Press Bias: Two Takes
By Mitch Berg
“The media isn’t really liberal”.
I’ve read a couple of mildly interesting takes on that premise this past week. Both are worth a look – partly on their merits, and partly as a measure of how much the media’s liberal bias itself serves as a sort of “instrumentation error” in any attempt to judge the media’s bias.
The first; this bit in the New York Daily News.
I won’t quote the piece, by Joshua Greenman, at length – partly because as I write this (at 5:45AM on Tuesday morning) the NYDN site is not loading. But the piece’s overall premise is “the media isn’t biased because conservatives wrote the political dictionary”. The money passage:
It’s hard to know where to begin in dismantling the Republican canard that Democrats control the media. Fox News is the most popular 24-hour news network by a whoosh and a cachung. Rush Limbaugh is the most powerful radio host, and lots of little Limbaughs line up behind him. Sarah Palin is the biggest media-political crossover star. And in an increasingly fragmented Internet, the Drudge Report continues to drive more political traffic than any other website. In italics and bold, to boot.
We see the hole in Greenman’s logic, here, right?
Greenman cites as evidence Republicans “wrote the dictionary” a series of media and pundits who were spawned as a response to liberal control of the media. It’s like saying “Mitch Berg, Mr. D and Minnesota Democrats Exposed control Twin Cities’ political debate” when we are in fact the antagonists, not the protagonists.
The New York Times doesn’t decide what words we use, nor does CNN or NPR. Our political vocabulary comes from the mouths of crafty conservatives, and that’s the ultimate proof that they steer the conversation.
Obamacare. Pity the poor congressional and White House staffers who spent hours coming up with the bromidic name “Affordable Care Act” only to see the 2,300 page bill (which Republicans complained Obama played far too passive a role in shaping) get labeled, for all eternity, “Obamacare.” This of course, is an update of the equally elegant Hillarycare. It’s interesting to note that both were used, from the get go, as slurs, unlike, say, “Reaganomics.” (Compare this to, say, “No Child Left Behind,” which has never for a second been called Bushducation – though that would have been pretty catchy.)
Greenman should take a course in the mechanics of language; catchy phrases have to be easy to say; “Bushducation” is almost impossible to pronounce…
…but that’s a digression. According to Greenman, acceptance of conservative-driven language is a sign that the media never was liberal…:
Using the supposedly massive megaphone of the Liberal Media, Democrats, who were sensitive – hypersensitive, in my mind – to the Obamacare implication, tried to replace it with a blander formulation emphasizing insurance regulation.
…which is sort of like saying “if the receiver drops the ball, then the quarterback must have thrown a basketball”. The fact that conservative catch phrases, er, catch, isn’t a sign the media is conservative; it’s a sign that the people are.
John Harris and Jim Vandehei in Politico make a more rational case; it’s not so much that the press is “liberal” as they prefer the appearance of “bipartisan process” to any actual policy outcome:
That is, they believe broadly in government activism but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship. Governance, in the Washington media’s ideal, should be a tidier and more rational process than it is.
I’ve “joked” in the past that when I work at a company, and a manager joins a group and introduces himself as a “process person”, it’s time to get your resume polished up; the group is doomed.
It’s a little cynical – but you know what they say, a cynic is an idealist who got mugged by experience.
The problem with “process people” is that when process meets people, entropy wins, sooner than later; invariably, processes need someone to run them. Someone just like the reporters:
In this fantasy, every pressing problem could be solved with a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Sam Nunn and David Gergen that would go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base for a week, not coming back until it had a deal to cut entitlements and end obesity.
Bill Clinton’s best press came when he made a deal with Newt Gingrich on the budget, and George W. Bush got favorable coverage when he reached a deal with Ted Kennedy on education reform and in the brief period after Sept. 11 when the terrorist attacks brought Washington together.
Harris and Vandehei’s point is that Obama has been exploiting this tendency to get better press – and it’s working:
Obama is taking advantage of the press’s bias for bipartisan process, a preference that often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy. (See: GOP, Dem lawmakers sit together)
It was an easy choice. In the wake of the Democratic rout in November, for instance, it would have been political suicide to risk letting taxes go up. So Obama shrewdly ignored his own party’s liberals and made a big show of wanting to cooperate with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts — and reaped a bonanza of favorable news stories as a result.
It would help explain the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant and their constant, unseemly pining for the 1970s and MNGOP that was “Republican”, but in no way conservative; it’s about process, not vision or outcome.
But all of us who polish up our resume when we encounter that bobbleheaded “process-oriented” MBA have a point; process without keen vision is just paperwork and churn.
And even if Vandehei and Harris are right, and reporters, editors and producers are leery of aggressive partisanship, which may be true in some cases – it leads to the same result; people who gravitate toward “process” to manage public affairs tend to be people with fond views of government activism.
Same result; different rhetoric to get there.
February 8th, 2011 at 12:55 pm
My dog isn’t shedding all over my carpeting. She’s recycling fur. If that damn carpeting wasn’t there I wouldn’t have a problem.
February 8th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
A bigger hole in Greenman’s logic is that the MSM coverage of figures like Palin and Limbaugh is almost always negative. For example the AP in this story carried by ESPN’s site: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4553445 , casts Limbaugh as making racist comments. The integrity of the people making the accusations — Jackson and Sharpton — are never questioned, nor is their right to somehow speak for NFL players.
This is AP and ESPN, two avowedly unbiased news sources.
Vandehei’s article is near-gibberish.
He uses a strawman:”Conservatives are convinced the vast majority of reporters at mainstream news organizations are liberals who hover expectantly for each new issue of The Nation.”
This is not true; conservatives believe that journalists were educated in and are employed in industries where liberal political ideas are the norm. political and social liberalism is an outlook, a point of view. I doubt that the writer of the biased AP story about Limbaugh has ever heard of The Nation, but he knew that if he wrote a story hinting that Limbaugh made racist statements and quoted Jackson and Sharpton without mentioning that they are self-promoters and shakedown artists it would get printed without an editor seeing anything wrong with the story. If a similar story were to be written about Jackson’s shakedown of Annheiser-Busch (a company with ties to St. Louis deeper than the NFL’s Rams) Limbaugh would never, ever be asked to comment regarding Jackson. Unlike Limbaugh, the liberals in the news media consider Sharpton and Jackson to be legitimate opinion sources
February 8th, 2011 at 1:58 pm
I’ll try again . . .
A bigger hole in Greenman’s logic is that the MSM coverage of figures like Palin and Limbaugh is almost always negative. For example the AP in this story carried by ESPN’s site: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4553445 , casts Limbaugh as making racist comments. The integrity of the people making the accusations — Jackson and Sharpton — are never questioned, nor is their right to somehow speak for NFL players.
This is AP and ESPN, two avowedly unbiased news sources.
Vandehei’s article is near-gibberish.
He uses a strawman:”Conservatives are convinced the vast majority of reporters at mainstream news organizations are liberals who hover expectantly for each new issue of The Nation.”
This is not true; conservatives believe that journalists were educated in and are employed in industries where liberal political ideas are the norm. political and social liberalism is an outlook, a point of view, held by a distinct minority of Americans but over represented in mainstream journalism, show business, and institutions of higher learning.
I doubt that the writer of the biased AP story about Limbaugh has ever heard of The Nation, but he knew that if he wrote a story hinting that Limbaugh made racist statements and quoted Jackson and Sharpton without mentioning that they are self-promoters and shakedown artists it would get printed without an editor seeing anything wrong with the story. If a similar story were to be written about Jackson’s shakedown of Annheiser-Busch (a company with ties to St. Louis deeper than the NFL’s Rams) Limbaugh would never, ever be asked to comment regarding Jackson. Unlike Limbaugh, the liberals in the news media consider Sharpton and Jackson to be legitimate opinion sources.
Vandehei’s notion that “[Journalists] believe broadly in government activism but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship.” is something only a liberal could believe. Clinton’s best press came during his impeachment when the media took his side. The press never sees excessive partisanship as coming from the left. You are not a cntrist when virtually every political position you hold is to the left of the majority of Americans.
February 8th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
It’s like saying “Mitch Berg, Mr. D and Minnesota Democrats Exposed control Twin Cities’ political debate” when we are in fact the antagonists, not the protagonists.
Yep, that would be ridiculous, since everyone knows Speed Gibson controls the political debate.
February 8th, 2011 at 2:56 pm
I could write a novel on this, with documentation and thorough examples to support my view that MSM has a left wing bias, but, to keep this short……..look at articles when a right wing group critizes something….the emphasis is on the accuser, like they are wacky “fundamentalists”. Look at left wing accusations, the emplasis is on the target and what they allegdely did wrong. Look at the reporting of the left wing attacks on Target and others who “gave money to a candidate who opposes civil rights for gays”. When they actually gave a small amount of money to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, which in turn supports pro-business candidates.
A anti-abortion extremists kills an abortion doctor in Kansas. Non-stop stories on that. A pro-choice person walks up to a pro-life protester and shoots him in the head. Said “I can’t stand pro-life people”. total media black out.
The St Paul paper is one of the more fair big city media outlets, but go back and look at their front pages, and the A section in general, from August to November 2008. They ran a daily anti-Palin and a daily anti-Bachmann column in the “news” section.
Same paper ran a story on a plantation in the south that was owned by an ancestor of John McCain. Get it, he is a decendant of a slave owner. But so is Barry Obama and we got no stories on that.
February 8th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Terry, speaking of editors not seeing anything wrong……remember when the Washington Post ran a story and made the assertion that orthodox Christions are “poor, undereducated and easily led.” It wasn’t so much that the “journalists” wrote that, but that it passed by one or two editors who saw nothing wrong with that line.
Of course the ultimate bias….the fake “racist comments” story from DC last year.
Or perhaps GWB not fufilling his Air Guard requirements. Another fake story that MSM loves.
February 8th, 2011 at 3:14 pm
Anyone see “what would you do” last week? ABC News sent a fake “racist” to Arizona to go after Hispanics. Then filmed it to show what goes on in Arizona. Get it. They hired an actor to portray their cariature of a Republican, then showed it on primetime television.
February 8th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Speed Gibson controls the political debate.
Silly Mr. D. Everyone knows that Speed is the Sarah Palin of Minnesota blogging. Teh crazee! Now shut up and watch NBC Nightly News.
February 8th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Look at the difference between the press coverage of Loughner’s shooting spree and the shooting spree of Nadil Malik Hasan. Literally within minutes the NYT printed a story about the Giffords shooting linking it to acts of vandalism by her political opponents with quotes from the politically motivated Sheriff about the poisonous political climate in AZ.
The Ft. Hood shooting? Hasan shouted “Alah Akbar” as he began shooting, he was Islamic, and was known opponent of the Iraq War.
The NYTimes story on the Hasan shooting does not mention Islam, but it does link the massacre to utterly non-political mass shootings at Virginia tech and an immigration services center in NY.
If you depended on the NY Times coverage of the Loughner and Hasan shootings you would learn exactly the opposite of the truth. Great journalistic standards ‘ya got there.
Vandehei’s “bias towards political consensus and bi-partisanship” is self-serving twaddle. To him it means shouting down anyone to the right of Colin Powell.
February 8th, 2011 at 7:59 pm
Jokes aside, of course conservatives are better at coining memorable phrases to get ideas across. You have to be if you’re going to cut through the Kultursmog (to borrow Tyrrell’s phrase for it). There’s no other way to get an audience for your thoughts, because the dominant media culture doesn’t welcome apostasy.
I remember the bad old days, 20 years ago or so, when I’d write letters to the editor of newspapers or magazines. Once in a while I’d get one published, but most weren’t, because I was completely at the mercy of whoever was editing that page. Blogging lets you self-publish and get your words past the gatekeepers, but people have to find you and that still requires memorable turns of phrase.
That’s what the MSM hates most of all — they don’t get to dictate the terms of the discussion any more. Not that they don’t try; the whole “civility” thing was just another attempt to silence the views of those who disagree with them. Terry is completely spot-on about this point.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to my lair and start beaming the gamma rays at John Croman and Tom Hauser.
February 8th, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Reminds me of when John Alterman wrote that book “WHAT Liberal Media?” and then went and joined the JournoList cabal to try framing the narrative.
February 8th, 2011 at 9:09 pm
“The media isn’t liberal.” Or my favorite: “The media is conservative.”
I’ve been reading this ever since the days I grabbed my first “Minnesota Daily,” a paper which dripped leftism from every page including the coverage of the volleyball tournament.
It’s amazing how much effort goes towards refuting these propositions:
a) the media is overwhelmingly liberal, b) voter fraud helps Democrats and c) the activities of men aren’t warming the planet.
To correctly read the political landscape one needs to understand “Orwellian” and “Socialist Reality.”
“Before you can debate you must first define your terms.”
It’s impossible to debate a socialist because they change their terms on the fly. Still, it’s fun to make them redefine their terms. In that way “socialists” become “progressives” become “you can’t use labels.”
February 8th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Tony gets a big CHA CHING. Mr. D gets the bonus points for the observation that “progressives” need to define the terms of the discussion. Out of fear. They hate on an unreasonable level because they are elitist to the core and believe that they are the sole arbiters of reason.
I don’t hate liberals. I hate liberal “progressive” ideology, because it is, at its core, misanthropic. And I and my children are anthropic.