The 'Liberal' Media

Great Debates
121

Don’cha see, Izzy? The Reps this week, and the Dems in two week, want to put on these infomercials, selling themselves to the public. The infotainment (formerly the news) industry covers these conventions as if they produced actual news.

Like in Seattle and Washington, the media cover the protesters only if they cause trouble (if peaceful protests aren’t worth putting on TV, why is the cheerleading on the inside worth covering?).

Your link shows exactly how the left-wing media treat the left-wing protesters. The police exercise prior restraint against dissenters and the reporter covers it from the police perspective. How dare these people block traffic! How dare they impede commerce!

I’ve been listening to one of my local NPR affiliates for the past few months, as all of the hosts fret over the possibility of disruptions due to protesters in L.A. God forbid a local business should lose business because protesters – some with orange-hair (gasp!) and nose-rings (shiver) – want to march down the street. note that none of these businesses complained when the Lakers shut down the streets for their victory parade. Of course, they weren’t parading to point out some societal shortcoming that the local, state, or federal government would just as soon ignore.

I guess acceptable political protest in this country ended with the Boston Tea Party.

122

For some reason, Dan Rather seems to be the newsman who infuriates conservatives most, though I don’t see why. He’s probably the most moderate of the major network news anchors. Peter Jennings is the guy who SHOULD be the bane of the right, because he never makes the slightest pretense of objectivity. He’s a leftist, through and through, and it shows. Anyone who heard him SCOLDING the American people in 1994 for electing a Republican Congress (yes, scolding- he himself compared the conservative electorate to 2 year olds throwing a tantrum… as if Bill and Hillary are our parents, and we little brats should shut up and do what Mommy and Daddy tell us!) has to concede as much.

As I’ve said before, most of the rants against “liberal media” began in the Seventies, when America was far more dependent on the 3 major networks and a handful of other outlets than it is now. Today, people have a host of choices, so it’s not quite accurate to speak of “the liberal media” as if they still had a monopoly on the airwaves. Still, whenever there’s a story on the major networks or in the major (liberal) daily papers, have you noticed that…

  1. Guys like Jesse Helms are regularly described as “ultraconservative” and “far right” even in (supposedly) objective news stories? Ever see Ted Kennedy or Tom Harkin described as “an ultraliberal” in the TImes or on ABC news?

  2. Liberal Republicans are NEVER described as “liberals,” but always as “moderates”?

In addition, have you ever seen a TV interviewer treat spokesmen for liberal causes the way Bryant Gumbel treats conservatives?

123

shocked But astorian, according to Izzy there’s no such thing as a liberal Republican (coughTomCampbellcough)! How can what you’re saying be true??

If you think conservatives arre the only ones who have labelling issues, by the way, you really ought to check out the second link I provided about the think tanks. Liberal or left-leaning think tanks almost always get denoted as such, which conservative institutes (Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute) are rarely so labelled.

And you still haven’t told me how you consider the New York Times and Washington Post to be liberal papers. They aren’t conservative, that’s for sure, but you’re skating on absolute polarities again…

124

FWIW, IRL, I’m a journalist. I offer my opinions, based not so much on studies (I presume, you can do a 'net search for FAIR, AIM, The Media Research Center, etc.) but on what I’ve observed.

Please pardon the length of this post.

I would say, based on my interactions with other journalists, and my observations of the stories they tend to do and the sources they speak to…that the average journalist on the ground doing the interviewing tends to be liberal, or slightly to the left.

When I was learning to be a journalist, I tended to come across a fair number of people with liberal political values who wanted to be journalists in order to make a difference. Idealists…and this idealism drove why they wanted to write. And of these idealists, the overwhelming majority of these were at least a little liberal. For some reason…relatively few idealistic conservatives feel led to want to work in journalism.

In my university student newspaper days...I learned that this tendency has been in place for many years, since the '60s. And, with one notable exception, whenever I have heard of a student newspaper annoying its readers, it is because it has been too liberal. (During my days on campus, we conducted two readership surveys...and my paper's readers complained we were "too liberal" for their liking....and this was on a moderate campus.)

I would suggest that if the "pool of available talent" in journalism schools and student journalism tends to be a little liberal, then the media will become more liberal over time, very slowly and very gradually.

I don't feel qualified to respond to the question of whether corporate power can more than make up for a liberal media tendency. But, I would suspect that the reporters and the editors would have a day-to-day edge. While advertisers can have certain kinds of stories spiked, as a practical matter...they can't pick what stories will be written in the rest of the paper, or say who will be talked to as sources in the stories they can't touch.

When I consider questions of possible bias, in newspapers...I look at these factors:

1) What is in the lead paragraph of the story...the only one read by most readers. What point of view does it reflect?
2) Does each "side" get roughly the same amount of column space? Is each side close enough to the top of the story that a skimming reader gets some of both?
3) Does each "side" get to use its best arguments?

I do suggest that everyone read as widely as they can, and keep an eye on what the other ideological side is arguing, even if only to know what "the enemy" is saying.

Thanks.

125

I appreciate the insider’s viewpoint, Scribe. Thank you. (Personally, I think FAIR is far more reliable than AIM–but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I? :D)

For what it’s worth, another treatment of this topic is going on right here in the thread Strange Locales. A friend of mine, a producer for CNN, gives his take–followed by some, um, energized debate.

126

My three descriptors of the large-scale news media all begin with B, coincidentally.

Reporters and reporting are very biased, balanced, and bipartisan.

Balanced, because every article reporting the views of one side is going to include the views of “the” other side. Do you ever hear what Clinton said about something without hearing what Republican Congressional leaders said? I don’t

Bipartisan, because there is always considered to be only one other side.

Biased. Bipartisanship is bias in and of itself, but there are some other biases. None of them is the result of a conspiracy or any of that. The bias toward simplicity: the public doesn’t get much intellectual respect from editors, and I’m not sure the public deserves much respect. The bias towards death: the only things that make big news are political speeches, sports, and people dying. The bias towards “reporter talk”: short repeated phrases that people get used to like “Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega” (uhh, boss, what should we call him? Dictator? Autocrat? Strongman!)

None of this equates, in my eyes, to a liberal bias. The media are bipartisan and narrow. A Prohibitionist would look at the media and say they have a pro-liquor bias. A Libertarian would say they have a pro-autocratic bias. A Royalist would say they have a pro-republican bias. Socialists think they have a pro-capitalist bias, just as a few overexposed right-wingers think they have a liberal bias.

127

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Gadarene *
**I appreciate the insider’s viewpoint, Scribe. Thank you. (Personally, I think FAIR is far more reliable than AIM–but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I? :D)

 Thank you for your kind words. (Personally, I'm more of a conservative AIM and Media Research Center person than a FAIR advocate, but we can't be perfect, can we? :) )
 (I do think though, IMHO, that the North American media would tend to seem "liberal" to the mythical absolute centrist...for some of the reasons I've cited.)

 Boris B....Balance is *bad*?? You do mean only in the sense that...in your example...the Republicans would be the only "other" side cited, I hope.
128

Ooops. Only the first paragraph of the last post is Gadarene’s…The rest is my own reply. A posting error, sorry.

(Gadarene hasn’t had a “Road to Damascus” conversion…and won’t be joining the Young Republicans any time soon. )

129

Gadarene,

Must have misunderstood your point about the demonstrators. Sorry.

I may as well comment about that as well, since it ties in with my earlier remarks to sqweels that you took offense at.

The media, or at least the mass media, cannot present every viewpoint. They have a hard enough time getting people to pay attention to the major issues that are out there already. The media, on any issue is “biased” in favor of the mainstream viewpoints, in contrast to the alternatives, in that they will give far more coverage to those viewpoints. This is how it should be, for practical reason mentioned above.

The question is which viewpoints to consider the major ones and which to consider “alternative” viewpoints. Obviously, we would like to see those that are most rational treated with the most respect and those that are “far out” treated as such. Problem is that every person’s perspective on what is rational differs from the next person’s. The only non-biased way to approach this issue is to treat as mainstream those points of view that have a large amount of support among the general public.

It is this point that I was making earlier in my response to sqweels. Once you decide to ignore the amount of support a position has, there is no way a common ground can be found to have a set of standards regarding which positions occupy which points on the spectrum. Any standard could be proclaimed by any person, depending solely on his own personal perspective.

My specific response to sqweels was written tongue-in-cheek, but it should be noted that there is a well known professor of medical ethics in Princeton University by the name of Peter Singer who actually does advocate the position that infanticide is moral and should be legal, in some cases, until the child is about a month old. (His reasoning takes the anti-abortion logic and stands it on its head. Seeing no difference between a developed fetus and a newborn child, he says it should be legal to kill the child as well.)

Point about these demonstrations being that while the media should cover the demonstrations in an unbiased and factual way, there is no reason why they should be “sympathetic” to them. There is no reason that the media should feel under some sort of obligation to delve into the issues that the protestors are trying to highlight. The media covers the demonstrators like they would cover a building collapse. If there is public interest in the motivations of the protesters that should certainly not be suppressed. In this manner it is not unlike the Columbine High shootings, and other such events. Public interest may include a desire to know the motivations, and the media will cover it as such. But the idea that anyone who creates a civil disturbance suddenly acquires the “right” to have the media air his grievances is not a rational one.

Regarding the FAIR study, I ask again, who is FAIR? Are they a liberal group? I glanced at the link that you provided, and feel, again, that the terms liberal, conservative, and centrist, are too open to misinterpretation to allow the labeling to be done by a partisan group. In particular, I was always under the impression that the Brookings Institute is a left leaning think tank.

130

Arguably, John Stossel. He is no fan of liberals, at least the way I read it. I think Tim Russert tends more towards right-of-center than left-of-center, but he tries not to let it show as much.

Bryant Gumbel is just a schmuck. He seems to have trouble maintaining a veneer of professionalism, let alone balance.

131

Arrgh, Izzy! I feel you’ve just continued to ignore my main point here. You said:

You are bypassing the point I keep making about the survey of journalists that showed them to be more conservative on many non-globalization issues than the public as a whole! I freely admit, and have been saying since the beginning, that journalists tend to be more liberal than the general public on issues such as abortion, civil rights, SOCAS, and similar civil-liberties issues. But there are other issues besides those that can’t be classed as “globalization” (though I still don’t understand why you think that should be excluded, or why you believe that most people exclude it, from considerations of bias). I repeat:

How are Medicare, Social Security, undue corporate influence, taxation of the rich, environmental laws, and national healthcare “globalization issues”? They’re not! They’re precisely the sort of fundamental domestic issues that are very important to a lot of Americans. Yet on all of the above except environmental regulation, these journalists were on average more conservative than the larger public.

I appreciate Scribe’s point about liberal idealism among fledgling journalists—I’ve certainly always seen a lot of that in campus newspapers—and I think the remnants of that may well be in evidence in media liberalism on some social issues. But it hasn’t stopped these established journalists, the voices of our “papers of record”, from being on average relatively conservative on many other issues that don’t have anything to do with globalization.

And this, of course, completely ignores non-print media in which, as other posters have pointed out, conservative voices are much more prominent. To sum up:

  • If you’re trying to say that the major print media tend to be more liberal on many social issues than the average citizen, then duh! No debate.

  • If you’re trying to say that the major print media tend to be more liberal on the majority of the whole spectrum of political issues than the average citizen, you really haven’t proved your point. As Gadarene pointed out, most media voices don’t follow an ideological line on all issues, and as I pointed out, whatever “party line” there is seems to be not so much pro-liberal or pro-conservative as pro-rich. (And if we’re talking about the average citizen’s average political leanings, by the way, let’s not forget that the statistics I posted earlier indicated that there are more Democrats than Republicans, at least among registered voters.)

  • If you’re trying to say that the major print media tend to represent a viewpoint that even remotely resembles what progressives or Europeans would call “liberal”, you will be laughed out of the thread. (But I don’t think that’s your claim.)

There! Ignore that! :slight_smile:

132

Kimstu,

I actually feel that I have previously addressed all the issues that you bring up. In fact, much of this was in a post, addresed to you, on page one of this thread. But I shall not accuse you of ignoring me. It’s been a long thread. However, you might wish to reread this.

With regard to your second bulleted point, I again reiterate that the fact that the media overwhelmingly vote Democratic indicates that their cumulative position is to the left of the spectrum. If they would be so desparate to get tax breaks for the rich etc. (again assuming that the survey comparisons that FAIR used were valid), they would be presumably be voting Republican.

133

I don’t watch Gumbel, I only heard about the incident last week… the way I understand it, he made a post-interview remark that wasn’t supposed to air. That showed his leanings, but it doesn’t show bias.

Stossel, though not technically an interviewer, is arguably the most biased reporter on TV. His 20/20 pieces and his specials always masquerade as balanced journalism, but the deck is always stacked toward his Libertarian views. He’s much like a creationist, in that he knows what his conclusions will be (what he wants the viewers to “learn”) and builds his report around that.

Sources who support his views are given significant air time, and their backgrounds are kept murky (in a report purported to be a “look at” the organic food industry, an advocate for chemical companies who produce pesticides and fertilizers was identified only as a former chmist for the CDC). Opposing viewpoints are limited to a few highly edited quotes, or their arguments are oversimplified beyond recognition by Stossel in a stand-up.

134

Scribe wrote,

I didn’t mean any of my post to be a value judgement. If you’re asking me for a normative evaluation, I’d say the balance is good, the bias is bad, and the bipartisanship is pretty lame but not particularly horrendous. If I could make just one change to the media writ large, I would fragment it - divide up the ownership and splinter the conglomerates. I don’t mind industrial oligopolies that much - if you’ve only got three auto manufacturers to deal with, I guess that’s just too bad. Not so with the media.

I can’t guarantee that fragmented media ownership would improve anything, but I’ll bet you a stack of Op-Eds that it would. Each little newspaper or news network or radio station or whatever could balance their reporting as much or as little as they chose. The Ultraright Daily News could hire Orrin Hatch to write their weekly “Ask a Wishy-Washy Neoliberal” column. Window-Smashing Leninists for Peace could hire Ralph Nader to balance their reporting with his pro-corporate, happy-go-lucky conservatism. If they didn’t, who cares? The low-power station down the road would balance them out from one direction and the zine up the block would balance them out from the other.

I don’t fault any news source for having limited resources, but it irks me that they choose to blow all their bandwidth / column inches / prime time to balance, re-balance, and re-re-balance the same fictitious dichotomy that they invent on every issue.

135

Here’s a bit of a poser:

Let’s say it’s 1960 and there’s a newspaper in a Southern state which, in its reporting, consistently sympathizes with the plight of blacks and portrays racist policies and politicians in a negative light. In its editorials, it favors full civil rights for blacks, but says nothing about any job preferences or payments to blacks. Yet a clear majority of the people favor continued segregation and discrimination against blacks.

Is the paper biased or unbiased? Left, right, or center? Liberal, conservative or moderate? Right, wrong or neutral?

More to the point, should our labeling of the same content (and therefore our definitions of these labels), stay the same, or should they change because the attitudes of the people have changed?

136

Here’s a sidebar: When we’ve been talking about “the media,” we’ve been concentrating mostly on mainstream. hard news shows and publications. But are THOSE really the media sources from which most Americans draw their conclusions about politics and politicians? I uspect not.

For example, where did the American people get the idea that Dan Quayle was a blithering idiot? Certainly not from mainstrea, respectable news sources. After all, when serious journalists (even liberal ones like Bob Woodward and David Broder) wrote about Dan Quayle, they usually treated him fairly and even respectfully.

No, the image of Quayle-as-buffoon didn’t come from Dan Rather or Peter Jennings, it came from Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman. I happen to think that, today, popular culture shapes political perspectives at LEAST as much as genuine news outlets. And POPULAR culture is unmistakably tilted to the left.

137

Surprisingly, astorian, I agree with you on this: Hollywood, at least, is disproportionately liberal in its social attitudes (and by liberal, I mean the word’s actual political connotation, not IzzyR’s “Democrat-substitute”). I also agree that popular culture can shape popular perceptions, though I think Leno and Letterman have made plenty fun of Clinton and the Democrats. Again, though, I think these liberal attitudes manifest themselves primarily in the secularism vs. religion realm. Most television shows, movies, etcetera are liberal not through any explicit valuation of policy goals or political positions, but simply through a relaxed stance on sex, violence, drugs, and traditional “family values” issues. There are a few certain shows which lean unabashedly to the left, most notably The Simpsons and The West Wing, but I don’t consider Jerry Springer, South Park, or any of the so-called “reality television” liberal programs, despite their disregard for conservative values: the latter shows are simply profit-driven enterprises which cater to the lowest common denominator. Quite capitalist, really.

In fact, my other point is that while much of popular culture may reinforce relatively liberal social values, it arguably emphasizes (surprise, surprise) relatively conservative economic values. That is, poor people are largely unmentioned; the obvious primary purpose of most television programming, commercials included, is to make money; wealth is most often presented as a virtue, and the pursuit of wealth a noble motivation. Merely by the absence of any reference to most economic ills in this country, popular television programming validates their exclusion from the scope of national debate. (I hope I’m making sense here; I’m quite tired.)

Anyway, I would still argue that the news media exert at least as much influence over the political persuasions of our society as do the entertainment media, if only because the news is explicitly about politics, and purports to explain politics, and can shape the terms of debate. Not only that, there’s a tacit assumption that the news media report everything which truly is news, and that if they didn’t mention it, we probably don’t need to know about it. Finally, the affairs of the news media are largely conducted with the priorities of economic and political elites in mind: the Sunday morning public affairs programs, for instance, are less for public consumption than they are a way in which prevailing political perceptions can be reinforced and dispensed for the attention of the policy-makers. It’s important in Washington to know which way the wind blows; it’s even more important to lend breath to the wind yourself. He who can provide the dominant spin on past events holds a distinct advantage in shaping future policy.

I’m going to bed now.

138

You know. I disagree with you on the Simpsons Gar. In does have a fairly left bias. But, it’s also one of the most pro-conservative shows on TV. How many other shows skewer Clinton and the Democratic party. How many make fun of the Kennedy’s. How many have a town where almost everyone goes to church. It’s been fairly pro-gun at times. It has a traditonal family as it’s centerpiece. on and on.

139

oh and Gadarene. Sorry about calling you Gar. I’ve got some sort of mental block with your name. I’ll try to stop doing it.

140

That’s okay; at least people have stopped calling me Gaudere…