"For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on earth does that." -- presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, 1996
Some words from Colman McCarthy, from 1997:
"The Post is looked on as a liberal paper, which it clearly is not. It's a centrist paper. In fact, there are 1,500 dailies in America, and I defy you to find one liberal paper among them. There are a few pseudo-liberal papers (the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the LA Times, Washington Post) but they're just liberal on the safe liberal issues - gun control, civil rights, curbing your dog: tough ones like that. But on going after the Pentagon, or the US war machine, going after corporate crime - they become tepid. Why? Because most of the big dailies are in the Fortune 500. Do you know what the second most expensive stock on the New York Stock Exchange is? The Washington Post. It sells for $400 a share. What do the wealthy corporations tend to focus on? Problems of the wealthy."
Actually, I don't think the media is terribly liberal (although I am fairly conservative). I think what has made so many conservatives think the media is liberal is the way that they canonized Bill Clinton. I don't think anyone has ever gotten the slack from the media that Old Bill has. I think that the media folks, generally a liberal crowd, genuinely felt that Bill was going to be an important president who would make a big difference and they tried to help him make it happen. I don't really fault them for having a sincere belief.
Bill is still getting a free pass, but I think the media (as if it were a single thing) has a generally sour taste in their mouths from Clinton. He was their boy, they backed him to the hilt, went to the mat for him and all they got from it was embarassment.
The interesting thing to me is that Al Gore is not getting anything like the "get out of jail free" ticket that Bill skated on for years. It could be my imagination, but I have the feeling that a lot of media folks feel kind of bad about the two-term honeymoon they gave Slick Willie and they've decided to make it up by being aggressively fair when it comes to George and Al. There really seems to be a lack of bias in the way that the 2000 race is being handled (well, except for a few little boo-boos during the convention coverage).
This, I think, is the bad luck of Al Gore: it's not that the people tend so much to tar him with the same brush as Clinton, it's that the media does. He had the bad luck to follow a real stinker who repeatedly farted in the media's hot tub.
Scaife is a conservative philanthropist who helped finance the American Spectator's investigations of President Clinton.
The rival Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which reported the move, said the Tribune-Review's managing editor protested but that Scaife overruled him.
Just another example of the liberal media.
Questions like "Are the media liberal?" do not spring from the vacuum, nor do they return there once answered. When people answer this question, the conclusion they come to affects and is affected by the rest of their ideology. Oftentimes, people who are liberal see the media as conservative, because whatever points of agreement lie between them go unnoticed. Just as often, conservatives see the media as liberal, for the same mechanism. For most people, their particular political inclinations are strengthened by their answer, for the natural reaction to believing that the media are biased in a particular direction is to be on your guard against that bias. We become defensive in the face of what we perceive to be an opposition that surrounds us with its messages. We "protect" ourselves by seeking media that are in closer agreement to our own beliefs- be it The Nation or The National Review.
We seek the answer to this question not only for its own truth, but to become better truth-seekers. But, like so many feedback mechanisms, the initial conditions are important to the equilibrium we eventually reach. These initial conditions are formed, not only by the sum total of our individual political positions, but also by our assumptions of what the characteristics of the political spectrum and the media itself are.
I make no statement as to how common these assumptions are or whether they are true or not. I mean only to call attention to them, so that you may ask yourself whether you believe them or not.
Regardless of the conclusion we come to, there are ways that we as individuals can protect ourselves from the problem of biased sources.
First, we must recognise that hiding within the protective blanket of media that share our biases can introduce a systematic error into our judgements just as pernicious as any of the general media at large. We should take a page from the book of the scientist- or, at least, the statistician- and seek a large sample of data with which to judge. To avoid selection bias, we should get information from sources as diverse as possible. The Nation and The National Review, however different they are, are both magazines published in America by large organizations. There are other outlets that do not share these similarities, and we would do well to expand our data set by including these- from low-tech zines to web sites from nonprofit organizations based in other countries.
When tregoweth writes, "If the media's so liberal, where's Noam Chomsky? Where's Michael Moore? Not on any major media outlets that I know of." These two have made some interesting points that deserve to be heard, but dude, get a clue. These aren't reporters or newsmakers, they're opinion makers, and by any mainstream standard, these two are the far left wing. They're about as quotable in non-opinion reporting as are Lyndon LaRouche or David Duke. If tregoweth or his colleagues read this, I am sure in the fine tradition of Chomsky he will deconstruct my entire write-up as feeding the vast right-wing media conspiracy. I wish him well, and can only hope he does it creatively, like cabin fever did in this deconstruction of a rant against graffiti, instead of boringly, as he did here. Besides, when Moore actually makes news, he gets plenty of coverage. He had no qualms doing the Madonna media whore drill to promote his latest book, claiming to be shocked...shocked when his publisher asked (but did not insist) that he mellow his book after 9-11. The book went out unchanged, and the fake controversy helped keep it a best seller. At least Madonna had a legitimate beef in that her performance really was censored in Toronto, by the police.
The Media Are Biased In How They Label Newsmakers.
The question of media bias is whether traditional news reporting, you know, the kind that is supposed to inform rather than persuade, is biased.
There was some interesting debate on this question not to long ago on the Newshour With Jim Lehrer, on PBS. On the one side was former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg, author of the book Bias; on the other side was Marvin Kalb, "a former NBC and CBS reporter now with the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy" (the man must carry an immense business card) at Harvard.
Goldberg's position is one with which the readers of this node are possibly sick of hearing, that the media is liberally biased. However, one of Goldberg's major points hasn't been discussed in this node so far: the issue of labeling. Goldberg says,
"There is no conspiracy. The media elites don't come into their offices in the morning, go into a dark room, roll up their sleeves, give the secret handshake and say, "How are we going to not only execute our liberal agenda, but get conservatives at the same time?" That's not it. They marginalize conservatives mainly...by identifying every conservative who's in a story...but they rarely identify liberals."
"And right before the impeachment proceedings began, Senators went up to sign what they call an 'oath book', promising to be fair and impartial. As they went up, Peter Jennings, doing a live play-by-play, on ABC, identified Senator Santorum as a young conservative Senator from Pennsylvania -- 'determinately conservative'. Then Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was also a 'determined conservative'. Senator Smith from New Hampshire was a 'very, very conservative Senator from New Hampshire'. Those are exact quotes. And I think that's absolutely fine. This is impeachment, it's a political process, we need to know that these are conservatives, and their conservatism may affect their views. But Marvin, Barbara Boxer was simply 'Barbara Boxer from California'. Ted Kennedy was simply 'Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts'. Paul Wellstone was simply 'Paul Wellstone from Minnesota'. Now, did Peter Jennings, who is a bright, intelligent, excellent, first-rate newsman, did he really think that the conservative views would affect the vote, but that liberal views wouldn't affect the vote? You see, this reminds me of the bad-old days, and we both remember these days, Marvin, when the only time a criminal was identified in a news story by race is if he were black."
In response, Kalb makes some important points. He says its more complicated than simple bias, and he's right. He points out that the "liberal" media had no problem skewering Clinton when the time came, and he's right. The media aren't so biased that they're willing to give up high ratings. But on the specific issue of labeling, Kalb's response is illuminating -- he doesn't deny there's a problem, he just said it was not bias but...ready for this..."if there's lousy journalism, so be it." As if that makes it all OK.
What bothers me is, these lapses in labeling would be so easy to fix. Did you know that CNN anchors aren't supposed to use the word "foreign"? Ted Turner, who owns most of CNN, feels its a pejorative term and encourages his reporters to identify the country or use a word like "international". Newsrooms around the U.S. are responding to new diversity policies that require them to quotes and photograph more minorities when they do the inane person in the street reaction shot or interview ("When the Earthquake hit, how did you feel?"). A simple memo from the news director or president of the major networks would marginalize the point that Goldberg makes. It would be great PR for the media, as it would give the public the impression that the media can respond constructively to the same type of criticism they dish out to corporations and government. If enforced, such a memo would solve this labeling problem. And yet some would rather deny there is a political angle to this problem. Says Kalb to Goldberg, "your reaching back into dangerous turf: Spiro Agnew, Nixon, the media lost the Vietnam War. This is not simply a matter of choosing one issue over another; this is the condemnation of an industry". But bad journalism and the failure to take even elementary steps to correct it somehow isn't a condemnation of the industry? That defensive reaction to me suggests its more than just lousy journalism.
The labeling problem becomes even more pronounced if you listen for the affixes "far-" and "-wing". If you don't hear "conservative" that much more often that you hear "liberal", try listening for "right-wing", which you hear about as often as you'd expect, and "left-wing", which you almost never hear in non-opinion news. "Far-right" is uncommon, but I am hard pressed to think of a time I've read or heard "far-left" outside of conservative op-eds. Its perhaps most pronounced when anchors are broadcasting live instead of from a script. Outfits like Accuracy In Media, http://www.aim.org/ (which I would label right-wing) have attempted scientific tallies. But my personal experience, long before I found out about AIM, has been that the labeling problem is so pronounced, you don't need statistics to see it. Just listen to the news.
Interestingly, in my experience, the European press doesn't seem to have as much of a problem, they don't mind labeling what they consider to be "the left" as such. Anybody care to broaden this discussion to Europe?
Sources and Notes
All Goldberg and Kalb quotes from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june02/bias_1-24.html
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