August 23, 2006
Media Bias Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST A few thoughts on liberal media and media bias: First of all, I usually don’t watch too much TV news; I read a fair number of newspapers on-line, but TV news seems an inefficient and time-consuming way to get the news, compared to reading. Since much of what has been said here has been about TV news, my fellow bloggers have been discussing something in part outside my daily experience. On the other hand, during the second half of the 1980s and part of the 1990s I knew a fair number of news producers, and a few reporters and executive producers, in this country and in the UK, and I have known more such people since. We socialized a lot, and I informally (in one case, formally) advised people at a couple of the networks on, among other things, the background to the SALT II talks, which they had to cover. They knew very little about nuclear weapons, and rather than displaying conventionally “liberal” views on the subject, they were instead bewildered that anyone cared enough about the subject to have worked up any detailed knowledge of it. In general, their attitude about what ought to be on the news was captured by their slogan “If it bleeds, it leads.” They always insisted that a fire was the best possible subject for a news broadcast—great pictures. In some cases, politics actually bored them, although covering it was their job. I suppose most (although not all) of them were politically liberal, but that really did not seem to affect much of the way they appeared to do their jobs. They cared enormously about ratings, about the changing pay structure of their industry, and about the technical nature of their business; they were a lot less ideological, and a lot less Left, than most academics; they were alternately amused and disgusted by what was then called PC. The fact that it leads if it bleeds can have powerful but probably unintended political consequences. In Iraq, Lebanon, or the Occupied Territories, civilians killed or wounded in air strikes almost certainly intended to hit someone else bleed, and lead. This can create the impression that the Americans and Israelis are fundamentally in the business of killing civilians. It is impossible to visually dramatize the intricacies of most questions—for example, the questions of whether the Lebanese state and the Palestinian Authority need to enforce a monopoly on violence, and on the relationship of a monopoly on violence to the privilege of sovereignty. Television is by its nature able to cover some subjects and not others. If you can trust Human Rights Watch, some 25 of around 3000 sorties unjustifiably, recklessly, and indiscriminately killed Lebanese civilians. The air strikes that didn’t did not as predictably get onto the news—although it is relevant that Hezbollah is less than helpful in getting reporters to those scenes. It is not easy to visually dramatize the problem of determining culpable error and degrees of culpability. Is the resulting coverage expressing a bias? If so, the simplest way to describe that bias is to call it a bias for the accessible visual story. Reporters themselves may have their politics affected by the resulting coverage, which may subsequently influence their ideas of what the real story is, but again, that later bias is in part a consequence of the nature of the medium, not itself the origin of choices about what the medium first transmitted. Are the news media generally much afflicted with liberal bias? My sense is that some of them are, on some questions, but there is striking evidence for the reverse proposition. My most vivid sense of this came during the Clinton presidency, when supposedly ‘liberal’ papers like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times regularly hounded Clinton about alleged financial scandals grouped together as ‘Whitewater.’ Eventually, perjury and fellatio turned up, and yielded an impeachment, but for a good long time there was nothing much to show for all that muckraking, which didn’t make them lay off. The New York Times didn’t display any perceptible liberal bias in the Wen Ho Lee business—rather the contrary. If John Steele Gordon wonders why at least some liberals think that there is no great liberal bias in the media, part of the answer, I think, is all that very assiduous Clinton-baiting. In the wake of Watergate, a lot of reporters wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, even if Clinton wasn’t a very plausible Nixon. They were and remain broadly contemptuous of politicians, but that is not, for my money, a particularly liberal quality. If media people seem to enjoy thinking about themselves as people who see through things, rather than as people who look into things, they do not always have an ideological filter for who and what they want to see through. The self-description and its unexamined assumptions can be questioned, but this problem is not exactly liberal bias. In one of his recent posts, John Steele Gordon writes that “what’s needed, obviously, is diversity of opinion (and respect for opinions other than one’s own—not exactly a common feature among ideologues).” You can get diversity of opinion by trying to insure it within a news organization, or by multiplying the number of news organizations until you get some with different biases. We nowadays have the Fox network and talk radio, which do seem to have broken any possible liberal monopoly on the news media. I would have preferred to have gotten diversity through the first option, but the second may have to do. For whatever it is worth, in my admittedly limited experience people at Fox have a far sharper sense of ideological mission than do people at the ‘liberal’ networks, while people at the one Murdoch paper I know have a more explicit sense of ideological mission than do most people at The New York Times. If you have lived abroad, what is most striking about the American press is still how much (in comparative terms) it thinks it strives to appear neutral and maintain a separation between news and opinion. This was not always the case—I have the impression that before the 1950s, the American press was unabashedly partisan, generally very venomously so. The perception that the press is partisan probably shocks us because we are heirs to a relatively new tradition, where it is not supposed to be. It is also worth thinking about how much press biases matter in determining political outcomes. FDR faced what was on balance a savagely hostile press (although he was good at charming reporters). It got worse over time, but FDR kept winning elections, and if I remember correctly, by increasing margins.
|
