CNBC has just launched a marketing campaign with the theme Rise Above. It include numerous on-air segments, a print ad in the Wall Street Journal that the hardsearching staff can’t find an image of, and this video:
Here’s the problem: It’s all well and good to urge lawmakers to come together and solve America’s fiscal problems.
It’s just not the place of news reporters to do it.
Yes yes – newspapers and television stations routinely run editorials urging government officials to do one thing and another.
But they never draft their newspeople to bolster the argument, the way CNBC has crowbarred John Harwood and Maria Bartiromo and (God forgive us) Jim Cramer into its video.
With this campaign, CNBC has crossed the line between advocacy and activism. That’s a leading indicator that bodes ill for principled journalism.
Campaign Outsider 
Please tell us, John, how this bias is any different from that of the NY Times?
In all of the articles of the last cycle, couldn’t The Times have found one positive thing to say about those with whom they disagree?
Principled journalism, like everything political has its pendulum swings. Today it is swinging towards bias and reporting of fact. Tomorrow? Who knows?
I know you think the Times leans left, Mudge, but the paper is not running a multimedia ad campaign using its reporters to take positions on public policy issues. CNBC is.
Leans left? That’s an understatement!
When they start reporting accurately on subjects like the Benghazi fiasco, the guaranteed financing of failed “green” companies owned by large donors to the President’s campaign, and the Fast-and-Furious f-up, and the illegal campaigning by HHS Secretary Sebalius, then I might just give your remarks a pass.
Until then…
…Sorry, I’ve got to get the laughing under control…
Which one of those right-wing media fabrications are actual stories? Brings me back to my college Young Republican days, when we’d sit around and make up scandals and create false arguments to attack Dem candidates with. Preppy youth, eh?
Anyway, try telling soldiers wounded or killed looking for WMD in Iraq that the NYT “leans left.” It is, just as often, a CIA and Wall Street mouthpiece.
Hey, Mick – I didn’t say I think the Times leans left (wake me when they support labor rights and universal healthcare). I said Mudge does.
Hey, John, I support universal health care, so go easy with your assumptions.
I just don’t support graft and corruption in politics.
Nor do I support slanted journalism without at least a modicum of admission of the the bias.
Do you?
I do not, Mudge.
And, Mikie, google CBS Clapper and find out how the mainstream media is finally having it dawn on them that someone in the administration is a liar.