Biased media? It’s old news

What an amazing revelation in your Sunday Calendar [“The Toast of the Post” by Choire Sicha, Dec. 21]. The Queen of Spin, Arianna Huffington, tells the readers of one of the top newspapers in the country that “I think that the mainstream media . . . are increasingly accepting that there’s nothing wrong with opinion-based journalism if it is also fact-based at the same time.” Where has this woman been the last 20 years? Has she just come to realize that the mainstream media have been, for the most part, gathered together on the left for years? The last couple of those years, for example, promoting, not reporting, the candidacy of Barack Obama for president. Frankly, I am surprised that The Times would allow her to let the proverbial cat out of the bag regarding news based upon opinion. Now, not only Republicans know about the inequity of their treatment by the mainstream media but the Democrats have been brought up to speed. The question they may well ask themselves: Are opinions pretending to be news and influenced by politics always going to be the truth? The bottom line to this issue is that the American people are much smarter than the media gives them credit for and they are moving to other sources for their news such as Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. The ratings show this to be true despite Huffington’s biased opinions of some of the right-wing commentators. They have become weary of the leftist slant to the evening news on the networks and in their newspapers such as the New York Times, etc.

Doug Allen

Rancho Palos Verdes