Media Bias at 60 Minutes

60 Minutes is generally considered part of the fictitious liberal media. But if one has watched it critically in the past few years, several stories seem to fit the more realistic conservative slant that dominates mainstream media. Case in point is a recent story by Leslie Stahl regarding the Clean Energy Industry (Daily Kos). Stahl concluded her piece arguing that, "instead of breakthroughs, the [cleantech] sector suffered a string of expensive tax-funded flops." Yet what does she base this on? A few example of venture capital flops, which are common in venture capital as a market funder that takes risk the establishment banks are unlikely or unwilling to embrace. The story ignores the breakthroughs that have actually occurred and the fact that only 3 percent of the funded projects have failed so far.

This is a common strategy employed by the right and increasingly the media known as the Hasty Generalization Fallacy. It occurs when specific examples are used to reject the whole, even if those examples are atypical or uncommon. An example from a decade ago was when conservatives used the example of the small family business that would be destroyed by the estate tax. This was a limited part of the overall pool of those eligible for the tax and could have been resolved simply by raising its minimum level. Instead it was used to argue that the federal estate tax was flawed and should thus be eliminated, ballooning the federal deficit and undermining the notion that each generation should earn their wealth. It is the same here and an example of irresponsible journalism, a charge that can often be levied at Stahl, maybe the worst correspondent 60 minutes has ever employed.