{"id":17888,"date":"2011-02-08T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2011-02-08T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17888"},"modified":"2014-12-12T14:51:35","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T20:51:35","slug":"press-bias-two-takes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17888","title":{"rendered":"Press Bias: Two Takes"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The media isn’t really liberal”.<\/p>\n

I’ve read a couple of mildly interesting takes on that premise this past week.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The first; this bit in the New York Daily News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 But the piece’s overall premise is “the media isn’t biased because conservatives wrote the political dictionary”.\u00a0 The money passage:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We see the hole in Greenman’s logic, here, right?<\/p>\n

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<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s like saying “Mitch Berg, Mr. D and Minnesota Democrats Exposed <\/em>control Twin Cities’ political debate” when we are in fact the antagonists<\/em>, not the protagonists.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Greenman should take a course in the mechanics of language; catchy phrases have to be easy to say; “Bushducation” is almost impossible to pronounce…<\/p>\n

…but that’s a digression.\u00a0 According to Greenman, acceptance of conservative-driven language <\/em>is a sign that the media never was liberal…:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…which is sort of like saying “if the receiver drops the ball, then the quarterback must have thrown a basketball”. \u00a0 The fact that conservative catch phrases, er, catch, isn’t a sign the media is conservative; it’s a sign that the people are.<\/p>\n

John Harris and Jim Vandehei in Politico <\/em>make a more rational case<\/a>; it’s not so much that the press is “liberal” as they prefer the appearance of “bipartisan process” to any actual policy outcome:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ideal, should be a tidier and more rational process than it is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It’s a little cynical – but you know what they say, a cynic is an idealist who got mugged by experience.<\/p>\n

The problem with “process people” is that when process meets people, entropy wins, sooner than later; invariably, processes need someone to run them.\u00a0 Someone just like the reporters:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bill Clinton\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Harris and Vandehei’s point is that Obama has been exploiting this tendency to get better press – and it’s working:<\/p>\n

Obama is taking advantage of the press\u2019s bias for bipartisan process, a preference that often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy. (See: GOP, Dem lawmakers sit together)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s liberals and made a big show of wanting to cooperate with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts \u2014 and reaped a bonanza of favorable news stories as a result.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And even if Vandehei and Harris are right, and reporters, editors and producers are <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

Same result; different rhetoric to get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The media isn’t really liberal”. I’ve read a couple of mildly interesting takes on that premise this past week.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-alt-media","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17888"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17944,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17888\/revisions\/17944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}