Izzy: I just wanted to point out a passage in an Associated Press article dealing with Al Gore’s search for a VP candidate:
Help me out here…Gore needs to improve his standing with liberals? I thought Gore was a mainstream Democrat–and, as such, wholly representative of liberal values. Where am I confused?
While it’s not worth getting too orked up about comedy monolgues on “The Tonight Show” or “politically Incorrect,” or Letterman, I hasten to refute the notion that those shows are equal opportunity mockers.
Oh sure, Leno and Mahre will CLAIM that they skewer all sides equally, and in purely arithmetic terms, that may be true. But the difference in tone is enormous.
In a standard monologue, Jay Leno may say…
“Pat Buchanan gave a speech the other night- of course, it sounded better in the original German.” (Ba-dump-bump.)
“George Bush was supposed to throw out the first ball at the Dodgers’ game last night, but he was too busy snorting the third base line.”
“Al Gore gave a speech about prescription drugs to senior citizens the other night- of course, the drugs the audience REALLY needed were caffeine and No-Doz.” (Rimshot.)
“If Bill Clinton really wanted to make peace in the Middle East, he’d have made Yasir Arafat a date with Monical Lewinsky.” (“Hi-yoooooo!”)
Typical lame set from LEno. And, if you’re keeping score, that’s 2 jokes about Republicans and 2 jokes about Democrats. But really, is THAT even-handed?
Pat Buchanan is a Nazi.
George Bush is a coke-head.
Al Gore is a little on the stiff side.
Bill CLinton is a skirt-chaser.
Sorry, there is NO comparison between calling a guy dull and calling a guy a Nazi.
Well, astorian, the line about Buchanan was first, I believe, written by Molly Ivins, who makes no secret about her leanings. And the fact of the matter is that Buchanan can be more than a mite frightening to people. And I’m terribly sorry that Shrub had a more…entertaining…past than Gore, but Leno also buys a lot of his jokes. You go with the best that are submitted. Clinton? Well, Bubba is always good for the joke mill. And he’s been skewered on national television repeatedly. Usually far better than your example.
Bottom line, the media is far more concerned with being correct than they are with being Right or Left. Sure, there are some anchors who are further left than others. There are also some who are further right. Hell, they’re human. I still remember hearing the wailing and gnashing of teeth when it looked like Clinton was going to beat Bush, and everyone was bemoaning, “That damned liberal media.” They weren’t being liberal, they were backing the one that looked like he was going to win. They were covering their asses, that’s all.
Also:
Maybe they’re simply calling them as they see them?
Waste
Flick Lives!
Gadarene,
Two questions:
You have made a big deal about the FAIR study of media bias. Two times, I have asked you who FAIR is. Both times you ignored the question. Why is this this?
You keep harping on the notion that I have claimed that the liberal/conservative split is a black and white issue, and organized along the lines of the Republican/Democratic parties. Most recent example is this:
Now I actually don’t know if there is such a thing as a truelly “liberal” Republican or not, but I have certainly never claimed any position on this. I have, in fact, taken great pains to make clear that I am not claiming that liberals and conservatives are two completely divergent groups; rather, they occupy a continous spectrum. I have consistently employed terms like “tend to be”, “on average”, “in aggregate”, and the like. I cannot imagine that there is any legitimate confusion in this regard. What gives?
With regard to your last post:
Liberals and conservatives ocupy a continous spectrum, as mentioned. Thus a person can be liberal and have others be even more liberal than himself. The meaning of the term will depend on the context in which it is used.
In this case, Al Gore is to the left or liberal side, when compared to the country as a whole. He is to the center, or slightly to the right, when compared to the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is important to Al Gore because they tend to be the more motivated voters and campaign volunteers. (A similar situation prevails with the riught wing of the Republican Party). This wing is not enamored of Al Gore. In particular, organized labor is not enthusiastic about his vigorous support of the NAFTA treaty. He would like to counter this.
Furthermore, the candidacy of Ralph Nadar is of major concern to Al Gore. He is concerned that the more extreme liberals will vote for Nadar, costing him valuable support in what may be a very tight race. (A similar concern exist on the Republican side regarding Buchanan, but his candidacy has not, to this point, had the success of Nadar’s).
I hope this clears up your confusion, if indeed you were so.
GLWasteful:
They might call them as they see them, but “as they see them” demonstrates the bias. 
**So Far So Good **:
Fair enough, but keep in mind that the “They” in this instance are late night comedians. Now, if anyone can give me an example of Peter Jennings, say, referring to Pat Buchanan as a nazi, then I will cheerfully concede defeat.
Waste
Flick Lives!
Sorry, IzzyR; I guess I figured it was pointless to respond to you any more after your statement that the Brookings Institution was a liberal think tank.
I will address one point of yours, however: FAIR is a progressive media watchdog group. Yes, they are. And you know what? If you go back to the very first page of this thread–my second post, I believe–I implictly acknowledge their position of advocacy while adding this sidebar:
Those remarks still stand. As Rufus said on another thread, if they’re so biased then you should be able to point out all the errors they’ve made in their research. Right? If, however, you’re just going to claim that everything to the left of an arbitrary point is “liberal,” and everything to the right of that arbitrary point is “conservative,” and thus attack, for example, FAIR’s labelling of certain thinktanks as centrist or libertarian or progressive or whatever…well, then I’m done with you. There’s no common ground upon which we can debate, and my revision of your initial comment still applies: It’s evident that you are yourself are so far to the right–or so far removed from reality–that it is only natural that from your perspective the mainstream media will seem liberal.
Gadarene:
That’s just fine. However, I do request that, as part of being done with me, you henceforth refrain from distorting my positions, whether or not addressed to me, both in this and in other threads.
It may be a little biased to call Pat Buchanan a nazi, but it isn’t biased to call him a right-wing extremist because he is a right-wing extremist. But it is biased to call Bill Clinton a left-wing extremist because he isn’t. He’s a left-leaning centrist or a moderate liberal.
I’m unsure which of your positions I’ve distorted. Perhaps you could be more specific. Your saying “in other threads” refers, I’m assuming, to my sarcastic comment in the “Why are there no conservative protests?” thread about globalization not being an ideological position. In light of the fact that you’ve stated several times that globalization is not an ideological position, I apologize for somehow misrepresenting your stance.
Gadarene,
Please refer to my post of 8:42 this morning for the specifics.
Also, show me one place where I’ve stated that globalization is not an ideological position.
> Talking head shows on the broadcast and cable networks are dominated by the Right
I take it you haven’t seen many, or you don’t know right from left.
The trouble is, there really isn’t any such thing as left and right. They are oversimplifications; they are models. The focus is more in two groups who oppose each other than on the issues themselves. Once you start looking at multiple issues–which don’t always parallel each other but often criss-cross–and the all-important details of the issues, the model begins to break down. It remains a useful model and we’ll continue to use it, but it’s not the real world and has it’s limits, especially with the ever shifting definitions and contexts which it is put to.
There are such things as liberal and conservative, but as I stated earlier, they are not synonymous with left and right. They are adjectives describing how a person thinks in his approach to issues. A liberal is willing to re-evaluate or challenge prevailing attitudes whereas a conservative is strongly influenced by tradition.
Liberal and conservative are not always equal and opposite. Once you get into far-left territory, you begin to contradict liberal principle, but a person on the far-right can still be considered a conservative. There is no contradiction in calling a moderate or centrist a liberal.
Gadarene: Earlier you stated that moderate does not mean the same thing as centrist. Could you explain this a little?
sqweels: Sure. Over the course of this thread, I’ve articulated what I believe to be a dominant centrist ideology possessed by the leadership of both parties. This centrism manifests itself mostly as economic neo-liberalism (a corporatist, free market, globalist perspective) combined with moderate stances on most secular social issues. I detail this more fully in a previous post (on page two, I believe), but I’ll go into it again tonight, if you like, when I have more time.
The difference between centrists and moderates, to me, is kind of like your distinction between the left and liberals: that is, one is a particular political ideology, while the other is a degree of affinity for the status quo. Does that make any sense?
(Oh, and Flyer, I haven’t forgotten about your statement on the talking heads shows. I’ll dig up some cites later to refute your notion that TV public affairs programs lean to the left.)
All righty.
Near the beginning of the thread, you say
…which infers that deducing liberalism on the partial basis of the media’s position on globalization is nothing but “a semantic game.” This is a value judgment on your part placing the ideological weight of certain issues–“social issues, taxes, religion”–over other issues. I’ve never denied that the media are, when it comes to social issues, largely secular and largely moderate. Economic issues, including globalization, health care, corporate control, etcetera, are a different story. To me, they should be considered in the equation.
Let’s continue. A few posts later, speaking about issues of globalization, you say:
Now, this might be a fair argument–except that throughout this entire thread, you’ve made it a point to define political ideology wholly in terms of a liberal/conservative sliding scale. If there exists a bias in favor of globalization in the national news media, and yet this pro-globalization sentiment is irrelevant to the question of liberal bias, and ideology is determined by degrees of liberalism and conservatism…then, perforce, globalization and related matters are not, to you, ideological issues.
Your very next paragraph makes this clear:
So you’ve established a normative standard by which liberal equals Democrat and conservative equals Republican, and since Gore and Bush both favor globalization, their position on this issue is irrelevant to the determination of their ideology. Your argument this entire thread seems to return to this basic syllogism:
Aside from the many other problems with that logic (the degree of influence journalists hold in the media compared to editors and CEOs, the divergence of the Democratic Party from traditionally liberal economic values, the fact that more of the American public is registered Democrat than is registered Republican), you’ve constructed a set of axes which completely remove people like Perot, Buchanan, and Nader from the equation. You’re right, no one would call Perot or Buchanan liberal because of their opposition to NAFTA. But no one’s ever said that opposition to NAFTA, by itself, is an indicator of liberalism. That doesn’t make it any less ideological.
What I’ve said is that Buchanan and Nader–the left and the right–tend to oppose globalization for different reasons, while the mainstream party leadership tends to support globalization for similar reasons. So you have, in essence, at least three ideologies: one which opposes globalization on the basis of humanism, one which opposes globalization on the basis of protectionism, and one which supports globalization on the basis of economic liberalization. Actually, of course, ideology is much further gradated than that, but the point is that you’re dismissing globalization because it’s not useful, to you, in determining whether or not someone is a liberal. Meanwhile, The New York Times has columnists saying that opponents of the WTO and the IMF “deserve the back of your hand,” and The Washington Post has columnists saying that the protesters in D.C. “don’t possess anything which can coherently be called a cause,” and you’re calling these liberal newspapers.
Someone’s stance on globalization has no correlative value to how liberal they are? Sure sounds like you’re calling it irrelevant to ideology to me.
(I, by the way, have been making these points all along–I could quote myself here, as well, but that’d be pretty tedious.)
A point of clarification, by the way: It strikes me that your position could be that anyone who opposes globalization is by that token an automatic political radical. Is that the case? If so, then I apologize: you’re just saying that globalization is irrelevant to the determination of mainstream ideology, which is another value judgment, and pretty insulting to those millions of people out there who don’t think that the IMF is a benign institution or that China should have been accorded PNTR status.
Having said I’m not going to quote myself, I’m now, of course, going to quote myself:
This is in response to your comment that people can tell who’s more liberal between two opposite-party politicians without worrying about their stances on globalization. To it, you say:
Oh. So you’re just defining people’s perception of liberal bias as not including most economic issues. Fantastic. I’d suggest (and have suggested), then, that these people have an imperfect understanding of “liberal bias” in the first place; that they see it as secularism, as I noted in the original post, or that they believe certain positions to be unabashedly liberal (support of abortion, support of some kind of affirmative action, support of public broadcasting, support of some form of gun control) despite those positions being held by members of both parties. In any case, you’re right–you might not be saying “globalization is not an ideological issue,” but rather, “globalization is not an ideological issue to many people.” That’s argumentum ad populum, isn’t it? Just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t make it true.
Like I’ve said several times, you’ve certainly helped us understand why some people think there’s a liberal media, and that globalization not a factor in this determination. Whether these two perceptions are well-founded, however, is a different question–and happens to be the question I asked in the original post.
I’ll quote myself again:
In other words, just because Democratic leaders are more conservative today than they were half a century ago doesn’t mean that the definition of liberal has moved, too.
But I’ve gotten off-track, in part because I never felt you addressed the above point. We’ve wandered in this thread, too, and spent most of page two quibbling about the definition of liberal and about the presence of a strict left-wing/right-wing dichotomy in American politics. We got back to globalization, though:
At the end of page two, I repeat the point that there is a convergence of economic positions, particularly with regard to globalization and corporatism, between both parties’ leadership. You respond thus:
So globalization and corporatism are, to you, irrelevant to the determination of a liberal ideology. And since ideology, to you, adheres to a strict liberal/conservative dichotomy, you’re saying that globalization is irrelevant to the determination of ideology period. Okay?
(By the way, reviewing the thread I see that you actually never did respond to Kimstu’s about the survey of Washington-based journalists: namely, that the journalists surveyed are more conservative than the American public on many issues unrelating to globalization, such as Medicare, Social Security, corporate power, the tax burden, and national health care. Your tendency has been to question the validity of the survey, and to say that “if [the journalists surveyed] were so desperate to get tax breaks for the rich…they would presumably be voting Republican.” It would, I’m assuming, surprise you to know that many Democratic politicians are in favor of tax breaks on the rich? Anyway, the mechanics of the survey are clearly laid out in the link provided, and it’s validity should be beyond question. Go review it again, and then see if you can tell us why the surveyed “liberal” journalists are more conservative on many issues than the American public as a whole.)
Has Gallup, or another U.S. polling firm, ever asked the American public if they think the U.S. media is biased, and in what ideological direction?
Has AIM or FAIR ever commissioned such a poll, or done such a study?
(And…for those of a liberal bent reading this thread, I’d suggest two fairly recent books written by Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter, somewhat conservative academics who surveyed U.S. journalists and then, IIRC, Hollywood executives, producers, etc.
The books are The Media Elite and Prime Time.
They do find a liberal tendency in both the media and Hollywood, but the comprehensiveness of the surveys may give you something to think about. If I were to make a proper case for liberal domination of the U.S. media, I’d just refer you to these books. Thnx.)
Scribe: There’s a link which thoroughly debunks the Lichters, their poor methodology, and their right-wing funding in my second post on this thread. Here it is again. Here’s another on AIM and the Lichtners. Notice while that FAIR is a progressive group, they do research–through the Lexis/Nexis database and other sources–that is quantifiable. Their ideology determines the questions they ask, to be sure, but not the answers that they get. The same, sad to say, can’t be said about Accuracy in Media.
Also, I’d submit that it matters less what the public perception of media bias is than it does whether or not the media are actually biased. The myth of the ‘liberal’ media is a common misconception, admittedly; that doesn’t make it any less of a misconception.
“I admit it–the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.” --Bill Kristol, 5/22/95
Okay, I’ll have a looksee. Their research sounded plausible to me, but as I’ve noted earlier, I’m right-leaning, and I’m likely to go easier on conservative research than I should be.
I’ll have a look, though. Thanks for the link.
One of the reasons that I’m wondering what the U.S. public thinks, is that a national poll by a respected polling organization would be the closest thing to a “neutral observer” that we could get.
Whether the American public would be smart enough to detect a liberal or conservative bias remains to be seen, though, as you have noted. That’s a point well taken.
Not smart enough? I dunno; I think I’d say not informed enough, not involved enough, not invested enough.
I do admire your even-handedness and willingness to retain an open mind, Scribe.