The first editorial in this series showed how different surveys at different times verified that 86% of journalists in America's most powerful national media vote Democratic in presidential elections and are far more liberal than our voting public.
Now we'll give you evidence of how these journalists distort your news coverage and slant issues so that they trash Republican presidential candidates while aiding liberal Democratic candidates, their causes and their policies.
In her explosive 1972 book, "The News Twisters," Edith Efron was the first to tape, transcribe and analyze every ABC, CBS and NBC prime-time nightly news show just before a national election.
She found that from Sept. 16 to Election Day in 1968, ABC dispensed 7,493 words "against" the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, and 896 words "for" an 8-to-1 ratio. NBC's word count was 4,334 against and 431 for (10-to-1). CBS was the most biased, dishing out 5,300 words against and 320 for a 16-to-1 ratio of bad press to good.
Meanwhile, the liberal Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was the subject of more positive words and was consequently treated more fairly.
In the 1984 presidential election, when Walter Mondale challenged incumbent Ronald Reagan, the same three network prime-time news shows were taped and dissected from Labor Day to Election Day by Maura Clancy and Michael Robinson. They focused only on those reports in which the "spin" for or against each candidate was unambiguous.
According to Public Opinion magazine, Reagan got 7,230 seconds of bad press and 730 seconds of good, while Mondale enjoyed 1,330 seconds of good press and 1,050 seconds of bad. Reagan's vice president, George Bush Sr., got a goose egg zero seconds of good press vs. 1,500 seconds of bad.
Top journalists claimed that Reagan was too old, fell asleep at meetings, was cut off from the public, was insensitive and said dumb things. There was 13 times more evening news comment when Reagan supposedly lost his first debate with Mondale than there was after he won the second.
Leading up to Reagan's re-election run, the Institute for Applied Economics surveyed how network news shows treated economic news during the strong recovery in the last half of 1983. It discovered that "nearly 95% of the economic statistics were positive, yet 86% of the networks' stories were primarily negative."
In what amounted to a dishonest misrepresentation of highly positive economic news, the networks concentrated coverage on people left behind by the recovery and the few regions still suffering from higher unemployment.
More recently, we have the courageous 2002 book, "Bias," by Bernard Goldberg, a CBS reporter and producer for 28 years who exposes in an airtight case how liberal bias overwhelms straight news.
Goldberg tells of how journalists determine what news they want to cover and the slant they want to impart. More damaging, they determine what news to minimize, bury or keep mum.
"They take sides," Goldberg said. "A reporter can find an expert to say anything the reporter wants anything! Just keep calling until one says what you need him to say. It happens all the time."
They also assign labels, Goldberg wrote. ABC's Peter Jennings, for example, referred to certain senators as very conservative but never referred to Democrats Tom Daschle or Barbara Boxer as liberals. A far-left professor is just a "noted law professor."
"In the world of Jenningses and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and need to be identified," Goldberg explained. "Liberals, on the other hand, are mainstream moderates that think like they do and don't need to be identified.
"They honestly believe what they are saying. And that's the biggest problem of all. They don't see their own bias."
Perhaps this is why network news is losing credibility and viewers, and why talk radio has gained so much in popularity.
It could also explain why a 2003 Opinion Dynamics Poll found that only 9% of Americans have a great deal of confidence in news media, ranking it lower than Congress, the Internal Revenue Service and the public school system.