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Posted on 01/09/2004 1:53:50 AM PST by kattracks
So I’m sitting in a very nice conference room in the very nice Time & Life Building, high above bustling West Fiftieth Street in Manhattan, for my first meeting on this book. There are about ten big shots from Warner Books sitting around a very nice long table waiting to hear what I have in mind, which basically is to use my earlier book Bias as a jumping-off point to examine the powerful behind-the-scenes forces that have turned too many American newsrooms into bastions of political correctness; to examine those forces and see why they generate bias in the news and how they sustain it; and to tell the media elites, who are too arrogant to see for themselves, the ways they’d better change if they want to stay relevant. Because if they don’t, they’ll cease to be serious players in the national conversation and become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit—harmless enough but hopelessly out of date.But as I’m sitting there I’m not thinking about any of that. To be perfectly honest, what I am thinking is, before Bias caught on with so many Americans, before it became such a hit, no one in the liberal, highbrow book business would have thrown water on me if I were on fire. None of them would have dirtied their hands on a book that would have dismayed their smart, sensitive liberal friends. Before Bias I would have been the skunk at their garden party. But now they can’t wait to hear what I think?
But about fourteen seconds in, I am brought back to earth when one of the participants informs me that a friend of his thinks the whole idea of liberal bias is bogus.
I smile the kind of insincere smile I detest in others and look at the guy, wondering if I’m also looking at his “friend.” I’m also wondering if everyone else in the room also thinks that bias in the news is just the stuff of right-wing paranoia. I am in Manhattan, after all, the belly of the beast.
And besides, Manhattan is one of those trendy places where the new hot media chic thing is not only to dismiss the notion of liberal bias in the news, but actually to say, with a straight face, that the real problem is . . . conservative bias!
This is so jaw-droppingly bizarre you almost don’t know how to respond. It reminds me of a movie I saw way back in the sixties called A Guide for the Married Man. In one scene, Joey Bishop plays a guy caught by his wife red-handed in bed with a beautiful woman. As the wife goes nuts, demanding to know what the hell is going on, Joey and the woman get out of bed and calmly put on their clothes. He then casually straightens up the bed and quietly responds to his wife, who by now has smoke coming out of her ears, “What bed? What girl?” After the woman leaves, Joey settles in his lounge chair and reads the paper, pausing long to enough to ask his wife if she shouldn’t be in the kitchen preparing dinner!
Joey’s mantra in such situations is simple: Deny! Deny! Deny! And in this scene his denials are so matter-of-fact and so nonchalant that by the time the other woman leaves the bedroom, leaving just Joey and his wife, her head is spinning and she’s so bamboozled that she’s seriously beginning to doubt what she just saw with her own two eyes. She’s actually beginning to believe him when he says there was no other woman in the room!
Just think of Joey Bishop as the media elite and think of his wife as you—the American news-consuming public.
You have caught them red-handed over and over again with their biases exposed, and all they do is Deny! Deny! Deny! Only now the media have become even more brazen. Simply denying isn’t good enough anymore. Now they’re not content looking you in the eye and calmly saying, “What bias?” Now they’re just as calmly turning truth on its head, saying the real problem is conservative bias.
What’s next? They look up from their paper and ask why you’re not in the kitchen preparing dinner?
Having been on the inside for as long as I have, twenty-eight years as a CBS News correspondent, I should have known it would be just a matter of time before they would stop playing defense and go on the offensive. Given their arrogance, I should have known that sooner or later they would say, “We don’t have a bias problem—and if you think we do, then that proves that you’re the one with the bias problem.” Never mind that millions of Americans scream about liberal bias in the media; all the journalists can say is “You’re the one with the bias!” The emperors of alleged objectivity have been naked for quite some time now, and sadly, they’re the only ones who haven’t noticed. Or as Andrew Sullivan, the very perceptive observer of all things American, so elegantly puts it, “Only those elite armies of condescension keep marching on, their privates swinging in the breeze.”
But to deny liberal bias, the elites not only have had to brush off their own viewers, they also have had to paint their critics as wild-eyed ideologues—and then completely misrepresent what they say. For example, on March 4, 2003, this is how Nicholas Kristoff began his column in the New York Times: “Claims that the news media form a vast liberal conspiracy strike me as utterly unconvincing.” Well, they strike me as utterly unconvincing, too. Exactly who, Nick, is making those “claims”? Got any names? Because I travel all over the country and speak about bias in the media, and I haven’t met one serious conservative—not one—who believes that a “vast liberal conspiracy” controls the news. And for what it’s worth, I write on page four of the introduction to Bias that “It is important to know, too, that there isn’t a well-orchestrated, vast left-wing conspiracy in America’s newsrooms.” What I and many others do believe, and what I think is fairly obvious, is that the majority of journalists in big newsrooms slant leftward in their personal politics, especially on issues like abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, and gun control; and so in their professional role they tend to assume those positions are reasonable and morally correct. Bias in the news stems from that—not from some straw man conspiracy concocted by liberals in the supposedly objective, mainstream media.
Yet the idea that socially liberal reporters might actually take a liberal tack in their reporting is a proposition too many journalists on the Left refuse even to consider. Better to cast conservatives as a bunch of loonies who see conspiracies under every bed, around every corner, behind every tree, and, most important of all, in every newsroom.
In fact, right on the heels of the Kristoff column, the conspiracy thing pops up again in—surprise, surprise—the New York Times. This time in a book review: “The notion that a vast left-wing conspiracy controls America’s airwaves and newsprint [is] . . . routinely promoted as gospel on the right.”
Wrong again! But they are right about one thing: There is plenty of paranoid talk about a “vast left-wing conspiracy” in the newsroom. The problem is, the paranoids dreaming it up aren’t conservatives—they’re liberals!
And the uncomfortable truth—uncomfortable for ideologues on the Left, anyway—is that there now exists “a huge body of literature—including at least 100 books and research monographs—documenting a widespread left-wing bias in the news,” according to Ted Smith III of Virginia Commonwealth University, who has done extensive research into the subject. And much of the evidence comes not from conservatives with axes to grind but straight from the journalists themselves, who in survey after survey have identified themselves as liberal on all the big, important social issues of our time.
Despite the overwhelming evidence, despite all the examples of bias that were documented in my book and others, despite the surveys that show that large numbers of Americans consider the elite media too liberal, despite all of that, the elites remain in denial. Why? Well, for starters, as I say, a lot them truly don’t understand what the fuss is all about, since they honestly believe that their views on all sorts of divisive issues are not really controversial—or even liberal. After all, their liberal friends in Manhattan and Georgetown share those same views, which practically by definition make them moderate and mainstream. So, the thinking goes, it is all those Middle Americans who take the opposing view on, say, guns or gay marriage who are out of the mainstream, the ones who are “fringe.” Journalists don’t usually use the word—not in public anyway—but those supposedly not-too-sophisticated “fringe” Americans are smart enough to pick up on the condescension.
But there’s another reason journalists refuse to come clean on liberal bias—one that Dr. Freud would have a field day with. To be honest with the American people and themselves, you see, would be to shake their world to its very foundations. And that, as you might imagine, is not something they’re anxious to do, introspection not being their strong suit. By and large, these are people who see themselves as incredibly decent, even noble. They’re the good guys trying to make the world a better place. That’s why many of them went into journalism in the first place—to make the world a better place. Bias is something the bad guys are guilty of. So rather than look honestly at themselves and their profession, they hang on for dear life to the ludicrous position, to the completely absurd notion, that they, among all human beings, are unique—that only they have the ability to set aside their personal feelings and their beliefs and report the news free of any biases, “because we’re professionals,” they say.
But so are cops, and they can’t keep their biases in check is what journalists tell us all the time. If a cop is biased, sooner or later that bias is going to come out on the job, is what reporters say. And they’re probably right. It’s human nature, after all. It’s the same with judges and corporate executives with biases. No way they have the ability to set their personal feelings and beliefs completely aside—not for long anyway. And, as we all know, no white southern male over the age of five can keep his biases under control, certainly not as far as the elites are concerned. But journalists alone, the guys in the white hats, somehow can do what no other group can. Somehow, all of their life experiences can neatly be set aside as they go about bringing us the news, absent any preconceived notions and prejudices—because “we’re professionals.”
It’s unbelievable. Literally.
Deny! Deny! Deny! By now it’s not only their mantra, it’s practically official newsroom policy. In one way or another Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw have all dismissed the very idea of liberal bias in the news. Rather has called it a “myth” and a “canard” and has actually said that “Most reporters don’t know whether they’re Republican or Democrat.” Jennings thinks that “It’s just essential to make the point that we are largely in the center, without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage.” Ditto Brokaw, Couric, Lauer, Stahl, Wallace, and Bradley. The list, as they say, goes on and on.
But as strategies go, this new wrinkle—“There is no liberal bias in the news, but there is a conservative bias”—is far better. This is what you say if you’re a media liberal who is not only tired of playing defense but wants to put his critics on the defensive for a change. This is what you say if you’re trapped in a corner, and you don’t know what else to do and you think you’re fighting for your life.
It was Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader in the Senate, who fired the first shot (unless you want to go back a few years to Hillary Clinton and her warning about the vast right-wing conspiracy) when he went after every liberal’s favorite punching bag, Rush Limbaugh, in November 2002. That was right after the Democrats got hammered in the midterm elections and lost control of the Senate. Daschle accused Limbaugh and other conservatives on talk radio of inciting violence against liberals like himself. How would that work? you ask. Well, apparently Senator Daschle thinks the people who listen to talk radio are a bunch of crazy, drooling, scary rednecks who—if they’re in a good mood—merely send out death threats to the liberals Rush was complaining about. If, on the other hand, Rush riles them up—and they’re in a foul mood—well, then, who the hell knows what those morons might do?
This was so pathetically lame that it would have just been a one- or two-day story, except up popped Al Gore to stir the cauldron. Gore expanded the target list from Limbaugh to an entire Conservative Axis of Evil—an unholy trinity made up of talk radio, Fox News, and the Washington Times, whom Gore said were nothing more than mouthpieces for the Republican Party. “Most of the media [have] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks,” he declared, “that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective as stated by the news media as a whole.”
Once Al Gore spoke the gospel of conservative bias, it took only seconds for left-of-center journalists to start hopping on board the bandwagon.
“Al Gore said the obvious,” wrote the left-wing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
“The legend of the liberal media is finally dead,” proclaimed Joe Conason, the liberal columnist of the New York Observer.
“Sooner or later, I think we’re all going to have to acknowledge that the myth of liberal bias in the press is just that, it’s a myth,” according to Jack White, one of TIME magazine’s liberal columnists.
The true “new bias,” according to E. J. Dionne Jr., one of the many liberal columnists at the Washington Post, “adds up to [a] media heavily biased toward conservative politics and conservative politicians.”
Then on January 1, 2003, a weary world woke up to a page-one story in the New York Times, a story that made it all official. According to the Times, liberals are so sick of being beaten up by pro-conservative media, like talk radio and Fox News, that they are looking to create liberal outlets of their own for “balance”—everything from “progressive” radio talk shows, as the Times described it, to “a cable network with a liberal bent.”
This seems like a good place to state the obvious: Yes, Republicans do indeed have friends in some conservative places like talk radio, Fox News, and the Washington Times, whom I’m sure they use to get their talking points out. But what Al Gore and his pals in the media forget to mention is that Democrats also have friends, in some very powerful liberal places, and the Democrats use them to get their talking points out. Places like major newspapers in every big city in the country, big-circulation mainstream news magazines, television networks with their millions and millions of viewers— all very large platforms that journalists use, intentionally or not, to frame the national debate on all sorts of big important issues, in the process creating “conventional” and “mainstream” points of view. That is what media power is really about.
The fact is, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Washington Times might not even exist if weren’t for the routine (and the generally unconscious) liberal tilt of the mainstream media. Liberal journalists may indeed try to keep their biases in check (as they keep telling us), but—mainly because they don’t even recognize that their liberal views are liberal—they often don’t succeed. As I once told Bill O’Reilly, he should send a case of champagne to Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings with a nice little note that reads, “Thanks a lot, guys, for sending over all those viewers.”
Why do you think liberals like Mario Cuomo, who had a Saturday morning show on radio, and more recently Phil Donahue, with his nightly show on television, flat out failed as talk show hosts, along with a bunch of other liberals including Jerry Brown and Jim Hightower and a few more you probably never heard of? Why do you think there’s no current liberal talk show host in the entire United States of America who comes within light-years of Rush Limbaugh’s or Sean Hannity’s ratings? The Left, self-servingly, says it’s because conservatives (unlike civilized liberals, of course) are loud and angry and make complex political and social issues moronically simple for their moronically simple listeners, many of whom, of course, live in simple-minded Red State country. Here’s another theory: Maybe liberal talk shows keep failing because the American people don’t think they need yet one more media megaphone coming from left field. Maybe they flop because the American people are saying, “We already have plenty of those, thank you.” Or as Jay Leno put it one night: “A group of venture capitalists are in the process of developing their own liberal radio network to counter conservative shows like Rush Limbaugh. They feel the liberal viewpoint is not being heard—except on TV, in the movies, in music, by comedians, in magazines and newspapers. Other than that, it’s not getting out!” The joke got a great big laugh, which ought to tell us something, since the audience wasn’t made up of the Young Right-Wing Conservatives of America—just your regular Middle-American types. You think maybe just about everybody by now thinks it’s funny when the Left complains that, “the liberal viewpoint is not being heard”?
But the success of conservative talk shows isn’t just about America’s disaffection with the liberal media; it’s about America’s disaffection with liberalism itself: with liberals’ abiding respect for diversity (except, of course, diversity of opinion); with their reflexive tendency to blame America first for whatever is wrong in the world; with their deep suspicion of America’s military; with their titanic hypocrisy (as in their enthusiastic support of affirmative action (as long as it doesn’t adversely affect their own kids); with their self-righteous support for “art” seemingly designed to do nothing more than offend sensible people, often sensible people of faith. Remember Piss Christ and that other masterpiece that portrayed the Virgin Mary surrounded by elephant crap?
This is why liberal talk on television and radio has failed. And far more important, it’s also why liberalism in our culture—once such a great American treasure—has lost so much of its luster over the years. Half the time I find modern-day liberalism sad; the other half, I just find it silly.
So, in the world of media, if Republicans have the Washington Times, a relatively small second newspaper in a two-newspaper town, the Democrats have the most influential newspaper on the planet, the New York Times, whose editorials—and recently even some of its news stories—sound an awful lot like Democratic talking points.
And we’re supposed to fret about conservative influences on the news?
No matter. While the Left gears up to start its own national liberal radio talk show network (and maybe a liberal cable TV network, too, possibly starring Al Gore), using seed money from fat-cat Dem-ocratic Party contributors, this is the new mantra, the number one talking point for all those solid thinkers who for so long have denounced Rush Limbaugh’s ditto-heads as mindless automatons: “There is no liberal bias in the news, but there is a conservative bias.”
Yes, it seems that right-wingers these days not only control Big Oil and Big Tobacco and Big Tires and Big Business in general and the military-industrial complex and the White House and both Houses of Congress and on some days the Supreme Court of the United States . . . but now those conservative SOBs also control Big Media!
The very sound of it is comforting: “There is no liberal bias in the news, but there is a conservative bias.” Say it enough times and, who knows, maybe it will actually start to be true.
Perhaps the charge liberals have been making most often to back their claim of conservative bias is that the media have given George W. Bush a free ride on some very important issues involving foreign policy and national security. For a while you could hardly open up a liberal magazine or go to a liberal Web site without finding some bitter screed about how the press was sucking up to the president on everything from the war in Iraq to supposed civil liberties abuses at home. But the truth is, all the news media were doing was what the media always do in times of war: They were rallying ’round the flag. September 11 had a devastating impact on the national psyche. America had been attacked—not at our embassies in Africa and not even at Pearl Harbor. We had been attacked in New York City and Washington and Pennsylvania. The way the media covered the president wasn’t proof of a conservative bias so much as it was evidence of a post-September 11 pro-American bias. This may not please some on the Left, but that’s the way it’s always been. And, just for the record, this misplaced sense of patriotism, as some on the Left saw it, didn’t stop those lapdogs in the press from challenging President Bush on a million other issues, from environmental policy to the always popular “massive tax cuts for the rich.”
“Well, what about all those media outlets with right-wing points of view?” the guy in the conference room wants to know, repeating what his friend (who doesn’t think there’s a liberal bias in the news) told him. “There’s Bill O’Reilly; there’s talk radio; there are a bunch of conservative syndicated columnists . . .”
As I was reading this I kept hearing Hillary's voice going on about the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy". In fact, that's how I know I must not be a right-wing conservative. After all, I've never once received my special invitation to one of the super-secret "Right-Wing Conspiracy" meetings.
I'll bet you never got your decoder ring either. ;o)
Ah man! I want one! How can I sign up for the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" and get me one of those decoder rings?! And since everyone knows that all right-wingers are rich fat cats I bet it's made out of platinum too.
| Professor's Study Shows Liberal Bias in News Media | ||||||
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Great Debate#9 Break up Microsoft?...Then how about the media "Big Six"? [ ... -Poll confirms Ivy League liberal tilt--
A poll by the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change in 1992, eighty-three percent of film and television writers, directors and producers voted for Bill Clinton. Eighty-three percent. The vote that Clinton received in the country at large, forty-three percent.
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I don't understand this perception of the right. While we may at times be angry I don't believe I have ever heard a conservative in a red-faced rant. One needs only to go to any liberal gathering to see nearly every speaker in a spittle spewing frenzy.
prisoner6
Cool- I hope he's capable of being educated.
The biggest problem I have with media types is their claims of being "objective"- in my opinion, no-one is really objective. We all have biases, points of view- a certain way of seeing things based on our life's experiences.
I believe it is better to admit you have a bias, and try to compensate, than to delude yourself into thinking that you are somehow above it all.
I have done a little writing for hire over the years, and about the first thing you learn interviewing people is that there are never just two sides to a story-- there are 3, 4, 5, or 6, and they are all at odds with each other!
About all you can do is take notes, ask a lot of leading, sometimes rude questions, and sift through all the verbiage at the end of it. If I had an opinion, I'd always state that clearly, so there'd be no confusion about where I stood.
You're right about "objective" being a modern conceit-- about 25 years ago I printed some old glass negatives of pictures taken in my little city by the sea in the eighteen-hundreds, and there were about 6 different newspapers, all blatantly partisan.
It's been so long I can't recall their names, but they were along the lines of "The Brunswick Democrat Times" and "Boy, those Democrats Stink!"
Let's just say that like Winnie ther Pooh, "I view it with great suspicion..."
The local assortment of Usual Suspects- politicians and businessmen who stand to benefit from this event- are trying to sell it as the Next Big Event That Will make Every One of Us Very Rich & Famous."
( Historic Note: Same claims were made for the 1996 Olympics, and Jimmy Carter's staying at Musgrove Plantation. I'm still waiting to get my cut from those events...)
I see it as a bloody aggrivation- congested traffic, hoards of strangers who view us locals with a mix of fascination and horror, security concerns, and general discombobulation of living normally...
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