge headline about allegations of killings In Iraq by Blackwater. Below that is a headline that reads “Most in Poll Want War Funding Cut.” Meanwhile deep inside the paper, on page A14, we find the following article: “U.S. and Civilian Deaths Decrease Sharply in Iraq: American Military Credits Troop Influx.” True, nestled between the other screaming headlines on page one, there is a brief minuscule teaser for this far more positive story about Iraq. Yet the bias here is clear.

As some of you pointed out, technically this MSM reported the lower fatalities in Iraq last month. But as has always been stated the bias is clear in the editorial decisions and not the facts themselves. In this case, the editorial decision is where in the paper the positive story is placed. It easy to imagine a conservative newspaper that would put the low death rate story on the front page with the other stories being buried in A14.

Stories about how the military casualties are lower than they have been for a year have been covered to death. The way the MSM has covered this from every angle leads me to believe not much is going on the world.

US military losses in Iraq for September stood at 70 on Sunday, the lowest monthly figure since July last year, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures.

The figure also marks the fourth consecutive drop in the monthly death toll following a high of 121 in May. June saw 93 deaths, July 82 and August 79. The monthly toll in July 2006 was 53.

Oh wait thats right, its not heavily covered because no one wants to read about America succeeding. In America there is no demographic for pro America stories. Especially news sources that cater to the left. In other words all of them.

Apparently the White House showed interest in having Bush doing a sit down interview with NPR concerning race in this country. However because of NPR neutrality they rejected such a partisan maneuver. It’s a good thing the federal government funds a new organization to insure some degree of media neutrality.