John Stossel claims media has liberal bias

Great Debates
21

And, of course, we could all take a trip down memory lane to remember how the “liberal media” covered the 2000 elections. Remember, how the “liberal media” jumped all over Dick Cheney’s quip in his debate against Lieberman that “the government had nothing to do with it” (in reference to his hefty income in the 1990s), pointing out how in fact there is lots of circumstantial evidence that Cheney’s appeal to Halliburton had a lot to do with his government connections…with their government contracts rising dramatically during Cheney’s tenure? And, remember how they failed to take the bait on the supposed exaggerations of Al Gore but instead pointed out how the claims that he claimed to have invented the internet and served as the model for Love Story were exaggerations themselves and that the real statements he made were not significantly out-of-line with the facts?

Okay, I don’t remember that either.

22

Because they are dangerous? We may find examples of bias on many issues. But every news station I see is quick to air news of a local killing (in white neighborhoods, of course). Are they “pro-murder” because of this?

Wow. I didn’t know being for gun control measures was the defining hallmark of being a liberal. I guess I’ll just take your word for it.

Because one side favors the ability for a woman to choose and the other side wishes that there were no legal abortions. Is that not an accurate choice of words? What would you prefer?

None, as far as I can tell. Perhaps you could elaborate.

The same reason they referred to many other terrorist groups throughout the world as groups. Because they are groups. They often have agendas for their violence, all of which can be neatly explained by mentioning that “an [agenda-based] [group] destroyed property today…” This is not limited to PETA. It is conciseness.

Because their defining characteristic was simply that they were opponents. They didn’t form a group. They weren’t from a pre-existing group with a cause that had anything to do with the protocol. The common thread between them was only that they were opponents. Thus, saying anything else would be wrong. On the other hand, being an environmental protocol, pre-existing groups who focused on the environment become startlingly relevant, wouldn’t you say?

23

I personally think that the failure of my initial reply to go through followed by evidence that the hamsters had consumed the text, to be evidence of a left-wing conspiracy. At least that makes as much sense as ascribing the rise and persistence of right-wing opinions in America to the role of money.

I fear you are still suffering the effects of denial.

Anyone who’s listened to talk radio, for example, in recent years has heard the outpouring of resentment from conservatives about treatment of their views in the mainstream media. One can claim that this is contrived, false etc. but one can hardly deny that these programs and other alternative sources of “news” have flourished in response to strong perceptions of liberal media bias.
If the more recent spattering of left-wing protests about right-wing/insufficiently left-wing media bias represents more than a tit-for-tat response, we’ll no doubt see much more vigorous left-wing alternative “news” sources arise in the near future. I wouldn’t bet the farm on that happening.

You may speculate as you wish on the nature of the press and prevailing views abroad. I am commenting about what I have long observed in this country.

24

Here is a report from FAIR on a survey to gauge the political views of journalists relative to the general public. Basically, while journalists may be to the left of the public on certain social issues (probably not surprising since I believe that views on these issues also probably correlate fairly strongly with education, amount one has travelled, whether one lives in an urban or rural area, etc.), they are not on a variety of economic issues…In fact, they are often to the right of the public.

Perceptions do not reality make, my friend. I am arguing on another message board (which I ought never have gone to) against someone who believes there is a massive left-wing conspiracy in regards to global warming that includes the media, the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, the EPA, the councils of the American Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union, and British Petroleum. People will believe what they want to believe, especially when they are constantly fed lies and deceptive information. Also, the conservative media folks like Rush have been much better at making their shows simple and entertaining. There are little things like facts and complicated lines of arguments that tend to make liberals pretty boring by comparison. Only a few people like Roger Moore have been able to overcome this (and admittedly at the cost of playing lose with the facts).

25

Let’s try that sentence again:

Only a few people like Michael Moore have been able to overcome this (and admittedly at the cost of playing loose with the facts).

26

Whoops! I almost forgot, Science and Nature are in on it too. In fact, the whole peer-reviewed body of scientific literature apparently can’t be trusted. I should add that this person has a master’s degree in geology and seems to be a pretty intelligent guy. He does, however, have an extremely strong libertarian /anti-government bend.

27

I think this sometimes, but then I have met a great number of intelligent people who are conservative so I’m not sure information itself is the key. jshore below mentions the amount of the world one has been exposed to (journalists, certainly, would see a lot of different situations) so this might be a factor, but I’ve known more than a few liberals who are extremely isolated. I guess the matter is just complicated itself.

That said, I have my own pet conspiracy theory. See, the right is attempting to discredit sources of information. Why? Because they get to poison the well. Suppose I convince you that the media is liberal. Now you view all reports skeptically or as outright falsehoods. But why didn’t this taint the conservative views expressed? Because there are still a small minority working hard to bring you the truth and keep integrity in the media! So they get a double bonus of ostensibly being more “fair” and being able to discredit what liberals say before they even say it (if they get to say it at all, of course).

Anyone have any spare foil hats?

They’re just defenders of truth and honesty working hard to get the word out, see. One must almost suspect they run pirate broadcasting centers in their basement in order to penetrate the liberal glass ceiling that so dominates what is reported… but they continue fighting the good fight.

28

I think you’re on to something here. This exactly describes what I was facing in that global warming discussion. I tried to point out that I was citing only impartial scientific sources (no cites to Greenpeace or Sierra Club or NRDC or whatever). And, he was citing all these right-wing libertarian sources. But, see, my sources were really all biased. And, his were indeed that minority who are valiantly fighting to keep the truth alive and set us free from government statism and all that.

A related point that Eric Alterman makes in “What Liberal Media” is that these charges amount to “working the refs”. He even has a quote from a conservative that sounds pretty much like an admission on that point.

29

That’s really interesting, jshore. I mostly figured that it was an unintentional effect rather than the more overt action I painted in my post (elucidator tends to get one in such flowery modes of expression), but I’ll have to check that book out. Promising in the link, anyway, is the comment that “there is evidence for both sides” which, I hope, means that it won’t be too selective.

The poisoned well is a well-worn rhetorical fallacy, but it is sometimes surprisingly hard to spot. As I become more and more interested in watching the news and reading magazines I see the trend happening. At first I thought it was unintentional, but there is a certain self-promoting quality to it. That it could ever be popular in the media to suggest a liberal bias to the very media one is using should be so contradictory as to be absurd.

But here we are.

I roughly feel that there the liberal bias is really in terms of what is covered and that the conservative bias is in terms of how it is covered. They might spend more time, for example, reporting things about gun control than individual-rights gun proponents. But the people they interview about it might be rather nutty, thus leaving a net effect that the media “cares” more about liberal issues and that liberals are stupid.

It’s just an interesting topic, at any rate, and my growing cynicism is a bias in itself. :slight_smile:

30

The explosion of right-wing talk radio and the birth of Fox News are quite real.

So what’s the explanation?

  1. A conspiracy of lies.
  2. A conspiracy of money.
  3. Large numbers of people who feel that their views have been derided and/or minimized in the mainstream press.

You seem to have bought into reasons #1 and #2.

#3 makes a lot more sense to me.

31

It never ceases to amuse me that the people who buy into the “liberal media” story somehow fail to recognize that they’re hearing all these accusations in the media.

In other news, Internet posters named Cervaise are untrustworthy! Never believe anything posted under that name! Don’t even read it, for your ears could go flying off your skull with the most adorable little whing sound! And nobody wants that! Just say No to Cervaise’s lies!

32

It’s not really a conspiracy. It is pretty out in the open. I also explained how conservative talk-show hosts have been better at articulating a simple message. As has been pointed out before, it is the sort of embodied in liberal thought that things are nuisanced…not so black and white…complicated and that we need to understand things from other people’s points of view. This doesn’t really sell that well compared to the sort of bombastic stuff that Rush gives people.

Look, people like to be titillated…Everyone does. Look, I almost never watch TV (and have only an old b&w one at home) but when I do, I often tend to get taken in by junky shows. When I was on vacation, I was watching this dating show on MTV where the woman gets to go into the guys’ houses and investigate, including using a blacklight to reveal stains on the sheets. Another time, I was watching Howard Stern interview Pamela Anderson while his sidekick tried to look up her skirt and comment on what he saw. However, that doesn’t mean I consider this to be quality programming. (This is exactly why I don’t want the market deciding everything in this country. I think their are ways people can express their desires with a little more rationality than they often do through the market.)

Couple this with the fact that the Right has been able to appeal to a lot of people on issues of “values”…i.e., the social issues…and here is the only place where I think it is possible that the media might sometimes lean to the left. (At least on such issues, there is a plausible argument that journalists viewpoints lean left…Whether that translates into their reporting is less clear.)

33

The problem with number 3 Jackmannii is that I see more liberal views derided and/or minimized in the mainstream press.

It is not just me: one has to take into account what the liberals consider “their” news: once Fox appeared in the scene, conservatives considered it the “fair and balanced” news: in other words “their news” I have seen both the irrational and reasonable liberal groups out there and many liberals don’t consider even CNN “their” news, I do consider the network news (except Fox) more balanced overall, but the whitewash of many items (e.g. news on the conglomeration and weakening of rules so the media gets bigger and with less voices of dissent) makes them IMO more in favor of the conservative side.

No matter how liberal reporters or owners can be, they cannot be as liberal with the news as they would like:

From the book: Witness to a century- By George Seldes: In the "Spain broke the heart of the world.” chapter:
J.David Stern was the owner of the New York Post. In a conversation, George Seldes mentioned that Stern was a liberal, and that liberalism was not being reflected at all in the obvious conservative slant, the news from the Spanish civil war were getting. Stern replied:

“What do you want me to do, take a quixotic stand, print the truth about everything including bad medicine, impure food and crooked stock market offerings, and lose all my advertising contracts and go out of business- or make compromises with all the evil elements and continue to publish the best liberal newspaper possible under these compromising circumstances?”

Amazingly, that was in 1936, and it looks like things have not changed much:

As I saw in a recent Charlie Rose interview in PBS, circa 2002. The New York Times knew Enron’s methods were bananas and Enron was likely not a good investment.
The Times economic reporter had this commentary, on why they did not report much of that conclusion:

Because “Other things came up!”

Charlie Rose, not making any follow up questions to that whitewash of an answer, just completed the picture.

34

Or, perhaps, just perhaps, the sports/entertainment division of CBS – a different entity from their news division – chose not to air a commercial during the Super Bowl because it was inflammatory and likely to offend the audience which would be viewing during that particular period of time with little positive effect to offset the negative.

The MoveOn.org commercial rejection whining has gotten out of hand. The ad is intentionally pandering and in a very specific sense quite inaccurate, but CBS’s refusal to air it during one of its key ad periods just absolutely must be a sign of their complicity with the Bush administration and refusal to criticize it, not at all an editorial judgment about the quality of the ad. Oh heavens, no, it couldn’t be that they just didn’t think that the content was appropriate for the timeslot!

On another note – catsix raises good points about labeling. One of the ones that I’ve noticed (admittedly only after reading Goldberg’s Bias) is the game of labels. NOW? If mainstream media outlets are to be believed, it’s a completely centrist women’s advocacy group, to the point that its political/partisan affiliations need not be named. CWA on the other hand, is a conservative women’s organization, and on the rare occasions when a representative of CWA appears on a news program, its crucial that viewers are informed of the conservatism of the group so that they know that the CWA rep is speaking from a biased/partisan perspective. :rolleyes:

35

The defining hallmark? I doubt it. But if you try to tell me that gun control, on the whole, is not an issue that liberals and leftists push, you’ll be wrong.

It is typically those on the left: Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, Dan Rather, and many of those in Hollywood, who are adamantly opposed to gun rights.

To the effect of misinformation. ELF is not an ‘enviornmental’ group. They are a terrorist group.

Or they might just leave out an important part of the story, and do something like point out that the murderer at the Appalachian Law School was a gunman, but that the students who ordered him to drop his weapon did so at gunpoint, as did The Washington Post and Newsday. They might even outright lie, and use a statement like “students tackled the man while he was still armed,” as did the Western Morning News out of Plymouth.

In all, some 208 stories were published about the incidents, 68 specifying exactly the type of gun used by the assialant. Only four stated that Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross used guns at all.

If the media is so damn interested in reporting the facts, why did it so seriously drop the ball there?

36

But that would still mean they weren’t liberally biased. Unless this is another case where paradoxes prove things, like “not airing liberal views is proof of a liberal media” or something. I suppose that’s the natural follow-up to “the airing of conservative views in the media is the best proof that the media is liberal”. Or something.

37

Speaking of labeling: I don’t trust Goldberg:
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/8/nunberg-g.html

38

Oh yeah, the gun issue, one item conservatives conveniently forget is that journalists go to dangerous situations with no weapons, so as to be impartial to the eyes of opposing forces, the many deaths of colleagues by gun shots (some even in the USA), can indeed put a dislike of guns in your trade, and it has very little to do with being liberal or conservative, I bet there are even gun restrictions even in Fox’s HQs (related to that: other corporations frown on hiring gun nuts), I do not think this is just a liberal issue.

39

I’m not going to tell you anything, I support individual gun rights.

I see.

I’m not trying to suggest the media is honest or intelligent. Indeed, I’m quite sure most journalists sacrifice honesty for sensationalism in a great number of cases, or selectively cull facts and fill in what they missed themselves. This has nothing to do with a liberal bias per se. They misreport a lot of items about everything.

They’re not interested in reporting facts, in a general sense. They’re interested in

  1. gaining viewers, and
  2. not pissing off their superiors who are
  3. wealthy conservatives running
  4. multi-billion dollar businesses.

This should be so obvious as to not even bear mentioning. You bring up points where there are labelling disagreements, but then get upset when they are actually honest about it. I don’t get it. It is in their interest to present sensational reports as quickly as possible, excepting all that liberal coverage of the war on Iraq where I couldn’t go five seconds without hearing some damn reporter complaining that we shouldn’t even be there, and being sure to interview only anti-war pundits and not hang on every word the administration said.

Oh wait, that didn’t happen. Hmm.

Well it must be all the shows that dedicate time to debating the different ways to improve the welfare system without reducing benefits.

Wait, that doesn’t happen either.

Maybe it is all the news time dedicated to pointing out the problems with the enormous deficit we’ve run up.

Hmm, I missed this, too.

Maybe it isn’t a friggin’ liberal media.

40

not this garbage again. Goldberg Lies.

[sub](oh, wait, it was from a book by a guy telling you what you WANT to hear, it must be true!)[/sub]

Yes, but Mary Jane supporting terrorism? That’s perfectly non-controversial and 100% true. Roll with it! That and CBS dropping the Reagans movie and lobbying for support of rules letting their tenticles reach further sort of makes them look like conservative lapdogs. But they must be liberal. Goldberg said so, and they have Dan Rather, who Goldberg hates and spends most of Bias badmouthing randomly. Ignore the fact they are just clamoring to make more money, and the best way to do that right now is to Hail to the Chimp.
Once again, they are biased towards MONEY. You only see the liberal bias because your partisan hate is blinding you to the truth.