Posted on 12/11/2001 6:27:09 AM PST by DKNY
Sean Hannity Attests Media Bias Is Local Too
WASHINGTON – "OK, now, how are we going to slant this?” That’s what a top editor of a newspaper in heartland America asked his young reporter just back from covering a campaign visit by presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992.
How are we going to "slant” a story? In the supposedly impartial unbiased news columns? In the wide red swath on the map known since last year as "Bush country”? Absolutely. And it is no isolated incident. It is happening all over America. Bernard Goldberg’s book "Biased: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News” deals with the leftist conventional wisdoms of the Eastern establishment media.
Only briefly does he touch on the similar bias out there in the local media.
Sean Hannity, whose radio talk show has gone national after several years of sky-high ratings on WABC in New York, is a monument to the poetic justice of being true to oneself.
Right out of the starting gate, Hannity made it clear who he was. He was a conservative and let the chips fall where they may. At a college radio station, he was fired after just 40 hours because he was a conservative. But he stood his ground. And today, he is going great guns on talk radio and cable television.
"I’ve run into people everywhere that have similar stories to tell,” Hannity told NewsMax.com on Monday. "[They say] that they’re the sole quiet voice of conservatism in a newsroom that is a liberal bastion. Conservatives [in newsrooms] were mocked and ridiculed and made fun of. This is the environment that they lived in.”
When he was working in Huntsville, Ala., Hannity would get calls from journalists saying, "Look, I can’t go on the air and tell you this, because if I do I’ll be fired.”
In Wyoming, one writer has contemplated starting a magazine covering the entire Rocky Mountain region giving an alternative view to the predominant liberal to mushy middle approach of every major metropolitan newspaper in the region.
The region consists of eight states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. These states in what has been called "Sagebrush Revolution” country constitute what is probably the most conservative part of the United States. And not one single major newspaper there offers a conservative voice.
That would seem to confirm Goldberg’s report of a Los Angeles Times survey of 3,000 journalists nationwide. It showed that the average newsperson at the grass roots — forget for the moment the Eastern establishment correspondents — is way out of step with the views of the people in the same community.
Hannity says he himself was lucky in that after the college radio experience, commercial station managers were still willing to hire him, knowing that he was a conservative, and he had long stays wherever he went.
This writer, who worked in local radio and television for years before coming to Washington, also had the good fortune of working for good people along the way.
It is a fact, however, that you can go to newsrooms in the conservative heartland and find on-air reporters, news writers or editors who have contempt for their readers, listeners or viewers whom they will privately denounce as "hicks,” "hayseeds,” "rednecks,” etc. It shows up in many of the editorial pages in spades. But what is far worse is that it shows up in the "slant” of their supposedly unbiased news reports or front-page stories.
Staffers at many network affiliates strive SO mightily to be "with it.” They spout the conventional wisdoms they hear from the network correspondents because they want to convince themselves or others that they are SO sophisticated.
The question mentioned at the outset of this report about how to "slant” a story came from an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was talking to a reporter he had sent out to cover the Clinton campaign as the then-governor of Arkansas visited a nearby community.
A case can be made for assigning reporters to certain stories precisely because their personal views are known to be opposed to the subject of the story. It tends to filter out any temptation to fawn or write a puff piece. Of course, such a policy does not always working both political directions, but that’s another matter.
What made this case so egregious, in the view of former Atlanta newspaper employee Guy Garrett who witnessed it and recalled it in an interview with NewsMax.com, is that the reporter was so obviously sent to help the candidate by writing a hatchet job on his opponent, the first President Bush.
"They picked the one who had the most animosity to Bush,” Garrett explained. "When she came back from being at the whistle stop, the editor who was in charge at the time” asked the question about slanting the story.
Even though the area Clinton had visited was very Republican, "they actually discussed how they were going to take the story and use it to demonstrate that Bush wasn’t really a strong candidate.”
"Most of what they did was talk about what he [Clinton] didn’t say, rather than go into reporting the news about what he did say, or being accurate with the people that were there. They spent more time with the issues that he didn’t address.”
So it was a campaign commercial disguised as a news report?
"That’s not unusual,” said Garrett, who also noted a conservative columnist who was "the only conservative on the paper’s editorial board.” Ultimately his column was downgraded to less prominent places in the paper.
Goldberg’s book mentions "denial” by media establishment liberals who actually think they are middle of the road. Garrett on the other hand, thinks most liberals he’s met in local media outlets know what they’re doing. A line of work that was once a blue-collar profession now has more college-educated reporters, fresh out of the left-wing environment of politically correct campus life.
"They know what they’re doing,” he said. "They’re going to hide behind that moderate label as best they can.”
The issue of liberal media outlets that are themselves far to the left of the people they serve is another book waiting to be written, Hannity agreed.
Goldberg’s new book on establishment media liberalism may have been the crack in the dam that will lead to a flood of discussion and writing about the problem on the local and national level.
Goldberg is "the first person to do this,” Hannity said. "He’s paying a big personal price for it. All he’s done is told the truth, and look at the names that he’s been called in just a short period of time.”
There are people out there, some of them entrenched on the local level, who try to root out conservative thought in the media. Even after a media conservative leaves his community and goes on to other things, they will try to blackball him. This is easy to do in a highly visible profession.
"It is interesting,” Hannity told NewsMax, "because anything that we do as conservatives that is [perceived as] out of line; it is highlighted. And it will follow you for the rest of your career. But that same standard doesn’t exist for liberals.”
Hollywood has been lionizing 10 writers and producers who were exposed because of accusations they were under Communist Party discipline and tried to use their movies to advance that cause over 50 years ago. Documentaries have been produced spotlighting the supposed evils of "the blacklist” of motion picture leftists. But Hannity points out you won’t find media sympathy for the blacklist against conservatives in the media, even though it happens regularly.
However, the radio/TV host believes he gets the last laugh because in the end; "sometimes your critics can make you better, make you more introspective, more thoughtful.”
That’s an opportunity that Goldberg has given the networks, Hannity pointed out. But he does not think they will pick up on it, and as a result they will continue to lose viewers. Perhaps someday in the long run, he said, the networks may decide to eliminate their news departments in the face of increasing competition from 24-hour cable news networks such as Fox News Channel, which features, among other offerings "Hannity & Colmes.”
As an example of liberal determination to black out conservative thought, Fox News has been criticized for hiring Hannity, even though he is counterbalanced by the liberal Colmes.
Goldberg's Book "Bias".
Bill O'Reily's book "The No Spin Zone"
Barabra Olsen's book "the last days"
And radio talk show host Neal Boortz's book
All of these books are by non-liberal writers. They are doing well (If you can find them because the leftest are hinding them) and the media doesn't report it. They would report it if it was four Liberal writers. The worm is slowing turning in the media. More people are coming out and saying proudly "I'm a conservitive!" And the left can't stop them.
I can attest to that. I've been told that the local rag, the Reno Gazette-Journal (Urinal), is used in some universities as an example of blatant media bias. I walked into a grocery store recently and was confronted by a salesman that wanted to give me a free copy of the Urinal if I listened to his sales pitch. I told him, "I haven't read that piece of s--t in 10 years and I'm not about to start now." The salesman then confided in me and said that he had been hearing that all day. In fact, he said that the word 's--t' was the most common adjective used to describe the Urinal. He was from Sacramento and had no idea that trying to give away the local paper was a losing sales plan.
Oh paaaaallllleeeaaaassseeee! Goldberg is laughing all the way to the bank...... on a side note, I can't wait for my copy of his book to arrive. LOL
And another thing; in news jargon, "slant" or "angle" often is used to mean the particular aspect of a news story that'll receive the reporter's primary attention. If the president gives a speech announcing two or three new initiatives, there'll be a discussion about which is the most important and should be the main focus of the story.
To be sure, this very process makes it possible to inject bias into the story. But it needn't turn out that way, and usually doesn't, in my experience...
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