YouTube circulates 'unfiltered' war views

--"It's not that the media are biased; it's the public isn't particularly supportive of this war so why should the media go and find the one or two videos on YouTube and give them coverage because they give a human aspect?" -- said Barbie Zelizer, a journalism professor. Really? I think we should expect more from a professor than this shallow perspective. There’s been ample evidence showing the emboldening effect our media’s reports have on our adversaries’s behavior. Is it too much of a leap to see how these same reports can shape the attitudes of our own fellow countrymen? Sorry, but Professor Barbie is wrong; the media are biased. And, it’s not very hard at all to detect that. If this is what issues forth from a professor’s lips, what then can we expect from her students? Apparently these days, just about anything – anything with the liberal slant, anyway – can be trotted out and be called journalism.

'"the majority [of war] is about violence," said Barbie Zelizer, a journalism professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "I think it's media's responsibility to reflect the bulk, kind of the core of what's going on," she said of the mainstream media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It's not that the media are biased; it's the public isn't particularly supportive of this war so why should the media go and find the one or two videos on YouTube and give them coverage because they give a human aspect?"' Besides being incorrigibly biased, Professor Zelizer is completely clueless. Violence is a tiny part of what's happening in Iraq now. A significant cause for low public support is that the public is mostly uninformed and has been greatly misinformed by the media. If Barbie is a typical professor at an Ivy League J-school, I have very little hope for the American media. The only thing that might save it is competition from new media sources like YouTube, blogs, etc. At least in other countries, journalists don't pretend to be objective.