Posted on 03/14/2003 10:29:02 PM PST by John Lenin
| What Conservative Media? Yet another myth It's become something of a cliche among some European commentators that the reason for the U.S.-European gap in perceptions about the coming war against Saddam is because of the media. In the United States, we're told, the famously scrappy, independent media has gone belly-up like a puppy, desperate to have its tummy scratched by the White House. In Europe, in contrast, the independent media and television have kept their eyes on the ball and maintained the usual journalistic standards of, er, the BBC. Al Gore, with his usual ability to chew manfully on a half-truth, put it this way: "The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks - 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." That was, in part, his explanation for the Democrats' devastating loss last November. Last week saw yet another indicator of the alleged rightward tilt of the news media in America. The only serious cable news talk-show with a live, unmediated liberal host, Phil Donahue, was yanked off the air after only a few months. The show was not on the Fox News Channel, the current favorite target of the liberal intelligentsia. It was on MSNBC, a more centrist outfit. MSNBC's upcoming plans, post-Donahue, include a show with ferocious right-wing rabble-rouser, the aptly named Michael Savage, and Jesse Ventura, former pro-wrestler and independent former governor of Minnesota. Ticked off at his premature demise, Donahue lashed out at MSNBC for their apparent swing to the right. He derided them as "trying to out-fox Fox." But the closer you look at this notion of a monolithically rightward-moving American media, the less impressive it sounds. To begin with, the entire theory is based on cable news. It's true that cable news channels cater to a highly motivated political audience, and so are more influential than a brief survey of their ratings would suggest. And it's also true that conservatives have found a real home in the medium, and have seen their market share soar. But the broadly liberal networks still reach far more people. Fox News, for example, has a viewership in the realm of 800,000. The combined audience for all the evening network news, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, skewed broadly center-left, is over 33 million. There really is no serious conservative competition. Moreover, there's plenty of evidence that the reason cable news is slanting right is not because of some over-arching vast right-wing conspiracy - but because that's what the audience wants. Deprived of any non-liberal coverage on the networks, moderate to center-right viewers have taken to Fox News with alacrity. More revealing, this conservative tilt applies not only to Fox but even to CNN. A recent survey of the politics of cable news viewers found that 46 percent of Fox viewers called themselves conservative, 32 percent moderate, and 18 percent liberal. CNN's audience was only subtly different: 40 percent conservative, 38 percent moderate and 16 percent liberal. The reason Donahue was dropped was not because his bosses didn't want a liberal option. It's because the audience didn't want another liberal option. They've already got plenty. What you're seeing here is the market work. Most American journalists, like journalists everywhere, are liberals. A 2001 survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates found that of 301 media professionals, "liberals" outnumbered conservatives by 4 to 1; and "moderates" outnumbered conservatives by 10 to 1. Any guess what the percentages would be at the BBC? Finding the lone Tory at Broadcasting House is about as easy as finding Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The liberal slant is made even worse among America's daily papers, almost all of whom have a virtual monopoly in their own markets, therefore face little or no conservative competition, and so continue slanting the news effortlessly - and to their minds ever-so-reasonably - to the center-left. It's only when you actually get a real and open media market that conservative voices find a niche. Take talk radio, a deregulated and rambunctiously competitive market, in which ratings matter more than content. Two forms endure: the shock-jock vulgarity of a Howard Stern and the conservative populist format of a Rush Limbaugh. Recently some liberal philanthropists have been trying to set up lefty alternatives to these essentially conservative outlets. But they cannot abolish the laws of supply and demand. Right now, NPR so dominates liberal opinion on the radio that it has all but saturated the market. It also brilliantly appeals to liberals' sense that they're just smarter and more reasonable than conservatives - another reason why populist media liberalism is so hard to find. No wonder a leaked memo from MSNBC had one executive describing Phil Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace." That's not a right-wing ideologue talking. It's a businessman. Or look at the Internet, where there isn't even much price competition, since much of the political content is free. Again, liberals and leftists are for some reason in the minority. The right-leaning Drudge Report still creams its competitors and just scored its highest ratings ever. The most popular political blogs on the web lean right. Good liberal journalism still exists - like Slate or Salon. But they exhibit nothing like the ideological conformity of the BBC or the network news - and employ a few token conservatives like yours truly to keep their readers' blood pressure up. Yes, there's Michael Moore and a smattering of left-populist sites. But how mainstream will an outfit calle "Media Whores Online" ever be? And they seem to have none of the staying power of the libertarian or conventional right. Or think of the British media market. Compare television with newspapers to see what I mean. Where there's real competition - in Britain's newspaper market - you have a real diversity of views, all the way from the Guardian and Daily Mirror to the Telegraph and the Times. But in monopolistic or near-monopolistic entities like BBC radio and BBC television, you get a monotone left-liberal slant. Even when conservative voices are heard on the BBC, they're token, brought onto the air with an almost audible ideological pair of tweasers. They don't own the place. They don't pervade the entire atmosphere of the institution. What Britain needs more than ever is its own version of Fox News: a widely available, anti-liberal, populist news channel, an unBBC. In this battle, of course, bias is often in the eye of the beholder. That's why the only way to see it clearly is through actual media competition - where markets, rather than benevolent, politically appointed moguls, determine the content of the product. Conservatives will still be at a disadvantage. Most conservatives in the instinctual sense are not that political. The best and smartest tend not to go into news and journalism as a career, they tend to go into business. And the current upswing in conservative journalism is as much a function of a popular revolt against liberal media supremacy as anything else. But a freer market in media would at least find a space for some of these ideas. And true media diversity is surely a good thing. Last time, I checked, it was one of the defining characteristics of true liberalism. Funny how definitions change, isn't it? March 5, 2003, Sunday Times. |
| 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--
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