The Unbiased Truth About Media Objectivity

The reporting of the news is supposed to be objective, a dispassionate recitation of the facts. But of course it never is and never has been. What’s more, it never will or could be.

In this, the postmodernists are right. The truth does exist somewhere out there, but we are incapable of perceiving it except from our own inherently skewed points of view.

So we’re stuck with our versions of events or a plethora of competing versions of the same events, none of which adds up to the real McCoy. A lot of effort, however, is put into maintaining the illusion that they do, especially when it comes to the news.

American news organizations are superior because, unlike so many other government-controlled and censored presses from China to much of the Arab world, they tell the truth -- or so its members like to think. They get very upset when someone suggests otherwise.

Take, for example, feisty former Vice President Al Gore, who recently accused Fox News, among other media outlets, of being “part and parcel of the Republican Party” and of “injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective.”

Tongues wagged at that one, especially on Fox News, where Gore was painted as a nonsensical paranoid. But he shouldn’t have been, because he was at least half right.

Gore was right that Fox, despite its much touted “fair and balanced” tag line, has a conservative bias. And as shown by a photograph in the Dec. 9 issue of Time magazine of Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes backstage with former President Bush at the 1992 GOP convention, it also has a Republican pedigree. But Gore was only half right because Fox isn’t the only guilty party. The rest of the media are just as skewed, though mostly in the other direction. CNN founder Ted Turner’s sympathies are loudly left of center, as arguably are the network’s.

Media bias is a familiar complaint. But until the Democratic Party establishment (before Gore it was Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle) started bashing so-called conservative news outlets, it was a charge more often leveled by conservative pundits at mainstream news outlets like the big three television networks and major metropolitan newspapers.

On their daily Web logs, pundits Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus have made a sport of picking apart the increasingly activist New York Times, which has a clear liberal bias that seeps into its news analysis on a distressingly regular basis.

As Newsweek media reporter Seth Mnookin suggested in a recent article, Times Executive Editor Howell Raines’ “hard-charging, crusading style is coloring the Gray Lady’s reputation” by “ginning up controversies as much as reporting them.” Even Times insiders are complaining.

Other examples of liberal allegiances among supposedly disinterested news anchors abound. Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball” on MSNBC, worked for both President Carter and former House Speaker Tip O’Neill. NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert was chief of staff for former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and counselor to former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, both New York Democrats. ABC “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos worked as a strategist and aide for President Clinton.

The bias is there on both sides. It’s unavoidable. And it’s time we started accepting the fact rather than keeping up this absurd pretense of detachment. Balance and full disclosure are what’s called for.

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, scourge of liberals everywhere, may be hopelessly partisan, but he’s never claimed to be anything else. He has an agenda, and he’s honest about it. The New York Times is no less wildly partisan and has no less of an agenda, yet it presents itself as the tame word of God.

And therein lies the real problem.