Homework - I have a

Homework - I have a gnarly deadline for a big client due tomorrow, so blogging will likely be a bit thin today and tomorrow. But I hear I've been given an assignment.

Although I didn't hear the show, apparently Hugh Hewitt asked the Northern Alliance members to comment on this piece by Rod Dreher in NRO's "Corner" (their in-house blog, which is such an amusing concept; a National Review blog is like karaoke night at Motown Records).

The posting is, apparently, an in-house memo by LA Times editor John Carroll, dealing with trying to sand off the more obvious signs of liberal bias in the paper's coverage:

I'm concerned about the perception---and the occasional reality---that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring "so-called counseling of patients." I don't think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it "so-called," a phrase that is loaded with derision.

I'm going to take an educated guess as to the nature of the assignment from Mr. Hewitt; what's the deal with this memo?

Two guesses:

• It's an editor who's recapping some Journalism 101 lessons. Reading this clip...:

  It is not until the last three paragraphs of the story that we finally surface a professor of biology and endocrinology who believes the abortion/cancer connection is valid. But do we quote him as to why he believes this? No. We quote his political views.

  Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don't need to waste our readers' time with it.

  ...sounds just like the newspaper editor who taught my Journo 101 class, way back when. He's hectoring his charges about some slips in basic journalistic ethics - and he's right. If properly and consistently applied, these basic tenets should provide some self-filtering to bias, or at least overt bias.

  Of course, the bias that really matters is more subtle and at a higher level than a reporter slipping in totenbergish editorial cracks in the midst of reportage. And that brings us to:

• Maybe, as some conservatives have been predicting for a while, it's a sign of the market incrementally shifting coverage to the center. We've noted this in this space before, parts of the media are taking note. The market will drive things to the center - incrementally, eventually, and only rarely with any actual admission of any problem in the first place. We've seen some of it already - after years of coverage of the concealed carry debate that differed little from editorials, the Strib's Conrad DeFiebre led the local media in actually covering the issue fairly, two years ago. We'll see more of it.

More as events warrant.

Posted by Mitch at May 29, 2003 08:58 AM