NewU Letter to Editor: New U. Reveals Left-Wing Bias

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New U. Reveals Left-Wing Bias

I wasn’t surprised when I picked up last week’s New University and read the headline, “Young Dems Rally the Vote, Reps Protest” (Nov. 4). It is a popular misconception among the general public that the media is biased and leans to the right. You always hear liberals complaining about how the media never tells the truth and is somehow on a corporate or government payroll, and constant allegations of FOX News being biased and right-wing. But whenever I pick up the newspaper in this country or watch the news, I get the opposite feeling.

The best example of how the media is not biased toward conservatives but toward liberals can be seen in the New U. The headline of last week’s newspaper implies that Republicans were protesting the Get Out the Vote rally set up by the Young Democrats of UC Irvine. This is an absurd and misinterpreted view of what actually happened.

To best make a judgment on the neutrality of the headline, we must first analyze the Young Democrats’ rally, which was publicized as a GOTV effort, with special guests like actor Ed Asner, Congressional candidate Steve Young and Iraq-war protestor Cindy Sheehan. However, the rally focused more on partisan politics and left-wing views. All the speakers were one-sided and never portrayed a balanced view. Usually during a GOTV rally, the purpose is to get people to vote, not just to get people who share your point of view to go vote, so the first conclusion we can make is that the Young Democrats’ rally was a rally to get extremely liberal voters to vote.

The second conclusion we can make about the rally was the lack of UCI students. The majority of the crowd was middle-aged men and women who were apparently attending the rally only to see Cindy Sheehan speak. This brings up a good question: Where were all the students the Young Democrats were trying to rally?

But to their dismay, Sheehan did not show up. Apparently Sheehan was “deathly ill” from constantly protesting around the country. This was reported in the New U as well. But, if the biased New U did some research, they would have found out that Cindy Sheehan was not “deathly ill” with the flu but had a more important rally in Orange that same day.

Another thing the New U forgot to report was the fact that the UCI administration tried to silence many Republican protestors and denied the College Republicans a place to set up their booth nearby for a large portion of the event.

So the question still remains: Are media outlets biased toward liberals or conservatives? The answer is very simple at UCI. The New U has done everything in its power to twist and spin their reporting. Will the New U change its policies and attempt to portray a more balanced image of politics on campus or continue to promote biased perspectives?

Edwin Ohanian

second-year,

economics major