Subtility in media bias

Every once in a while a news article comes along that contains a liberal bias in it so subtle that you’d miss it if you weren’t reading it carefully. Today’s example comes from Charles J. Hanley, writing for the Associated Press. See if you can spot the liberal media bias below:

Some Republican lawmakers called for criminal investigations of the journalists responsible and of the government insiders who leaked the information.

Investigations are already under way in other U.S. cases, reaching back to 2003, when whistleblower Joseph Wilson questioned a Bush administration claim about Iraq’s supposed nuclear program. Times reporter Judith Miller spent three months in jail in that complex case last year, as investigators sought whoever leaked the name of Wilson’s CIA-agent wife.

The term ‘leak’ as it relates to revealing previously unknown sensitive information to the public denotes ‘wrongness’ – the article correctly points out that the administration is on a mission to find out who leaked sensitive information about the Swift program to the press.

On the other hand, the term ‘whistleblower’ is used to describe someone who alerts the public to wrongdoing that has been kept under the rug. Dictionary.com’s definition:

One who reveals wrongdoing within an organization to the public or to those in positions of authority …

With that in mind, let’s go back to the paragraph I quoted earlier, with emphasis added by me:

Investigations are already under way in other U.S. cases, reaching back to 2003, when whistleblower Joseph Wilson questioned a Bush administration claim about Iraq’s supposed nuclear program. Times reporter Judith Miller spent three months in jail in that complex case last year, as investigators sought whoever leaked the name of Wilson’s CIA-agent wife.

The article describes Joe Wilson as a “whistleblower” (aka revealer of wrongdoing) while on the other hand, the person(s) who mentioned his wife’s name to a reporter (or reporters) is a ‘leaker’ (meaning it was ‘wrong’).

Joe Wilson, as we all know, was and is not a “whistleblower.” He was/is an administration critic and Democratic party hack who was discredited by a bipartisan Senate intelligence panel in 2004. As far as the ‘leak’ of his wife’s name, it has never been proven that whoever discussed Valerie Plame with reporters did so knowing they were supposedly ‘outing’ her.

Once again we have an example of the press deciding who was in the right and who was in the wrong by using the terms ‘leaker’ and ‘whistleblower.’ And they do it so subtly that you can miss it if you’re not looking for it.

Toldjah so.

Hat tip: Christopher Alleva at The American Thinker

Thanks once again to John for inviting me to guest blog here at RWN. If you enjoyed this post, you can read more of my work by visiting my blog, which I linked to above in this cross-post. Have a safe and fun Independence Day!

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