The Media Bias Myth

Say something loud enough and frequently enough and a good many people will believe it is true. For decades, conservatives have howled that most major TV news sources, including ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, and three major U.S. newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have a pronounced liberal slant. This year, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg hit the bestseller lists with a book titled “Bias,” which described the liberal sins of network news, and conservative pundit Ann Coulter had another bestseller with “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.” As Goldberg put it, “The old argument that the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore.”

So, how do you explain the “liberal” media’s failure to rebuke Sen. Trent Lott for the string of pro-segregationist pronouncements that came before his infamous gaffe at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party? Or the media’s curious lack of interest in George W. Bush’s windfall at Harken Energy and indifference to his stonewalling a Securities and Exchange Commission report investigating the episode? Or their unwillingness to challenge Vice President Dick Cheney on his cozy relationship with the energy industry while he was drafting the country’s energy policy?

It sure doesn’t sound like a liberal media. Rather, it sounds downright conservative, which is what some liberals are saying. In their view, the conglomerates that own most of the news media are promoting their own interests, and those interests tend to be conservative.

But there is a third and more disturbing possibility in which both sides have gotten it wrong. Looking at it philosophically rather than ideologically, the real media war today isn’t between liberals and conservatives but between two entirely different journalistic mind-sets: those who believe in advocacy, and those who believe in objectivity -- or, at the very least, in the appearance of objectivity. And what we are witnessing is not just a political skirmish but a battle for the soul of American journalism.

Most of us take it for granted that the media should be disinterested, but for the better part of the history of American journalism, this would have been regarded as idiotic. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the press was not impartial, nor was it supposed to be. Newspapers were published by political parties, or their allies, with the express purpose of advancing an agenda; news was almost always tinctured with opinion. The papers were principally targeted at the party faithful, or at potential recruits, who read them for incitement, just as listeners today tune in to Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly to stoke their political fires. Put another way, a newspaper provided ammunition, not information.

The great newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, in the last decade of the 19th century, showed how rabid a partisan press could be when fighting for readers. But if this journalistic food fight represented the apex of advocacy, it also marked the beginning of its end as a media standard. During the Progressive era, middle-class reformers aimed to bring rationality and high purpose to American life. One of their central tenets was the idea of professionalization, and the press was no exception. Schools of journalism were inaugurated and, with them, the novel notion that journalism is a vocation, like medicine or law, with its own rules and standards. One of its highest standards was impartiality. From now on, reporters were to present the news, not plead a case.

This approach didn’t take root immediately, and it was often honored in the breach. Still, objectivity as a guiding principle did become a mark of journalistic respectability, the standard that separated real newspapers from tabloids, real reporters from hacks. When radio and later television began to broadcast news, they strove to adhere to the standard of objectivity. This was because the Federal Communications Act of 1934 required that the public interest be served in return for the use of the public’s airwaves (and impartial news was considered to be in the public interest), and because the last thing the new media wanted to do was risk alienating audiences. When they did broadcast opinion, it was labeled as such and was segregated from the regular news. The anchormen at NBC or CBS were seldom accused of bias back then.

Today’s conservatives scoff at the professed objectivity of network news reporters and newspaper correspondents, often brandishing a 1995 survey by the Roper Center and Freedom Forum as their smoking gun. The survey showed that 89% of the journalists polled voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, while only 7% cast a ballot for George Bush. One problem with conservative interpretations of this study is that they assume that politics trumps professionalism for liberal journalists but not for conservative ones. Far more likely is that, for both liberal and conservative journalists, politics has roughly the same priority it has for any of us regardless of profession. When there is bias, and it does exist, one can chalk it up to the personal rather than the political, or to the press’ herd instinct for ganging up as long as doing so fits the public temper at the time.

The dirty little secret of network newscasts, and of most major newspapers, is not that they are manned by liberal proselytizers. It is that they are trying to attract the widest possible viewership, or readership, and that doing so necessitates that they be as inoffensive as possible. That is why investigative reports seem so toothless, gumming away at government boondoggles or consumer fraud or corrupt politicians that are unlikely to infuriate either the left or the right.

That is also why both network TV news and the major newspapers seem so bland compared with cable news or the tabloids, unless they can latch onto a story like Rep. Gary Condit’s affair with an intern who disappeared and was later found dead. The mainstream media prefer to stay under the radar and out of the gun sights of critics, so what may seem like liberalism to conservatives -- in its tolerance, forbearance and embrace of the conventional wisdom -- and conservatism to liberals -- in its support of the status quo -- is really a strategy to keep people watching. It may be objectivity in the service of ratings, but it is objectivity just the same.

What is true for the networks and mainstream mass-circulation newspapers, however, is not true for cable television, the tabloids or the Internet. For one thing, cable is not restrained by the Federal Communications Commission to serve the public interest. For another, cable television news is “narrowcast”: It appeals to a relatively small segment of the population, and it must tailor its approach to attract and hold its viewers. This tends to reward advocacy of any sort, liberal as well as conservative. But it has proved especially hospitable to conservatism, because conservatism is much more lively than liberalism and that much more entertaining. Also, conservatives are more ideologically unified than liberals and thus enjoy listening to their ideas being reinforced. In short, cable news networks like the Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNBC provide advocacy in the service of ratings.

Of course, advocates disclaim that they are anything of the sort. They assert they only seem partisan compared with the real propagandists of the mainstream press. “Fair and balanced” is the motto of the conservative Fox News Channel, where I appear as a panelist on “Fox News Watch.” The motto is just as disingenuous as it sounds. The mainstream press is an easy target for advocates precisely because it cannot take sides without surrendering its impartiality, so it sits there and takes it. This permits the Orwellian paradox of Coulter spewing some 200 pages of conservative name-calling against liberals while contending that liberals are always name-calling against conservatives, or the paradox of Coulter complaining of liberal bias while appearing regularly on the very networks she attacks.

None of this would really matter much if the sides were equally poised or if advocates would permit them to peacefully coexist. Advocacy, after all, can be just as valuable, and is certainly just as necessary, as objectivity.

But there is no balance, and conservative advocates aren’t interested in coexistence. Cable television attracts only a fraction of the viewers of the network news broadcasts; on their best days, the aggregate audience for all the cable news networks is somewhere around 3 million, whereas the network news broadcasts still get nearly 30 million viewers a night.

Yet, one would never guess this by the way the advocates have been driving the news. Cable’s influence is magnified exponentially by the fact that its audience is more energized and its reports deeply impassioned. It grabs attention while the networks and newspapers studiously avoid attention. It makes news while the traditional networks break news.

Just compare Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings to O’Reilly, Brit Hume, Chris Matthews and Kudlow and Cramer. Though he calls his show a “no-spin zone,” Fox’s O’Reilly grills his guests, smirks at their answers and shakes his head in disbelief when he hears what he regards as a liberal opinion. MSNBC’s Matthews was once an aide to Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, but he too plays the cable game by roasting liberalism on a spit that spins as fast as a jet turbine. Similarly, Hume on Fox can barely conceal his agony when he has to report a criticism of President Bush. For these guys, Bill Clinton and Tom Daschle, not Osama bin Laden and his ilk, are the real threats to America.

More important, since they are not playing by the same rules as the practitioners of objectivity, the advocates are able to intimidate the networks and newspapers. Lest they lend credence to charges of bias, mainstream news outlets seem to be bending over backward to prove they are not liberal and harbor no animus toward the Republican administration, even though the political spectrum has shifted so far right over the last decade that thinking once considered centrist is now seen as liberal.

Indeed, this intimidation may be the real objective of the advocates. Though partisans on both ends of the political spectrum seem to love journalistic bloodletting, they don’t just want to bash the media. They want to use the media’s goal of objectivity to render them even more feckless.

It is hard to beat zealots when they are fighting with swords and you are fighting with ploughshares. Already, the New York Times seems to be indulging in more open partisanship with its crusade against the exclusion of women members at Augusta National Golf Club. And recent news reports on U.S. war plans against Iraq seem designed to discourage action there.

While no one should be writing an epitaph for the ideal of objectivity, developments like these suggest that it is beleaguered. Advocacy has all the advantages and objectivity little defense against it, especially since nothing would satisfy the right-wing advocates short of abject surrender.

Even so, this isn’t just a triumph of conservatism. This is a reversion to an old, old way of doing business, back when the press wasn’t a light but a bludgeon. And the losers aren’t just liberals. The real loser is the idea that the chief obligation of the press is to tell it the way it is without fear or favor.