So how exactly does one slant a story to skew the facts one way while acting as a legitimate columnist? The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund provides a good example and we’ll go through parts of this column to give an example of how you can tell one side of a story and make it seem like you are trying to be fair.
In all fairness, you can find similar stories while reading liberal columnists about the same story.
Just when it looked like the Chicago news media were fixing to focus on the issues – wham! – the Illinois Appellate Court tossed the frontrunner in Chicago’s mayoral race off the Feb. 22 primary ballot. True, that appellate decision only lasted for three days—on Jan. 27 the state Supreme Court restored Rahm Emanuel to the ballot. But the off-again, on-again battle of the ballot has made it hard for everyone—press and public—to re-focus on the stuff that really matters.
To get a better grip on the Tea Party movement, we should take a look back to 2008. In a year when angry voters were expected to vote out Republicans, there was one voice in Red that was drawing crowds. No, it wasn’t Sarah Palin. It was Ron Paul.
Polls don’t always tell the truth. That doesn’t mean they lie; it just means they can be misleading. An example could be found if one followed the polls during Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race between Rand Paul and Jack Conway.
With so much sloganeering and mud-slinging leading up to the Nov. 2 mid-term elections, the challenge for Chicago’s news media—print, broadcast, online—was whether to echo the races’ shallow bombast … or cut through to the issues. By and large, the metropolitan press held to the latter, more difficult course. Which is saying something, given the staff cutbacks and news hole shrinkage of late.