Posted on 12/09/2001 10:20:48 AM PST by freeforall
In praise of bias
Journalists have been accused for years of marching in liberal ideological lockstep. They faced such charges even before CBS talking head Dan Rather turned up at a Democratic Party fundraiser, then awkwardly explained that he didn't know it was a partisan event until he got there and it ... ummm ... would have been rude to leave.
Every election season for the past decade has seen Republicans trot out a 1992 Roper poll of Washington bureau chiefs and correspondents. It found that, in that year's presidential election, reporters in the nation's capital voted 89 percent for Clinton and 7 percent for Bush.
Even Walter Cronkite famously admitted at the 1996 Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner: "Everybody knows that there's ... a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents."
But if most journalists adhere to liberal dogma on matters such as gun control and the environment -- often providing coverage so biased it's laughable -- they're equally lock-step on other controversial issues. Journalists' prevailing positions on drugs and foreign policy don't seem so liberal.
Of the firearms debate, William R. Tonso convincingly reports in Reason magazine that, "although big journalism's misleading coverage of this issue can be partly explained by a combination of ignorance and arrogance, it seems clear that hostility toward the right to keep and bear arms has played an important role."
Likewise, though, Craig Reinarman and Ceres Duskin write for the International Journal on Drug Policy that, "throughout the twentieth century the media helped foment a series of drug scares, each magnifying drug menaces well beyond their objective dimensions." In January of 2000, Salon revealed that the official stance on the "drug menace" was so readily accepted at TV networks that they happily took federal money to insert anti-drug messages in scripts for prime-time shows.
And if liberalism has traditionally been associated with dovish foreign policy, then journalists escape charges of a uniform pinkish tint. Over the past decade, mainstream U.S. news outlets have been justifiably taken to task for their near-monolithic cheerleading in favor of American military adventures in Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Journalists at major American newspapers and electronic news operations do indeed seem to share a common view of the world to a startling extent. But that shared viewpoint is less left-of-center than it is pro-government.
Yes, journalists often hold liberal views on social issues where moral differences rather than questions of government power are at stake -- abortion and homosexuality, for instance. But, with the exception of freedom of the press (is that a surprise?), it's difficult to think of a contentious social or economic issue on which staffers at flagship media operations don't have a demonstrable bias in favor of more, rather than less, government intervention.
Why this should be gets into speculative territory, but it isn't such a mystery. As journalism has become professionalized over the years, the street urchins turned ink-stained wretches of "Front Page" fame have been replaced by ambitious J-school grads from urban and suburban upper-middle-class backgrounds.
Reporters might once have been adherents of political views ranging across the spectrum. But modern journalists were educated together, think much the same, and all want to end up at the New York Times or CNN.
They also went to school with kids who went on to government jobs. With people "just like us" calling the shots at an alphabet soup of regulatory and law-enforcement agencies, it could be relatively difficult for reporters to think of government as something misguided or dangerous.
The tragedy here isn't the existence of bias -- it's the uniformity of that bias. In the past, news operations in the United States traditionally adhered to one point of view or another. The measure of a good newspaper wasn't whether or not it was unbiased -- a difficult goal to meet, if it's possible at all -- but whether it was thorough and accurate in its coverage. Newspaper readers picked through the conflicting biases and sorted out the "right" spin for themselves.
Today's professionalized media claims to present objective coverage of events, but with journalists so often of one mind on the issues of the day, that "objective" coverage too often turns out to be filtered through the view they and their friends have of the world.
The reaction -- a healthy reaction -- has been the re-emergence in recent years of alternative news outlets with overt biases at odds with those of the mainstream media. The evolution of the Internet has empowered those dissatisfied with the established press, easing the way for them to create news operations of their own that bypass the information gatekeepers. With right-of-center folks screaming the loudest about the media's political tilt, it's no wonder that conservative and libertarian viewpoints are well-represented among these upstart operations, though they don't have the field to themselves.
WorldNetDaily, NewsMax and the Cybercast News Service, right-of-center operations all, are among the news alternatives that have so-far weathered the online wipe-out that has claimed or threatens to claim many more-mainstream publications. They all cover news stories that their editors believe have been wrongly overlooked by the mainstream media, or simply offer a different perspective than anybody is likely to find in the pages of a "newspaper of record."
Also among the living -- at least so far -- are such operations as the Environmental News Network, with a self-explanatory view of the world, and CounterPunch, the provocative left-of center newsletter published by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. They too offer spins on the news that differ from the takes usually found in big-media newsrooms.
Offering a service unique to the online world, Free-Market.Net's own Freedom News doesn't try to compete in terms of original coverage, but compiles daily annotated links to stories of interest to its generally libertarian readers. The service delivers headlines and links directly to subscribers' e-mail in-boxes, ensuring that they won't miss important stories and commentary.
None of these alternatives claims to offer the unspun truth -- but that's a sign of their honesty. News coverage untouched by the opinions of those presenting the news is probably an impossible goal, and would likely be deadly dull if it could be achieved.
There's nothing inherently wrong with Dan Rather attending political fundraisers; at least we know where he stands. But a healthy media is one in which more then one point of view benefits from such largesse.
And if liberalism has traditionally been associated with dovish foreign policy, then journalists escape charges of a uniform pinkish tint. Over the past decade, mainstream U.S. news outlets have been justifiably taken to task for their near-monolithic cheerleading in favor of American military adventures in Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Liberalism has never been "dovish"- that is a great myth. It was "dovish" only during the last stages of the Viet nam debacle when the Democrat party became hijacked by Leftists rather than liberals. The "dovish" stance of these Leftists was not about "peace" but was about being anti American and Pro Soviet and Pro Communist. Liberals and Leftists in this country had been the biggest war mongers before Viet Nam and the Cold War. It was "progressives" who waged the Civil War. It was Liberals who boosted for our involvment in WWI and WWII. Conservatives stood opposed to these wars. But when America was confronted with the Cold War against the Mecca of the Left - Soviet Russia- liberals and Leftists suddenly became advocates of "peace" and "cooperation."
Now our government and media are largely controlled by these "dovish" leftists. While the President may be a Republican the career government employees and back door policy makers are markedly liberal or leftist. These former doves- cheered as Clinton waged his various phoney wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Why? Becasue- that it serves their ends. They cheered those wars and reported on them uncritically becasue a democrat was waging them- one of their own.
Clinton was also one of "them" so anything he did was sacred.Nothing ever rose to the level of being wrong.But of course they don't have any standards.
This guy doesn't get it. Real Americans want less intrusive government. Liberal/socialist/communist media hacks want more.
The author's main point is that while there is a media bias, it is "not liberal" so much as it is "pro-government". This is misleading. It seems to imply that there is such a thing as "liberalism" nowadays which is not pro-government.
After all, the author's primary example on which he can agree that the media is biased in a "liberal" direction is on the gun issue. The media is virulently anti-gun-rights, and the author concedes this is one expression of a "liberal" bias.
But what the hell is so "liberal" about trying to take everyone's guns away, in the first place? It is a misnomer to begin with.
The truth is that the closest thing to real "liberals" which exists today would have to be the libertarians. On the other side - on the side of government power - are the Leftists. Most people call Leftists "liberals" nowadays, so when they accuse the media of having a "liberal" bias, what they are really saying is that it is biased Left: in favor of big government powers, an established political upper class molding society from above.
As the author correctly states, there is such a bias in favor of government action.
And so do I!
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