But once I clearly understood that Accuracy in Media (AIM) could produce clear-cut instances of "bias in the media" until the cows come home, I decided that indeed there was no point in waiting around for those cows--that the only interesting question was not "whether" but why. And I flatter myself that I have developed an incomplete but fairly satisfactory theory.
That theory began to take shape about 1990, and you can see its status as of 9/01 and its development to its present state in the <a href="http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3ba20deb5ac5.htm"> http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3ba20deb5ac5.htm</a> thread.
In a nutshell: Journalism is the pilot fish of liberalism. Journalism has inherent liberal tendencies built into its business plan, those tendencies self-reinforce and weed out conservative viewpoints, and reinforce liberal tendencies in the rest of the entertainment media, from which journalism is distinct only in being a nonfiction (not explicitly fiction) genre of publishing. Liberal politicians simply sail downwind of the resulting propaganda tendency--a blatantly demagogic procedure.
Codes of journalistic ethics are irrelevant for analyzing journalistic treatment of liberals, in the sense that you don't need ethics rules to know not to embarass members of your own group. And codes of ethics are useful for analyzing journalistic treatment of conservatives, not for any realistic assurance that journalism actually avoid doing them, but only as a checklist of things to expect that journalism is likely to do.
And those who doubt that should ask themselves, not why it should be so, but exactly why it should not be so. And who told them that it was not so.
Davis spokesman Peter Ragone said, "Leno didn't endorse Schwarzenegger? Everyone in California thought he did."
Which one of them is right? Both, and neither. Objectivity is impossible.Tradition and history tell one story, current events seem to tell another. Tradition and history tell a conservative story. By focusing on the short-term things like a house burned down, and not noticing all the things that went well (e.g., all the people gainfully doing a day's work on the same day that the house burned down), the news inherently tells an anticonservative story.
Except on a 9/11, the news is just entertainment--and keeping a radio to your ear for a 9/11 report is paranoid. Entertainment is "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl." Journalism is mostly the "boy loses girl" part. The "boy meets girl" and the "boy gets girl" parts are the everyday blessings of God. They are great--but they don't make "good copy."
It is because journalism's role is entertainment that its perspective is inherently anticonservative. Journalism is the pilot fish of liberalism, and the prevailing propaganda wind down which demagogues sail. Journalists, liberal politicians, and all other celebrities who want to justify their celebrity by sounding profound simply flatter each other and make each other look good.
That system even applies to academia, except in sciences with a fairly firm attachment to reality--and even among scientists the desire to look intelligent without serious thought results in aggressively projecting PC attitudes outside the scientists' own disciplines. The system works by a get-along by going-along system, and it tends to dominate expensive, high-production-value media because it protects against risk.
But that system inherently limits the perspective its acolytes allow themselves to see; it is a system in which everyone agrees to avoid the extremes of left or right--but one in which everyone is so immersed in the self-congratulatory worldview of leftism that they also agree that there actually is no such thing as "left"--and that the divide is between "moderates" and "right-wing extremists."
Journalists critique the rest of society, and conservatives in particular, from a leftist point of view--but deny the very existence of their own POV. Conservatives, OTOH, accept the fact that they do indeed have a POV. By accepting that their POV has a name rather than being the absence of a POV, conservatives are self-critical and admit that they critique journalism and the rest of society from that POV.
Conservatives are very uncomfortable with demagoguery and go-along-to-get-along compromise of principle, and that makes them pariahs to the go-along-to-get-along crowd. They are the curve-breakers who see the establishment's underwear and are unwilling to pretend otherwise. Their reward from the establishment--from journalism, from academia, from Hollywood--is scorn, ridicule, and vituperation.
Thus conservatives see journalism's codes of ethics, and laugh bitterly. You do not need a code of ethics to know how to treat your friends kindly--and a "code of ethics" which is not, and can never be, enforced against your abuse of your critics is a facade. Such enforcement would have to come from the very establishment which brooks no criticism of itself.
"The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." The First Amendment designs a system of open debate, and of judgement of that debate by we-the-people and not by the government. The liberal establishment is illegitimate by its own standards, but not by those of the Constitution and conservative principle, except to the extent that the government entangles itself in political decisions pertaining of right only to the people themselves.
The solution to this conundrum is not for conservatives to apply liberal standards to liberalism, but to ridicule the liberal standards themselves. We have to laugh "objective" journalism out of the court of public opinion. And with its mock-bombastic "talent on loan from God", "all-seeing all-knowing Maja Rushie", "truth detector and Doctor of Democracy", and so forth, that is exactly the project of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
NBC Supports the Politically Partisan Leno
The New York Times ^ | October 10, 2003 | BILL CARTER