An example of this would be during the 1996 Presidential campaign. As the campaign was coming to an end, the Dole camp knew it would be difficult to defeat an incumbent president running on a strong economy, so they counted heavily on trying to expose the unethical nature of the Clinton administration. Unlike economics or crime, government ethics is something the public cannot experience directly. Voters most rely on the media for such information. The facts about the Clinton administration’s ethics or lack thereof took a fiery turn in late September. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, having legal documents found in Hillary Clinton’s living quarters, determined tht they wre used by James McDougal and his savings and loan to commit federal fraud. The report confirmed why the White House had balked at giving the documents to investigators. But the 60 million potential voters who get their news from NBC, ABC, and CBS never heard the news. The FDIC story was ignored. So too was the Senate testimony of White House employee Marie Anderson, who confirmed that, the contary to the testimony of her former colleagues Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, they knew they were accessing the files of former Bush administration officials. “Had the media simply become bored with Washington ethics stories? Hardly. During the same period they were ignoring the FDIC and Filegate stories, the networks were airing 11 stories on the House investigation into Gingrich’s ethics.”12Liberals often say that Conservatives often promote the myth that the U.S. media is liberal, without any concrete evidence. They say the myth serves several purposes, such as, it raises public skepticism about liberal news stories, hides conservative bias when it appears, and goads the media to the right. They claim that since conservatives have powerful friends in the media: the corporations that own them, and the corporations tha...
