Powerline’s John Hinderaker, with the help of the newly formed San Antonio Express-News Watch blog, exposes ABC News’ attempt to "balance its coverage of President Bush's inauguration with coverage of a military funeral”. Here is the text of ABC News’ solicitation:

Jan. 19, 2005 — For a possible Inauguration Day story on ABC News, we are trying to find out if there any military funerals for Iraq war casualties scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 20. If you know of a funeral and whether the family might be willing to talk to ABC News, please fill out the form below:

Not only does this show ABC News is not content with covering the Presidential Inauguration without finding an angle that could embarrass the president, ABC News demonstrates a sheer laziness and lack of compassion for the fallen by trolling the web to exploit the grief of a family bereaved by the loss of a loved one in Iraq. As Mr. Hinderaker astutely notes, ABC is not looking for soldiers fallen in other conflicts; only the families of those lost in Iraq need apply. ABC News has pulled its solicitation from the web, but Captain’s Quarters took a copy of the page prior to the removal. The media’s ability to hide the truth from the watchful eyes of the denizens of the Blogosphere diminishes daily.

Just Another Isolated Incident?

So is ABC News’ attempt to “balance” the Inauguration a single event taken out of context by overzealous bloggers and conservative pundits? Is the media just mistake prone and ridden with poor journalists that are not properly following journalistic standards, as the Ra^thergate Commission suggests? Or is there systemic bias in the Old Media? Howard Fineman, a media insider not of a particularly conservative constitution, claims there is absolutely an inherent media bias, and networks and newspapers have an agenda. He recently outted the American Mainstream Media Party, explaining Vietnam and Watergate drove the media to believe it can pursue and implement their own agenda.

Bloggers have played a crucial role in exposing the media’s bias. Apart from Ra^thergate, three quick and recent examples come to mind. The Adventures of Chester looks reporting in the latest suicide car bombs attacks in Iraq. The media is eager to report casualties, but either downplays or outright ignores that each attack never reached their intended targets; they were repelled by American and Iraqi Security Forces. Belmont Club has been on the cutting edge of exposing media perfidy, including the conflict of interests (to put it mildly) of an AP Photographer photographing the murders of Iraqi election workers on Haifa Street, as well as attempts by Sarah Boxer, of the New York Times, to characterize the Iraq the Model bloggers as CIA operatives. Ms. Boxer’s rantings of CIA conspiracies was promoted by Juan Cole over a month ago, and has been discounted by many bloggers. Either she is too lazy to investigate, or she doesn’t care to learn the truth.

MilBlogs, a network of active and retired military bloggers and family members hosted by Greyhawk of the Mudville Gazette, consistently posts emails and letters from soldiers in the field frustrated with the media’s portrayal of the war as an abject failure (full disclosure, I proudly joined the MilBlogs ring yesterday). The Adventures of Chester, also a member of MilBlogs, recently posted a link to a scathing letter by Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ryan highly critical of the press’s failures to objectively report American and Iraqi successes in Iraq. Service members are furious at the media’s portrayal of events, and cannot and will not be silenced. The internet and blogs have given them the ability to bypass traditional media outlets unwilling to portray their accounts on the war.

The Old Media/Mainstream Media have some tough lessons to learn if they want to use the web to post biased stories or solicit assistance in promoting their agenda. As ABC News’ recent foray into the web makes obvious, the Blogosphere has eyes (San Antonio Express-News Watch), a brain (Powerline), a mouth (InstaPundit, Hugh Hewitt, Betsy’s Page, PoliPundit and a multitude of others) and a memory (Captain’s Quarters).

The Old Media/Mainstream Media can no longer foist off their bias as just another isolated incident of shoddy journalism gone wild. The San Antonio Express-News Watch is but one of thousands of citizen watchdogs monitoring the media’s actions. And blogs have only begun to make their impact. The Old Media/Mainstream Media had better understand we are watching, we can think, we can spread the word, we can uncover their attempts to hide the truth and we have an audience that seeks the truth.

Additional Reading:

Robert at The Blue State Conservatives looks at the reemergence of citizen-journalists.

Stolen Thunder's DJ Drummond has a series titled "The Blog Identity" which is well worth the read. The series started on Monday, January 17th and two more installments are due.

DJ was a guest writer here at the fourth rail in the past and I hope to have him post in the future. He currently runs his own site as well as posts at PoliPundit, so he is a busy man. He has read Hugh Hewitt’s book Blog so it will be interesting to see how these two works dovetail. (I have not yet read Blog, but will. Rumor has it the fourth rail gets a small mention from a reader submission.)