Seeing the Blind Spot in Liberals’ World View

The curious thing about Neal Gabler’s “The Media Bias Myth” (Opinion, Dec. 22) is that it’s a prime example of precisely the type of unconscious liberal bias that conservatives so often complain about. Specifically in regard to Gabler’s presumption that Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-Miss.) history of gaffes, the Harken Energy matter and questions regarding Vice President Dick Cheney’s relationship with the energy industries were matters worth any journalistic effort whatsoever, he undermines his own premise.

The conservative complaint has never been that there’s a conscious effort on the part of “mainstream media” to create a liberal bias in news reporting. The complaint is simply that members of the media, by and large, have a liberal worldview that affects both their choice of subject matter and their methodology in gathering facts and reporting their findings. It’s that extraordinary blind spot, that continuing pretense of neutrality, that ongoing insistence that there is no leftward bias that gets conservatives’ dander up. It’s perfectly all right for a journalist to have an opinion. The offense, of which The Times itself is too often guilty, arises when opinion is reported as if it were fact.

Dennis Mallonee

Long Beach

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Gabler’s opinion piece and Steve Lopez’s Dec. 22 column, “Here’s a Vast Conspiracy for You: to Kill Interest in Public Affairs,” represent the cause and effect of the voter cynicism and low turnout of the recent election. Between the cable shows and talk radio, the constructive and necessary discourse that fuels a real democracy has dissolved into name-calling and invective. There is no “other side” of any issue. It seems the only people who get air time are the pundits screaming us to sleep.

David Ellis

Sherman Oaks

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Good try, but the argument made by Gabler is weak at best. Comparing the obvious and predominant leftist tilt in today’s mainstream media (The Times included) with the examples cited by Gabler is laughable. I’ve read plenty on these subjects, and you’d hear a heck of a lot more if there were anything substantial to them. Think today’s media would sit on their hands if they could destroy Bush or Cheney? Why don’t the mainstream media just admit they’re filled with a majority of left-leaning do-gooders and simply get on with the business of fair and balanced reporting? In fact, that’s the only salient point Gabler made.

Mitch Boehm

Los Angeles

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Thanks to Gabler for his superb opinion piece on the media’s avoidance of controversy and lack of investigative reporting. With headlines swinging back and forth between Pentagon press releases on new weapons systems and titillating accounts of the latest Hollywood or Washington scandal, the mainstream media sound more and more like the tabloids. Fortunately, alternative news sources such as KPFK radio, the Nation magazine and Salon.com are there to fill the void.

Jack Cooper

Van Nuys