https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/john-hinderaker-and-joe-concha-speak-restoration-frontpagemagcom/
EXCERPT: Lawyer and co-Founder of the Power Line blog John Hinderaker discusses the evolution of media bias, fake news;
Transcript:
John Hinderaker: What I want to talk about in my presentation here is the evolution of the issue of media bias over the last 15 or 20 years. And I want to do that primarily by comparing and contrasting two significant milestones in that story of media bias, which I think sheds a lot of light on how things have changed since the early 2000s.
So we started the website Power Line in 2002. And media bias was one of the topics that we wrote on all the time. And in those days, reporters for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were relatively accessible. Their email addresses were public. And if we emailed them, as we did rather frequently, to comment on and to critique their news stories, they usually would respond. And so we got into some very interesting colloquies with some of those reporters, which resulted in a number of corrections being made to news stories. Now, those corrections were generally subsilentio, unacknowledged, certainly, as to the source. But nevertheless, that would sometimes happen. Reporters in those days wanted at least to be seen as objective and fair, even though most were, in fact, biased in the direction of the Left.
Then in 2004, an episode that became known as Rathergate occurred. “60 Minutes” tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents that put the service of President George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, way back in the early 1970s, in a bad light. It was a complete fraud. The documents were fakes. And the fraud unraveled quickly, as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy forgeries that were full of substantive errors as well as the typographical errors that made most of the news.
