The more pernicious bias is less substance, more fluff

“The news media are biased.” It’s the most common complaint I’ve heard throughout my career as a journalist. And it’s true: The news media are biased.

We’re biased in favor of change, as opposed to the status quo. We’re biased in favor of bad news, rather than good news. We’re biased in favor of conflict rather than harmony.

Increasingly, we’re biased in favor of sensationalism, scandal, celebrities and violence, as opposed to serious, insightful coverage of the important issues of the day.

But most of the time, on most stories, I don’t think most reporters and editors are biased in the way that our most virulent critics suggest. We don’t, consciously or subconsciously, slant our stories to fit our ideology.

Yes, I’ve read and heard all the complaints about most journalists voting for Al Gore over George W. Bush -- and for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole and for every other Democrat over every other Republican dating back at least to John Kennedy over Richard Nixon. This pattern supposedly proves that all reporters are liberals and their coverage is slanted to the Left.

I’ve also read and heard all the complaints about most major news organizations being owned by Republicans -- and, more recently, about all the major radio talk shows, plus Fox TV News, being dominated by conservatives, thus proving that the media are, in fact, slanted to the Right.

Sure, most reporters, like most other sentient beings, do have an ideology of sorts -- that is, we have personal opinions, often strong and, in our case, generally liberal. Only the uninformed or the inert have no opinions, and on issue after issue -- race relations, gun control, the environment, government spending, gay rights, capital punishment -- I think most journalists are more liberal than are most other Americans.

Yes, the people who own the conglomerates that own the television networks and many other major news organizations tend, like most other big businessmen, to be Republicans, as do the most successful talk-show hosts. And if Fox News is “fair and balanced,” as its slogan boasts, it’s certainly not intentional.

But to suggest that all this means, ipso facto, the media are politically biased in their news coverage is syllogistic reasoning at its worst. Talk radio hosts don’t pretend to be impartial journalists. Fox is but one of many news outlets. In my experience, neither the conservative media moguls nor the liberal reporters try to impose their views on news stories.

Equally important, I honestly believe that most good reporters are able to set aside their personal political views when they cover a story.

Nevertheless, judging from what I read in my e-mail and hear on talk radio -- and looking at the success of Bernard Goldberg’s book “Bias,” which spent seven weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list early last year -- it’s clear that allegations of ideological bias ring true with many Americans.

After all, they reason, if you feel strongly about a particular cause or a particular candidate, why wouldn’t you use your journalistic platform to advance that cause or candidate? More to the point, how could you avoid doing so, at least subconsciously, no matter how committed you are to being fair? Wouldn’t your personal feelings seep into the decisions, large and small, that you make as a journalist -- what stories to do, whom to interview, whom to quote, whom not to quote, what facts to emphasize, what language to use?

Sometimes -- rarely -- that does happen. Despite some evidence to the contrary, journalists are only human. And sometimes reporters bend so far backward trying to be fair that they wind up unfairly hurting the cause or candidate that many of them personally favor.

But I think the very real biases mentioned earlier -- the individual and institutional preference for change, conflict, bad news and sensationalism -- are far more common, and far more damaging, than any kind of intermittent, inadvertent ideological bias.

In the months and years before Sept. 11, most news organizations all but abandoned coverage of international news, and while Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and their terrorist colleagues have temporarily refocused much of the media attention on truly significant matters, even some of those matters (vide anthrax) have been covered in sensationalist style.

Equally bad, the “let’s you and him fight” school of journalism, in which the slightest disagreement among public figures is blown up into bitter conflict, makes us look more like provocateurs than chroniclers. How many times will we read that Colin Powell is on his way out as secretary of state because he’s losing the corridors-of-power battles with administration hard-liners? Wasn’t it the summer of 2001 when we were reading that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was on his way out because he was losing a battle with Congress and military professionals over Bush’s plan to overhaul the Pentagon?

An attitude that distorts

The news media’s knee-jerk adversarial position toward those in power -- and our sneering assumption that virtually every politician is a liar or a hypocrite, invariably acting out of self-interest and self-aggrandizement, rather than out of a commitment to the public good -- has contributed to steadily declining voter turnout, discouraged many good men and women from seeking office, and makes us seem like cynical, self-righteous scandal-mongers.

Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting Service has spoken of the “stench of contempt” that distorts much of our reportage -- and of the concomitant implication that only journalists are “smart enough to know what to do” about the various problems confronting society today.

Worst of all, the growing sensationalism-cum-trivialization of the news embodied in the media’s sequential obsessions with O.J., Princess Di, Monica Lewinsky, Gary Condit, Martha Stewart, Elian Gonzales, shark attacks, the Indiana mother caught on tape apparently beating her 4-year-old daughter, and the frantic search for allegedly missing children (at a time when FBI statistics show that the kidnapping of children has actually declined) leaves us little time or space to cover the truly important issues of the day.

The media have made their daily news report much softer in recent years, and in the process, they’ve decided to devote much less time to politics and public affairs, says Thomas E. Patterson, who teaches at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

“Celebrity profiles, lifestyle scenes, hard-luck tales, good-luck tales and other human-interest stories rose from 11% to more than 20% of news coverage from 1980 to 1999,” according to a Shorenstein Center study quoted in Patterson’s new book, “The Vanishing Voter.” “Stories about dramatic incidents -- crimes and disasters -- also doubled during this period. The number of news stories that contained elements of sensationalism jumped by 75%.”

As “soft news” has taken up more space in newspaper news sections, “public-affairs coverage [has] dwindled,” Patterson writes. “From 1980 to 2000, public-affairs stories decreased from 70% of news coverage to 50%.”

So the way I see it, the problem with the media’s political coverage isn’t bias. It’s shrinkage. And superficiality. I worry far more about the tarting up and dumbing down of our news media than I do about any ideological infiltration.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.