Media bias...

I love NPR. This morning, they were talking about the supposed media biased opinion from MSNBC (subsidiary of parent company NBC/GE) who leans more in the liberal direction with show hosts Chris Matthews and Keith Oberman. Now, I personally don't like either of these shows - I don't find them interesting enough (but I do miss Oberman on ESPN), but MSNBC had been running these guys as anchors for their election coverage. Which, with their backgrounds, pretty much sets up some sort of biased opinion seeping through especially when both are OP-ED types and not necessarily journalists in the pure form.

Post the RNC in Minnesota, the Republicans were calling MSNBC out on the carpet due to Oberman's comments and "leading" of the viewers. I actually agreed with NPR's comment that people have the right to choose and in this day and age they can exercise their right to choose to turn the channel (what a concept!) if they don't like what they're hearing.

I find the whole unbiased reporting rather funny. For ages, newspapers (traditionally before TV) were completely rooted in biased opinion and backed particular candidates and their issues as gospel. This went all through the 18th and 19th centuries in America. Then with the rise of TV as the main quick media source, the Walter Cronkites of the world championed unbiased, fact-based reporting.

With the rise of blogs - the OP-ED is back with commentary as biased as biased can be. Who cares about the facts? As long as it's in a format that I agree with.

What bothers me, and really what is probably irking the McCain/Palin camp is that news agencies that claim to be unbiased in their fact reporting who then insert ratings generating commentators to spice things up a bit. It's false advertising and undermines the entire credibility of agency. If MSNBC is guilty of this, they need to reconsider very quickly.

Of course, it would just be great to not have any talking heads at all. Just have some cameras in the room so we can just watch what's going on. In a recent issue of Tennis Magazine, there was an article about tennis commentators and how they just yap and yap just to fill the void. Our TV news agencies tend to do the same since they need to fill that void when there really isn't anything to say at all.

Even with Dish TV and cable's myriad of choices for information - it's still in a programmers box and lacks customization from the eventual end user. The Internet tends to have much better capabilities of this and maybe some in our not-so-distant future we'll be able to hand pick what we want to see at the minute we want to see it.

But then again, we would then only be looking for what we want to hear and know about without entertaining the big picture. That doesn't sound much different than 18th Century newspapers to me.

UPDATE: MSNBC updated this afternoon that Oberman and Matthews were pulled from election anchor coverage but will retain their talk-shows.