Media Bias - CBS & NY Times Distort Health Care Poll

Between June 12 and 16 the New York Times and CBS News did a poll showing the level of support for President Obama's health care plan. The results showed a very strong 72% support. That makes for a pretty good story, doesn't it?

But suppose support wasn't really that strong? And further suppose that your organizations also like the President's plan and want it to succeed? If you really wanted the poll to work out, what could you do? You could poll an unbalanced number of people who would tend to agree with Obama. And they did.

This poll sampled almost twice as many who voted for Obama as those who voted for McCain. That's one way to look for an imbalance. And the poll drastically undersampled Republicans and oversampled Independents based on voter registrations.

The charts are below. I think the pictures speak loudly. And you can read more detail on the CNS News Site

Media Bias - the Power of the Omiting Words

There are a lot of words in most news articles. But a news report obviously will choose excerpts from a speech for reporting purposes. The words chosen can make a big difference in the "slant" of the report.

Let's take one example from history and one from today. One historic quote that you can find on various atheist blogs is especially misleading. John Adams is quoted as saying, "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it." The whole quote is:

"Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out, 'this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!' But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell."

The meaning changes and you have more background when you see the whole quote.

Now consider a very recent quote by President Obama. He is no doubt sensitive to the resistance that the voters may have to a single-payer system (i.e. government system exclusive). The President gave a speech before the American Medical Association (AMA) about health care. In that speech he said these words:

"There Are Countries Where a Single-Payer System Works Pretty Well."

But the large news outlets apparently were not anxious to report those words. None used that sentence in their coverage. Three sources were the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and the New York times. Each used the sentences before and after the quote above but skipped over that one revealing part. One used the ellipses (...), and the other two broke the quoted portion with a few editorial words, and then continued, skipping over the words above.

Read more detailed coverage here:

Obama: ‘There Are Countries Where a Single-Payer System Works Pretty Well’

America and the Ten Commandments

It seems hardly a month goes by that we don't see a news story about an attempt to remove a reference to religion from the public sphere. Lately there have been a few stories about removal of Ten Commandments monuments in a couple of states.

But our Founding Fathers often spoke of the Ten Commandments. They are inscribed on several buildings/monuments in Washington, D.C. So what happened? Partly, we turned a corner in 1947 when a Supreme Court Decision emphasized the phrase "separation of church and state" rather than the words actually found in the First Amendment. That phrase could mean many things, and indeed it has turned out that way in other court cases.

In 1983 President Ronald Reagan made a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. This speech came to be called the "Evil Empire" speech. In the speech Reagan "...defends America's Judeo-Christian traditions against the Soviet Union's totalitarian leadership and lack of religious faith, expressing his belief that these differences are at the heart of the fight between the two nations." (According to the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, linked below.)

Here are two quotes from that speech where President Reagan specifically references the Ten Commandments:

One recent survey by a Washington-based research council concluded that Americans were far more religious than the people of other nations; 95 percent of those surveyed expressed a belief in God and a huge majority believed the Ten Commandments had real meaning in their lives. And another study has found that an overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of adultery, teenage sex, pornography, abortion, and hard drugs. And this same study showed a deep reverence for the importance of family ties and religious belief.
...
I know that you've been horrified, as have I, by the resurgence of some hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice. Use the mighty voice of your pulpits and the powerful standing of your churches to denounce and isolate these hate groups in our midst. The commandment given us is clear and simple: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

Read the entire speech at The Miller Center

FDR: United Nations Should Enforce the 10th Commandment

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address in 1943, discussed the United Nations. He talked about it being the largest military in the world (the combined military of all the nations being larger than any single enemy nation's military). The large force would help to prevent a nation from trying to take over another nation for selfish purposes. And the force behind that morality was specified by FDR: God's Tenth Commandment. What do you suppose the reaction would have been if a president said that in the last few decades? FDR said:

Today the United Nations are the mightiest military coalition in all history. They represent an overwhelming majority of the population of the world. Bound together in solemn agreement that they themselves will not commit acts of aggression or conquest against any of their neighbors, the United Nations can and must remain united for the maintenance of peace by preventing any attempt to rearm in Germany, in Japan, in Italy, or in any other Nation which seeks to violate the Tenth Commandment -- "Thou shalt not covet."

State of the Union Address (January 7, 1943)

Slavery and Religion

Many today seem to say that religious groups and church leaders may not speak out on various political policies because of so-called "separation of church and state" in the Constitution. There are already many examples on this site that show actions by our founders (the same ones who ratified the Constitution) that show an entirely different interpretation of the Constitution.

Consider the role that religion played in eliminating slavery. Even before our Revolutionary Way religious groups were pressuring the nation's leaders to do something about this. The disagreements over slavery almost doomed our Declaration of Independence and remained a controversy as the Constitution was written. The latter document contained compromises that were necessary to produce a single, unifying constitution to give our country it framework. However, the Constitution also contained the means to correct this: the amendment process.

The Library of Congress has much useful information about our history. Included in that collection is a fairly extensive page of historic tidbits called "Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy."

In it we learn of the role of the Quakers:

Benjamin Lay, a Quaker who saw slavery as a "notorious sin," addresses this 1737 volume to those who "pretend to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion." Although some Quakers held slaves, no religious group was more outspoken against slavery from the seventeenth century until slavery's demise. Quaker petitions on behalf of the emancipation of African Americans flowed into colonial legislatures and later to the United States Congress.

In this plea for the abolition of the slave trade, Anthony Benezet, a Quaker of French Huguenot descent, pointed out that if buyers did not demand slaves, the supply would end. "Without purchasers," he argued, "there would be no trade; and consequently every purchaser as he encourages the trade, becomes partaker in the guilt of it." He contended that guilt existed on both sides of the Atlantic. There are Africans, he alleged, "who will sell their own children, kindred, or neighbors." Benezet also used the biblical maxim, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," to justify ending slavery. Insisting that emancipation alone would not solve the problems of people of color, Benezet opened schools to prepare them for more productive lives.

Other speakers include Connecticut theologian Jonathan Edwards, born 1745, who the Library of Congress says:

"...echoes Benezet's use of the Golden Rule as well as the natural rights arguments of the Revolutionary era to justify the abolition of slavery. In this printed version of his 1791 sermon to a local anti-slavery group, he notes the progress toward abolition in the North and predicts that through vigilant efforts slavery would be extinguished in the next fifty years."


Then there is the famous abolitionist Sojourner Truth:

Abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth was enslaved in New York until she was an adult. Born Isabella Baumfree around the turn of the nineteenth century, her first language was Dutch. Owned by a series of masters, she was freed in 1827 by the New York Gradual Abolition Act and worked as a domestic. In 1843 she believed that she was called by God to travel around the nation--sojourn--and preach the truth of his word. Thus, she believed God gave her the name, Sojourner Truth. One of the ways that she supported her work was selling these calling cards.


We also see a tract published in 1959:

This abolitionist tract, distributed by the Sunday School Union, uses actual life stories about slave children separated from their parents or mistreated by their masters to excite the sympathy of free children. Vivid illustrations help to reinforce the message that black children should have the same rights as white children, and that holding humans as property is "a sin against God."

Read more at the Library of Congress:

Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy