“Talk-show legend Larry King says that, despite claims the news media have an agenda and slant their coverage, he has never seen bias in reporting in all his years on television and radio,” Bill Hoffmann writes at Newsmax:
“I worked at CNN for almost 26 years. I worked in Mutual Radio for 20 years. I’ve been in the business 57 years. I have never seen a bias off the air or on,” King told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
“I’ve never seen anyone say, let’s go get this person today, let’s really ram it into him. I’ve never seen it. If a Democrat or Republican commits some horrendous story, the story will run, the networks will cover it.”
“I have never seen anyone at CNN ever say, boy, here’s how we’re going to deal with this today to put this guy down and elevate this guy up. I’ve never seen it,” King said Wednesday.
Really? I have:
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Hoffman adds, presumably more than a little incredulously, “That even extends to coverage of political events, King insists:”
“I’ve covered every convention since 1960. I’ve never gone to a convention with a built-in bias . . . It’s the truth. It’s not a feeling. It’s not an opinion . . . It’s my experience.”
You mean like the 2008 Republican convention, about which, one CNN host said on air, “It literally look[ed] like Nazi Germany — it really did.”
Not to mention all of these examples rounded up here, including baking a cake to celebrate on-air the one year anniversary of the fiscal sinkhole known as the “stimulus, and the previous year, inviting a chorale on the air to help usher in the joys to come of Obamacare. And I’ll bet Mitt Romney could name a few examples of bias. Not to mention more than a few guests of Larry King’s successor.
And then there was the admission by King’s former boss that his network looked the other way at Saddam Hussein’s censorship — before going on to claim at Davos that the US military was targeting journalists for assassination.
Recently Hiroo Onoda died, the Japanese soldier who spent almost 30 years hiding out in an island jungle, not realizing that the war had ended. Like Onoda and Imperial Japan, Larry doesn’t realize that the era of the self-described “objective” news media have ended as well, and thanks to the Internet, claims that there’s no bias at a particular network are remarkably easy to bat back.
What are you favorite examples of CNN’s bias? Feel free to share them in the comments below.
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