Rove Loathing Reveals Newsroom Bias--UPDATE, UPDATED AGAIN

Joyous shouts, high-fives and general glee in a Seattle newsroom after the announcement that the Dark Lord Karl Rove retired prompted this giggle-worthy response from the editor:

I ask you all to leave your personal politics at the front door for one simple reason: A good newsroom is a sacred and magical place in which we can and should test every assumption, challenge each other's thinking, ask the fundamental questions those in power hope we will overlook.

If we wore our politics on our sleeves in here, I have no doubt that in this and in most other mainstream newsrooms in America, the majority of those sleeves would be of the same color: blue. Survey after survey over the years have demonstrated that most of the people who go into this business tend to vote Democratic, at least in national elections. That is not particularly surprising, given how people make career decisions and that social service and activism is a primary driver for many journalists.

But if we allowed our news meetings to evolve into a liberal latte klatch, I have no doubt that a pathological case of group-think would soon set in. One of the advances of which I’m most proud over the years is our willingness to question and challenge each other as we work to give our readers the most valuable, meaningful journalism we can.

Written like a true believer. It is sweet how he yearns for a balanced place, but that dog has hunted and there's no going back. He touches on the reason himself. People go into journalism as an extension of their "social service and activism". There aren't too many misanthropic investigative reporters who look for facts, just the facts.

Yellow journalism is back. Not that it ever left. It just got hidden under the veneer of respectability. After Watergate, journalists elevated their opinion of themselves to god-like heights. They were all Superman, doggedly pursuing the truth. Only problem is, most of them hate the American way. You know, Democracy, where people you don't agree with you might get a chance to be in charge for a while, too.

These days, the press sides with the villains.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson has this to say about the Beauchamp affair and the media in general:

The result of keeping these sources anonymous is that the reading public still can’t believe the once-anonymous Beauchamp’s account — or what his New Republic editors are now saying.

Anonymity on rare occasions may have a place in protecting whistleblowers or honest journalistic sources fearful of retaliation. But lately it is being misused in a variety of different contexts to destroy people and institutions — and as a way for authors of all sorts to avoid responsibility for what they write.

The media are blinded by their own ideology and have taken a Machiavellian turn. The end is getting ride of Rove and Bush and every "EVIL" person who disagrees with them. The means can be anything to get the job done. The media takes this on with a religious fervor. There is no such thing as agreeing to disagree. There is no such thing as letting the facts speak for themselves. There is the righteous way, their way, and then there are those who disagree. And those who disagree should be destroyed and if it takes anonymous, unchecked sources to do it, so be it.

UPDATED AGAIN: Newsbusters notes NBC's newsroom booing during the President's State of the Union address. I know, shocking.

And the American Thinker, Randall Hoven, via Glenn Reynolds creates a list of the biased, plagiarizing, lying, confabulating media. Read it all and note the number of reporters from the Gray Lady, herself. Oh, and the intrepid Glenn found this at Slate about uncorrected errors in the media:

The results might shock even the most jaded of newspaper readers. About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.

I know, shocking.

Oh, and Ann Coulter chimes in, too, about the stooges the Left latches onto for their biased and factually incorrect stories. Stooges beware!