Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A visual analysis of television presidential campaign coverage from 1992 to 2004 suggests that the three television broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- favored Republicans in each election, according to two Indiana University professors in a new book.

Their research runs counter to the popular conventional notion of a liberal bias in the media in favor of Democrats and against Republican candidates.

Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, both associate professors in the Department of Telecommunications of IU's College of Arts and Sciences, report their findings in their book, Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford University Press).

"We don't think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they're just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage," said Grabe, who also is a research associate in political science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. "It's self-censorship that journalists might be imposing on themselves."

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/9993.html

...idiotic statement of Maria Elizabeth Grabe, as follows:

"'We don't think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they're just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage,' said Grabe...".

CBS execs told Dan Rather that they wouldn't back him on his true story of Bush's AWOL from the Texas National Guard because, quote unquote, "It is in our interest for Bush/Cheney to be re-elected."

It's in Rather's lawsuit.

This professor's statement is crap. I don't know what that may mean regarding the content of her book, but how could she promulgate such an obvious lie about the motives of our corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies?