Quoted from 55tbird

There is bias on both sides of the political spectrum...
On the right, there is Newsmax, Fox, and cnsnews..
On the left there is MSNBC, PBS (I watch PBS,  at least they are non-nauseating compared to MSNBC).
For the rest of the networks, you could say they lean one way or another depending on issue and reporter (i.e. Andrea Mitchell, NBC).
Bias was born ever since news reporting was required to make money instead of doing the public good.  

Quoted from Box A Rox

We somewhat agree.  The Right and the Left have their own Lame Stream Media, who's job is to
promote the agenda and ignore or spin the facts.  
MSNBC, FoxSnooze NewsMax Moveon.Org... promote their agenda.

I wouldn't put PBS in that group.  PBS more often will show a very right wing or a very left wing show, or have
Right or Left wing gusts or points of view.  I don't see bias when you show viewpoints from both sides.

CNN ABC CBS NBC, IMO generally promote facts over bias.

Quoted from 55tbird

Sorry, I actually meant to say NPR, not PBS, as I listen to radio quite a bit. The only thing with PBS is sometimes they go too long with a story..I'm a news wonk for sure (I remember Cronkite doing the nightly Vietnam body counts on the evening news, so I was no more than eight), but sometimes the stories can be told fully in a shorter time.

Quoted from 55tbird

There is bias on both sides of the political spectrum...
On the right, there is Newsmax, Fox, and cnsnews..
On the left there is MSNBC, PBS (I watch PBS,  at least they are non-nauseating compared to MSNBC).
For the rest of the networks, you could say they lean one way or another depending on issue and reporter (i.e. Andrea Mitchell, NBC).
Bias was born ever since news reporting was required to make money instead of doing the public good.  

Quoted from bumblethru

don't be fooled by any of them. They are clearly  nothing more then a money making entertainment group!
Even the weather channel is trying to get a piece of the action. They dabble in news and sensationalize the hell out of the weather!!!
And all for viewership which results in more ads = more $$$$!!!

The lame stream media has now become nothing more than a whore....used for political and personal agendas.
And the sheople fall for it every single time.

I use to be a news junkie.......haven't been in a very very very long time!! And my world is better for it!

Quoted Text

The Revolution of the Immigrant Vote
Rating: No votes.
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Date:
January 8, 1861 to January 9, 1861
Location:
AUGUSTA, Virginia
Tags:
Government, Politics, Migration/Transportation, Race-Relations
Course:
"Rise And Fall of the Slave South," University of Virginia
Political propaganda was not unique to the nineteenth-century South. The Staunton Spectator published an article, in its paper for January 8, 1861, which depicted a French man who, ave loss ma vote The article was published in a broken English-French hybrid language, intended to show that he was indeed a foreigner. The immigrant explained how he had work ver hard tree four months for Messer Leencon, ze honest man vot spleet ze rail to mak free countree of tam neeger. Ultimately, the man went to vote for ze big pig for ze republican ticket, tre cheer for Leencon and he was denied the right to vote. There was, supposedly, a mix-up in the address of Jacques Flam, preventing him from registering correctly. The implied message is that this was a tactic of the Republicans to keep immigrants from voting. After going through the trouble, Jacques decided that he has had it with the Republicans and he gives tree cheer for Douglas. Ultimately, this article was an attempt to rally immigrants in support of the Democrat Party by showing that supporting Republicans would not give immigrants equal rights.

During the 1840s, the composition of America's workforce underwent a dramatic makeover. Immigrants came from predominantly two countries, Ireland and Germany, but also from an array of other European countries. This influx of foreign people would impact American society in virtually every way possible, whether through art, the economy, ideology, or culture. The newcomers provoked resistance to change and adaptation. The opposition to immigrants appeared in third-party platforms denying foreign-born citizens full political rights and eventually wove itself into the foundation of the Republican Party, with the Democrats as the opposition.

This article in the Staunton paper, January 8, 1861, shows how local activists encouraged immigrants to vote against the Republicans. Clearly Southern Democrat propaganda, this article promotes that party as a support of full citizen rights for foreign-born whites. Historian Gregg Kimball traces the immigrant impact of local and national politics, when European immigration sparked hostility during the Know-Nothing era of the 1840s and 1850s. Yet nativism and alienation of rights were undermined when local and national politicians needed the vote of the new immigrants. Where desire for disenfranchisment once existed, the Democratic Party had incorporated immigrants into the interests of its platform. This represents the transition from the immigrant vote being denied, to political candidates vying for the vote of foreigners.

Citations

Staunton Spectator, January 8, 1861.
Greg Kimball, American City, Southern Place (Athen, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 202, 250-251.

Quoted Text

The Pennsylvania immigrants who were part of an enormous wave of Europeans who landed in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s were fleeing political upheaval, persecution and, in the case of the Irish, a great famine brought on by a potato blight.

Throughout the North, these immigrant groups faced a whole new set of challenges and, despite being impoverished or non-English speaking, played an important role during the years preceding the war.

Two historical events in particular drove this new period of immigration: the Irish Potato Famine, which began in 1845, and the European revolutions of 1848. The largest two ethnic groups by far were Irish-Catholics fleeing starvation and eviction in Ireland and Germans of various religious and political affiliations (Catholics, Protestants, “freethinkers,” liberals, and conservatives) fleeing the revolutions or subsequent repressions that swept across Germany in the late 1840s.

These recent arrivals from Germany joined a much older and well-established community of “Pennsylvania Dutch” (Germans who had immigrated earlier during colonial times), thus making German one of the most common languages spoken in Pennsylvania. By 1860, there were more than four million foreign-born citizens living in the United States. Of the 400,350 in Pennsylvania, more than 200,000 were from Ireland and nearly 140,000 were from the German states. Nearly 15 percent of Pennsylvania's population, and almost 29 percent of Philadelphia's, was foreign-born by 1860.

Immigrants in the pre-war years struggled to find employment and the means to support their families with clothing, food and decent living conditions. Settling primarily in or near the country's large cities, many took unskilled jobs as laborers working in urban factories. Others owned small businesses that catered to immigrants from their own country. The Germans and Irish set up their own ethnic newspapers, clubs, charitable organizations, businesses and militias separate from those of American-born citizens. Immigrants balanced a desire to maintain their native cultures, languages, and institutions with the need to assimilate into American society.

Many native-born Americans, however, resented the growing political power of the immigrants in the North's largest urban cities like Philadelphia. Mob violence broke out in Philadelphia in May 1844, leading to the destruction of several Irish-Catholic churches in the city.

Anti-immigrant Americans (known as “Nativists”) in the early 1850s created the “American” or “Know-Nothing” party to try to limit the influence of immigrants in American society and politics. Formed around a secret society whose members would say “I know nothing” if asked about their secret order by outsiders, Know-Nothings won a series of impressive political victories at the state level in the mid-1850s. Yet their power did not last long; the Know-Nothing presidential candidate in 1856 finished in third place, and the party rapidly fell from prominence before 1860.

Because of the Nativists' failure to change naturalization laws, immigrants were able to vote in large numbers during the 1850s. The Irish were almost all devoted to the Democratic Party whereas the German community split its votes between the Democrats and Republicans in 1856 and again in 1860. Lingering fears of Nativist elements in the Republican Party ensured that many immigrants voted for the Democrat Stephen Douglas in 1860.

Though some immigrants had not voted for Lincoln in 1860, like most Northerners, they rallied to support the Union after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Initially, anti-foreigner sentiment waned as immigrants and Americans fought side by side for their common country. Many immigrants seized on the opportunity to prove their loyalty to their new nation during the war. Pennsylvania's immigrants served alongside Americans in mixed regiments, but also in separate ethnic regiments. Many Irish joined the 69th PA regiment, and the Germans formed several more including the 74th and 75th PA Regiments (recruited from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia respectively). The war brought hope, new loyalties, new challenges and a fresh round of personal tragedy to Pennsylvania immigrant families not long removed from the chaos of Europe.

Information for this section was contributed by William Kurtz, University of Virginia.