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Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced?
Imprimis ^ | August, 2006 | Fred Barnes

Posted on 08/14/2006 7:31:12 PM PDT by Nasty McPhilthy

Let me begin by defining three terms that are thrown around in debates about the media today. The first is objectivity, which means reporting the news with none of your own political views or instincts slanting the story one way or another. Perfect objectivity is pretty hard for anyone to attain, but it can be approximated. Then there's fairness. Fairness concedes that there may be some slant in a news story, but requires that a reporter will be honest and not misleading with regard to those with whom he disagrees. And finally there's balance, which means that both sides on an issue or on politics in general—or more than two sides, when there are more than two—get a hearing.

My topic today is how the mainstream media—meaning nationally influential newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today; influential regional papers like the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times; the broadcast networks and cable news stations like CNN; and the wire services, which now are pretty much reduced to the Associated Press—stacks up in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance. In my opinion, they don't stack up very well.

Twenty years ago I wrote a piece in The New Republic entitled “Media Realignment,” and the thrust of it was that the mainstream media was shedding some of its liberal slant and moving more to the center. This was in the Reagan years, and I pointed to things like USA Today, which was then about five years old and was a champion of the Reagan economic recovery. CNN was younger then, too, and quite different from the way it is now; Ted Turner owned it, but he wasn't manipulating it the way he did later, which turned it into something quite different. Financial news was suddenly very big in the midst of the 401 (k) revolution, and the stock market boom was getting a lot of coverage. The New Republic, where I worked, had been pro-Stalin in the 1930s, but by the 1980s had become very pro-Reagan and anti-communist on foreign policy. I also cited a rise of new conservative columnists like George Will. But looking back on that piece now, I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. The idea that the mainstream media was moving to the center was a mirage. In fact, I would say that compared to what I was writing about back in the 1980s, the mainstream media today is more liberal, more elitist, more secular, more biased, more hostile to conservatives and Republicans, and more self-righteous.

Liberal and Impenetrable Liberalism is endemic in the mainstream media today. Evan Thomas—the deputy editor of Newsweek and one of the honest liberals in the media—noted this very thing with regard to coverage of the 2004 presidential race, which I'll discuss later. It was obvious, he said, that the large majority in the media wanted John Kerry to win and that this bias slanted their coverage. And indeed, every poll of the media—and there have been a lot of them—shows that they're liberal, secular and so on. Polls of the Washington press corps, for instance, about who they voted for in 2004 always show that nine-to-one or ten-to-one of them voted Democratic. Peter Brown, a columnist who just recently left the Orlando Sentinel, conducted a poll a few years ago of newspaper staffs all around the country—not just at the big papers, but midsize papers and even some small papers—and found that this disparity existed everywhere.

Nor is this likely to change. Hugh Hewitt, the California lawyer and blogger and talk radio host, spent a few days recently at the Columbia Journalism School, supposedly the premiere journalism school in America. He spoke to a couple of classes there and polled them on who they had voted for. He found only one Bush voter in all the classes he spoke to. Steve Hayes, a fine young writer and reporter at The Weekly Standard, went to Columbia Journalism School and says that during his time there he was one of only two or three conservative students out of hundreds.

This is not to say that there aren't many fine young conservative journalists. But they aren't likely to be hired in the mainstream media. When I was at The New Republic for ten years—and The New Republic was quite liberal, despite its hawkish foreign policy—any young person who joined the staff and wrote stories that were interesting and demonstrated that he or she could write well was grabbed immediately by the New York Times or other big newspapers, Newsweek, Time or the networks. But that doesn't happen at The Weekly Standard, where I work now. Some of our young writers are the most talented I have ever met in my 30-plus years in journalism. But they don't get those phone calls. Why? Because they're with a conservative magazine. Of course there has been one famous exception—David Brooks, who is now the conservative columnist with the New York Times. But he was probably the least conservative person at The Weekly Standard. Conservatives are tokens on most editorial pages, just as they are on the broadcast networks and on cable news stations like CNN and MSNBC. Of course, I have a vested interest, since I work for FOX News; but if you compare the number of liberal commentators on FOX—and there are a lot of them—with the number of conservatives on those other stations, you'll see what I mean.

The fact is that the mainstream media doesn't want conservatives. It doesn't matter whether they're good reporters or writers. They go out of their way not to hire them. This was true 20 years ago, and it's true today. This impenetrability is why conservatives have had to erect the alternative media—talk radio, the blogs, conservative magazines and FOX News. Together, these form a real infrastructure that's an alternative to the mainstream media. But it's still a lot smaller, it's not as influential and it's largely reactive. It's not the equal of the mainstream media, that's for sure.

Powerful and Unfair One way to see the unequaled power of the mainstream media is in how it is able to shape and create the stories that we're stuck talking about in America. A good example is Cindy Sheehan last summer. The Sheehan story was a total creation of the mainstream media. And in creating the story, the media shamelessly mischaracterized Sheehan. It portrayed her as simply a poor woman who wanted to see President Bush because her son had been killed in Iraq. Well, in the first place, she had already seen President Bush once. Also, though you would never know it from the dominant coverage, she was in favor of the Iraqi insurgency—the beheaders, the killers of innocent women and children. She was on their side, and she said so. She was also filled with a deep hatred of Israel. Yet the media treated her in a completely sympathetic manner, failing to report the beliefs that she made little attempt to hide. In any case, the Cindy Sheehan story came to dominate the news for the latter part of the summer; only the mainstream media still has the power to make stories big.

To see how distorted the mainstream media's view of the world can be, one need only compare its coverage of the Valerie Plame “leak” story with its coverage of the NSA surveillance leak story. Plame is the CIA agent whose name was written about by reporter Robert Novak in a column, following which the media portrayed her as having been outed as an undercover CIA agent. The simple facts from the beginning were that she was not an undercover agent any more; she was not even overseas. The story had no national security repercussions at all—none. But that didn't stop the media, which built the story up to great heights—apparently in the groundless hope that it would lead to an indictment of Karl Rove—and kept it front page news, at least intermittently, for what seemed like forever. The NSA surveillance story, on the other hand, also created by the media—this time pursuant to a real leak, and one that was clearly in violation of the law—had tremendous national security implications. After all, it revealed a secret and crucial program that was being used to uncover plots to bomb and massacre Americans and probably rendered that program no longer effective. Not only was this important story treated on an equal basis with the non-story of Valerie Plame, but the media was not interested, for the most part, in its national security repercussions. Instead the media mischaracterized the story as a “domestic spying scandal,” suggesting constitutional overreach by the Bush administration. Well, a domestic spying story is exactly what the story was not. Those being spied on were Al-Qaeda members overseas who were using the telephone. If some of those calls were with people in the U.S., they were monitored for that reason only. But the media's stubborn mischaracterization of the story continued to frame the debate.

This brings me to the use of unfair and unbalanced labeling by the media. How often, if ever, have you heard or read the term “ultraliberal”? I don't think I've ever heard or read it. You'll hear and see the term “ultraconservative” a lot, but not “ultraliberal”—even though there are plenty of ultraliberals. Another widely used labeling term is “activist.” If people are working to block a shopping center from being built or campaigning against Wal-Mart, they are called “activists.” Of course, what the term “activist” means is liberal. But while conservatives are called conservatives by the media, liberals are “activists.” For years we've seen something similar with regard to debates over judicial nominees. The Federalist Society, with which many conservative judicial nominees tend to be associated, is always referred to as the conservative Federalist Society, as if that's part of its name. But the groups opposing conservative nominees are rarely if ever labeled as liberal—giving the impression that they, unlike the Federalist Society, are somehow objective.

Related to this, I would mention that conservatives are often labeled in a way to suggest they are mean and hateful. Liberals criticize, but conservatives hate. Have you noticed that the media never characterizes individuals or groups as Bush haters? There are Bush critics, but there are no Bush haters—whereas in the Clinton years, critics of the president were often referred to as Clinton haters. I'm not saying that there weren't Clinton haters on the fringes in the 1990s. But far-left groups like MoveOn.org have been treated as acceptable within the mainstream of American politics today by the media, while in truth they are as clearly animated by hatred as the most rabid anti-Clinton voices ever were.

Secular and Partisan Bias With regard to religion, Christianity in particular—but also religious faith in general—is reflexively treated as something dangerous and pernicious by the mainstream media. Back in the early 1990s when I was still at The New Republic, I was invited to a dinner in Washington with Mario Cuomo. He was then governor of New York, and had invited several reporters to dinner because he was thinking about running for president. At one point that night he mentioned that he sent his children to Catholic schools in New York because he wanted them to be taught about a God-centered universe. This was in the context of expressing his whole-hearted support for public schools. But from the reaction, you would have thought he had said that one day a week he would bring out the snakes in his office and make policy decisions based on where they bit him. He was subsequently pummeled with stories about how improper it was for him, one, to send his kids to religious schools, and two, to talk about it. It was amazing. The most rigid form of secularism passes as the standard in mainstream journalism these days.

President Bush is similarly treated as someone who is obsessive about his religion. And what does he do? Well, he reads a devotional every day; he tries to get through the Bible, I think, once a year; and he prays. Now, I know many, many people who do this. Tens of millions of people do it. And yet the media treats Bush as some religious nut and pursues this story inaccurately. Again, it is clear that partisan bias is involved, too, because in fact, Bush talks publicly about his faith much less than other presidents have. There is a good book about Bush's religion by Paul Kengor, who went back to every word President Clinton spoke and found out that Clinton quoted scripture and mentioned God and Jesus Christ more than President Bush has. You would never get that from the mainstream media.

The partisan bias of the mainstream media has been at no time more evident than during the last presidential election. Presidential candidates used to be savaged equally by the media. No matter who—Republican or Democrat—they both used to take their hits. But that's not true any more. Robert Lichter, at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, measures the broadcast news for all sorts of things, including how they treat candidates. He's been doing it now for nearly 20 years. And would anyone care to guess what presidential candidate in all those years has gotten the most favorable treatment from the broadcast media? The answer is John Kerry, who got 77 percent favorable coverage in the stories regarding him on the three broadcast news shows. For Bush, it was 34 percent. This was true despite the fact that Kerry made his Vietnam service the motif of the Democratic National Convention, followed weeks later by 64 Swift Boat vets who served with Kerry in Vietnam claiming that he didn't do the things he said he did. It was a huge story, but the mainstream media didn't want to cover it and didn't cover it, for week after week after week.

There was an amazingly well documented book written by a man named John O'Neill—himself a Swift Boat vet—who went into great detail about why John Kerry didn't deserve his three Purple Hearts, etc. It might have been a right-wing screed, but if you actually read it, it wasn't a screed. It backed up its claims with evidence. Normally in journalism, when somebody makes some serious charges against a well-known person, reporters look into the charges to see if they're true or not. If they aren't, reporters look into the motives behind the false charges—for instance, to find out if someone paid the person making the false charges, and so on. But that's not what the media did in this case. The New York Times responded immediately by investigating the financing of the Swift Boat vets, rather than by trying to determine whether what they were saying was true. Ultimately, grudgingly—after bloggers and FOX News had covered the story sufficiently long that it couldn't be ignored—the mainstream media had to pick up on the story. But its whole effort was aimed at knocking down what the Swift Boat vets were saying.

Compare this with September 8, 2004, when Dan Rather reported on documents that he said showed not only that President Bush used preferential treatment to get into the Texas National Guard, but that he hadn't even done all his service. The very next morning, the whole story—because CBS put one of the documents on its Web site—was knocked down. It was knocked down because a blogger on a Web site called Little Green Footballs made a copy on his computer of the document that was supposedly made on a typewriter 30 years earlier and demonstrated that it was a fraud made on a modern computer. Then, only a few weeks after that embarrassment, CBS came up with a story, subsequently picked up by the New York Times, that an arms cache of 400 tons of ammunition in Iraq had been left unguarded by the American military and that the insurgents had gotten hold of it. Well, it turned out that they didn't know whether the insurgents had gotten that ammunition or not, or whether indeed the American military had possession of it. It was about a week before the election that these major news organizations broke this unsubstantiated story, something that would have been unimaginable in past campaigns. Why would they do that? Why would Dan Rather insist on releasing fraudulent documents when even his own experts recommended against it? Why would CBS and the New York Times come back with an explosive but unsubstantiated arms cache story only weeks later? They did it for one reason: They wanted to defeat President Bush for re-election. There is no other motive that would explain disregarding all the precautions you're taught you should have in journalism.

I'll wind up on a positive note, however. Forty years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith—the great liberal Harvard economist—said that he knew conservatism was dead because it was bookless. Conservatives didn't publish books. And to some extent, it was true at the time. But it's no longer true. Conservatives have become such prolific writers and consumers of books that Random House and other publishing companies have started separate conservative imprints. Nowadays it is common to see two or three or four conservative books—some of them kind of trashy, but some of them very good—on the bestseller list. Insofar as books are an indication of how well conservatives are doing—at least in the publishing part of the media world—I would say they're doing quite well. They're not winning, but they're much better off than they were before—something that can't be said about how they are faring in the unfair and unbalanced mainstream media.

“Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: fredbarnes; mediabias; msm
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1 posted on 08/14/2006 7:31:14 PM PDT by Nasty McPhilthy
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

**Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced?**

That question is rhetorical, I take it? :)


2 posted on 08/14/2006 7:35:04 PM PDT by jdm (I gotta give the Helen Thomas obsession a rest.)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

Is there a "masters of the obvious" ping somewhere?


3 posted on 08/14/2006 7:35:10 PM PDT by samm1148
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To: jdm

Just the monthly Imprimis fix.

Nothing more.


4 posted on 08/14/2006 7:37:37 PM PDT by Nasty McPhilthy (Those who beat their swords into plow shears….will plow for those who don’t.)
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To: jdm

**Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced?**
----
I didn't get past this title....barf bucket please.


5 posted on 08/14/2006 7:39:18 PM PDT by EagleUSA (T)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

Three times I've witnessed up close major news events, and NO, the reporters seem to get half of the story. Poor people who get accused by the media! I remember hearing the stories of people in New Orleans 'eating rats', after going 24 hours without food.


6 posted on 08/14/2006 7:40:44 PM PDT by rovenstinez
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
I really don't need to read this longwinded article to get to the answer to that question.


7 posted on 08/14/2006 7:40:54 PM PDT by phoenix0468 (http://www.mylocalforum.com -- Go Speak Your Mind.)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

Nope


8 posted on 08/14/2006 7:41:11 PM PDT by garbageseeker (Wars may be fought by weapons, but they are won by men. -General George Patton)
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To: EagleUSA

If you choose not to read an Imprimis article, it's your loss. Not mine.


9 posted on 08/14/2006 7:41:41 PM PDT by Nasty McPhilthy (Those who beat their swords into plow shears….will plow for those who don’t.)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced?


No, they're bought and paid for.

All of them.


10 posted on 08/14/2006 7:41:55 PM PDT by WhiteGuy (It's about the People Who Count the Votes................. - Wally O'Dell)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced?

I look forward to reading the article. But personal observation, starting with an incident and how it (wasn't) reported by the Seattle broadcast TV news media almost 15 years ago -- and in fact how they "Photoshopped" the incident to support a "favored" protest -- gives me the only answer I need to know: "The Mainstream Media IS ANYTHING BUT Fair and Balanced, and have not been for a long, long time."

I know a used-car salesman I trust (I happily drive a car I bought from him a few years back, when it wears out I'll be back to him, wherever he is working) FAR more than I trust *any* MSM journalist.

11 posted on 08/14/2006 7:44:05 PM PDT by sionnsar (†trad-anglican.faithweb.com† | Iran Azadi | "Honest MSM Journalist" is fiction)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
There is a good book about Bush's religion by Paul Kengor, who went back to every word President Clinton spoke and found out that Clinton quoted scripture and mentioned God and Jesus Christ more than President Bush has. You would never get that from the mainstream media.

They never covered it because they knew he was lying.

12 posted on 08/14/2006 7:49:00 PM PDT by Jim Noble (I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.)
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To: EagleUSA

It's a pretty good read by Fred Barnes.

Really nails the media with the truth.


13 posted on 08/14/2006 7:49:24 PM PDT by digger48
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
As far back as 1973, when I was in the newspaper business in Florida, I met graduates of Columbia Journalism School and other esteemed institutions who told me since "true objectivity was impossible in journalism" it should simply be discarded. I, who went to junior college and a technical college, would argue that one had to strive for objectivity in journalism. It was a duty. I remember a few professionals who accomplished this. It is done by thoroughly examining both sides of an issue to the point that often the information conveyed by the finished product is in opposition to the reporter's personal views or biases. This is because he or she has bent over backwards to be fair. You still see this in print sometimes but it is rare.
14 posted on 08/14/2006 7:49:24 PM PDT by Brad from Tennessee (Anything a politician gives you he has first stolen from you)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
http://www.yahoo.com/s/135781/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060815/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_israel Look at that headline and you get your answer. The headline leads one to assume Israel fired rockets at the Hezzies. It was the hezzies who fired on Lebanon. Headlines are their stealthy bias.
15 posted on 08/14/2006 7:52:42 PM PDT by satchmodog9 (Most people stand on the tracks and never even hear the train coming)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
Compare this with September 8, 2004, when Dan Rather reported on documents that he said showed not only that President Bush used preferential treatment to get into the Texas National Guard, but that he hadn't even done all his service. The very next morning, the whole story—because CBS put one of the documents on its Web site—was knocked down. It was knocked down because a blogger on a Web site called Little Green Footballs made a copy on his computer of the document that was supposedly made on a typewriter 30 years earlier and demonstrated that it was a fraud made on a modern computer.

Uh..not so, Fred, Rather was outed here by FR by the hallowed Buckhead..

16 posted on 08/14/2006 7:59:45 PM PDT by cardinal4 (America, despite the usual suspects, stands firmly with Israel..)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

Is this a trick question of some kind? This question needs to be asked because...? Wow, it MUST be the dog days of summer!


17 posted on 08/14/2006 8:00:52 PM PDT by hardworking
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To: Nasty McPhilthy

ROFL.

No, they actively hate America, their own country and government, especially George Bush who makes them apoplectic just thinking about him or hearing his name.

The so called MSM doesn't have a clue about any objective, realistic, pragmatic approach to the world and the dangers America faces in it.

I could go on and on.

There are 2 main dangers freedom, democracy, America and Western civilization face in the world today, Islam and leftism. I don't know if there's a dime's worth of difference between them. They're both controlling, self-righteous, intolerant, hypocritical, fascistic and oppressive. That's today's so called MSM.


18 posted on 08/14/2006 8:01:35 PM PDT by garyhope (It's World War IV, right here, right now courtesy of Islam.)
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To: Nasty McPhilthy
I've always thought that the MSM being liberal is a function of demography, rather than malice.

They employ people young skulls full of mush and don't pay very well.

19 posted on 08/14/2006 8:01:46 PM PDT by ChadGore (VISUALIZE 62,041,268 Bush fans. We Vote.)
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To: sionnsar
MSM is entertainment/propaganda/advertisement driven media.
Same as it ever was.
The only difference is that nowadays, one need not have had direct contact with members of "the press" in order to cast an informed and cynical eye at their "reporting".
20 posted on 08/14/2006 8:04:29 PM PDT by sarasmom (To all political staff lurkers: SECURE THE BORDERS, OR YOU'RE FIRED!)
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