Brain Fertilizer

Oh, Yeah: Leftward.

Mickey Kaus has a nice little snark regarding an AP piece. I guess I'm risking a "Fair Use" lawsuit, but I'm going to excerpt the whole thing:

Is this one of those new A.P. Special Sauce ledes?

NEW YORK - Irked by the success of the nationwide Day of Silence, which seeks to combat anti-gay bias in schools, conservative activists are launching a counter-event this week called the Day of Truth aimed at mobilizing students who believe homosexuality is sinful.

a) "Irked." Would they ever say that the Lambda Legal Defense Fund was "irked"? b) Is "conservative activists" really the best phrase to describe the fundamentalist Christians who are sponsoring this anti-homosexuality event? Isn't that a little like identifying sponsors of a gun-control or militantly-pro-choice rally as "liberal activists"? ... The label's both inaccurate and part of the press' tendency to make "conservative" synonymous with the most extreme and moralistic segments of the right. I would say it's a subconscious anti-Republican trope, if I knew what a trope was. [But this isn't in fact an especially biased or hyped up story--it's a perfectly ordinary AP piece-ed. That makes the problem bigger, not smaller.]

I know most of you readers know this already. Some of you may not. Most of you may already know how to read between the lines of a mainstream news media report, but for those of you who don't, this is the sort of thing you need to watch for. This is editorializing masquereding as news reporting. There is a definite slant based on the prejudices of the reporter and/or editor, and as such, it is absolutely not objective reporting.

So even though A.P. is owned by someone rich and therefore supposedly conservative, the liberal bias still manages to slip through, contrary to what liberal media watchdogs would have us believe (i.e., that the news media is actually conservative).