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We’ve all known about “bias in the media” for a long time. I got the word back during the Carter Administration. The only question I had was, “Why is journalism ideologically monolithic?” and ”Why is journalism ideologically leftist?”
It took me a decade or more to hit on the idea that the leftist slant typical of journalism was explicable by reference to Journalism’s slogans, “If it bleeds, it leads,” “No news is good news (because good news 'isn’t news’),” and “There’s nothing more worthless than yesterday’s newspaper (IOW, “meet your deadline!’)” The first two of these dicta mandate that journalism will tend to be negative, the third implies that journalism will tend to be superficial. The conclusion is that journalism inherently tends to be cynical, hence not conservative.
The next point that became clear - after a shockingly long time - was that the telegraph - specifically the Associated Press newswire - was instrumental in homogenizing journalism. This can easily be understood by reference to
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
When you recognize that the AP newswire is a continuous virtual meeting of all the major journalism institutions in the US - and not for “merriment or diversion” but exactly about business - you can readily see why wire service journalism could devolve into go-along-and-get-along ideological conformity in “a conspiracy against the public.” A conspiracy, that is, to make cynicism seem mainstream, and to promote the conceit that journalists are a priestly class of “objective" wise men.
The politicians who go along with journalism - by promoting journalism's theme that criticism is a higher calling than performance - get positive labels such as “progressive” or “liberal” or “moderate.” Politicians who promote the theme that performance of socially necessary services and production is a higher calling than criticism get negative labels such as “right wing” and “conservative.”
If journalism is objective, we knew that George Zimmerman was a murderer and it was a waste of time to conduct a trial where some other outcome was possible. If journalism is objective, there is no reason for elections where the public votes for our government officials; the “conservative” should never attain office. If you don’t believe that, you understand that the conceit of journalistic objectivity is profoundly subversive of democratic principle.