22 November 2005 @ 12:49PM >> My earlier post on CNN’s X-ing of Cheney has been picked up by a number of websites and is driving a lot of readers here who are unfamiliar with my site. Some people are interpreting my position as a sign of my own bias. One reader e-mailed:

Puh-leeze....if Fox News had pulled this stunt by placing a “X” over Bill Clinton or Hillary or any Democrat for that matter, all hell would break loose. For you to give CNN a pass is showing your bias against Cheney.

The day I am accused of bias against Vice President Cheney is a day that I let out a robust belly laugh. But it is also a sign that people on the right can be too overzealous with their charges of media bias. Anyone who has read this site consistently knows the work I’ve done to document the media’s left-leaning slant. The key word there is document. Absent of any evidence, you can’t just assume that an apparent video glitch is the same thing as a doctored quote, an omitted set of facts, or an artfully crafted phrase. In those cases, a conscious act must be committed by the journalist in order to skew the reporting. We can’t tell whether the “X” mark is the result of a conscious act.

I am willing to be proven wrong on this, but it will take evidence to do so. In the meantime, I hope that conservatives don’t go too far down the road of conspiracy-mongering. Recently, that has been the exclusive domain of the left, much to their detriment. Such a mentality can be equally destructive to conservatives if they’re not careful.

22 November 2005 >> Apparently, either a video glitch or not-glitch resulted in a few flashes of an “X” over Vice President Cheney’s face while he was delivering a speech. A number of conservative bloggers are criticizing CNN under the assumption that the glitch (or not-glitch) was both deliberate and an example of political bias.

Sorry guys, I don’t see it. I recognize the possibility, but I also recognize a much larger number of possibilities for actual glitches in video production. True, I don’t work in live video, but I’ve seen software bugs and unintuitive behavior cause bizarre flashes where one video track has been accidentally merged onto another. It looks to me like something similar happened with CNN. This could have happened at the venue, or anywhere between bouncing the feed up to a satellite and back to earth, or maybe in CNN’s studios in Washington or Atlanta. It could have been because someone was sitting on a button or briefly brushed one a few times.

If you watch the video, additional text seems to appear below the X, partially obscuring the news ticker on the bottom. The online version isn’t of high enough resolution to make that text legible. But perhaps someone who recorded it can decipher the rest. My assumption is that a placeholder track got superimposed on the live feed by mistake.

There are plenty of examples of media bias that are far more provable. To latch onto a few flashes of an “X” as major evidence of bias—when no such evidence exists beyond the act itself—undercuts the possibility of being taken seriously when talking about the more tangible stories.

Maybe CNN should get the benefit of the doubt. There’s an old saying: Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Given CNN’s recent performance in the marketplace, that statement seems apt.