August 25, 2006
I Wouldn’t Let My Parakeet Poop on That Rag Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:15 PM EST If Fred Smoler knows media bias as well as he knows military history, I’m cooked, but I’ll take that chance and disagree with his post of Wednesday evening. By pointing to instances where liberal publications have pursued anti-Clinton investigations, or where their coverage has been governed by considerations other than politics, he does not disprove the assertion that these publications are biased; he merely shows that liberal bias is not their sole motivation. (This leaves aside the question of whether “liberal” and “anti-Clinton” are necessarily in conflict.)
You can’t disprove the existence of bias by listing some unbiased acts; you might just as well say that Fox News is unbiased because they report President Bush’s low poll numbers. Similarly, saying that New York Times reporters lack an “explicit sense of ideological mission” merely restates the old “everyone I know likes McGovern” line from 1972. They are so secure and unchallenged in their opinions that they don’t realize that they are opinions at all.
Fred points out that “before the 1950s, the American press was unabashedly partisan,” generally opposing FDR. That’s true, and the same went for Harry Truman. During the 1948 presidential campaign, Truman angrily told a reporter: “The Chicago Tribune and this paper [the Spokane Spokesman-Review] are the worst in the United States. . . . You’ve got the worst Congress in the United States you have ever had and the papers—this paper—are responsible for it.”
Most observers agreed with Truman that the papers he cited were strongly Republican. So, in varying degrees, were most other newspapers outside the South. Yet during that campaign, the press had great fun pouncing on the ill-advised statements of Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, Truman’s Republican opponent, and his supporters. When Truman went on a campaign trip by train, Sen. Robert Taft, an Ohio Republican, mocked him for visiting “every whistle station in the West.” (A whistle station was a town so small that passengers had to signal the conductor if they wanted to stop there.) For days afterwards, newspapers gleefully reported statements from the mayors of cities along the route denying that they were “whistle stops.”
Later, when Dewey (whose hometown was Owosso, Michigan, for what it’s worth) was making a train trip of his own, a member of the crew bungled a braking maneuver, giving the train a sharp jolt. Dewey muttered that the crew member deserved to be “shot at sunrise.” This is the sort of statement that any of us might make in a moment of frustration, but unfortunately for Dewey, reporters were present when he made it. Regardless of their political views, newspapers did not hesitate to print Dewey’s statement, or to continue kicking it around for days afterwards.
Does this disprove the contention that newspapers favored the Republicans? No, it merely shows that one very strong motivation of American journalists has always been the desire to make authority figures look like jerks. If the ever-popular combination of fellatio and perjury is not available, then accusing powerful people of making fun of hicks will have to do. And that’s what makes America great.
To me, if you want to prove that The New York Times is biased, all you have to do is look at it. I recently heard someone defending the paper by saying, “It’s not that bad. The editorial page and the style section are really the only parts that make me want to throw up.” To which another person replied, “Yes, but these days half the paper is the editorial page and the other half is the style section.”
As Fred Smoler points out, this doesn’t mean that every single thing the Times does is calculated to advance a leftist agenda, though it does sometimes seem that way. Many other factors are involved. The White House security logs that proved Bill Clinton was a perjurer, for example, were leaked to the Times precisely because, being a liberal paper, it would have the most credibility. But over the course of time, a newspaper’s choice of what to report and how to report it will usually be governed by the political biases, conscious or unconscious, of its writers and editors. The fact that counterexamples can be cited does not make the principle untrue; it merely shows that other considerations are also at work.
I agree with Fred Smoler that newspapers used to be much more open about their biases. In the 1870s, when The New York Times was exposing the Tweed Ring, it advertised itself as “New York’s only Republican paper.” When I used to write the long version of “Time Machine,” I looked at a lot of newspapers from the late 1940s on microfilm. The Denver Post was particularly atrocious, essentially consisting of half wire copy and half vicious attacks on whatever local politicians they felt like taking down.
Back then the Washington Post was still a small-town operation. Whenever there was an important story about Congress or the Supreme Court, I learned to look in The New York Times for coverage, since the Washington Post rarely had anything more than wire-service articles, even though they were right in town. (By the way, I was amused to see that in the 1940s the Post sponsored a softball league called the Post Industrial League. I envisioned it being restricted to service-industry office drones, and when someone tried to bring in a ringer, the opposing team would say, “Hey, no fair—he works in manufacturing!”)
But the worst thing I saw in my “Time Machine” research was a story that ran in the Atlanta Constitution in October 1922. It was titled “Possum Season Opening Brings Joy to Negroes,” and it began as follows: “Make haste dere niggers and zoon around here. Dey’s sumpin’ a’doin’ aroun’ dis place tonight. De ‘possum time is come.” That’s right, the whole thing was written in dialect. That’s one tradition in American journalism that we are well rid of.
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