August 27, 2006
Elephants and Donkeys, Continued Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:50 PM EST Fred Schwarz generously speculated about whether I know media bias as well as I know military history. He can stop wondering: I do not. As for the significance of what I called Clinton-baiting by what are normally taken to be liberal media organs: I think the persistence and intensity of their coverage of what proved to be imaginary financial scandals, in the absence of any persuasive evidence, was an example of bias. An unintended consequence of this biased reporting, which kept a sense of foul scandal alive despite the absence of evidence, was to give political cover to the Republicans for a remarkably protracted and for a very long time wholly unsuccessful investigation by Kenneth Starr. Starr eventually turned up some crimes by the expedient of what is sometimes called a perjury trap, but that perjury trap concerned a subject entirely unrelated to any earlier topic of inquiry. In any case, without the earlier and undeserved support of the liberal media, I do not think there could have been a sustained Republican campaign culminating in impeachment. What is arguably the most powerful recent example of the effect of media bias does not suggest that the only problem with media bias, including the biases of liberal media, is liberal bias. Protracted and disproportionate (i.e. biased) attention paid to a series of groundless charges was not liberal bias. I would never claim that what are called the “liberal media” are bias-free, only that they are periodically gripped by different sorts of biases (including some “liberal” ones). To pick another example of non-liberal bias in “liberal media”: The New York Times’ coverage of the strategic balance and the Salt II talks. Although you would not easily have guessed it from the press coverage, there was no dangerous erosion of the mid-to-late 1970s strategic balance, and the reporting did not adequately cover both sides of the controversies. To pick a third example: When in the election of 2000 a mob of Congressional Republican staffers stopped a vote count in Miami by noisy disruption and the implied threat of violence, and a senior Republican boasted that this behavior had successfully stopped officials from counting votes, the “liberal media” spent a lot less time covering that event than they spent on those never-to-be-proven Clinton financial scandals. Another point: biased journalism takes a lot of different forms. A traditional definition of bias is when the media organ’s editorial stance starts affecting its news coverage, but I don’t think that a sufficient definition. For example, when The New York Times, on the eve of the Iraq War, published an op-ed piece suggesting that Saddam Hussein had never gassed any Kurds, and that those notorious attacks had been made by Iran, that was in my view an example of bias. How can the choice of an op-ed piece be a demonstration of bias? Isn’t the op-ed page pure opinion? Sure—but who thinks the Times would have published an op-ed denying the Holocaust, or claiming that the Tutsi had massacred themselves? Giving publicity to a disgraceful though politically useful fringe view (if Saddam had not gassed thousands of Kurdish civilians, the focus on possible Iraqi WMD would have seemed less urgent) seems to me to be an example of biased journalism. Insofar as an op-ed page is imagined to fairly represent the spectrum of respectable views, an op-ed page can also display bias by letting the case for the other side be made only rarely, and then only by fools or the timid, while letting the case for one’s own side be made eloquently, aggressively, and frequently. I am not multiplying examples of what might be called liberal press bias, because I have every confidence that other bloggers can and will do so. I am only trying to suggest that there are interesting counter-examples from the same media. Also, I think I owe John Steele Gordon an apology. I thought he had made a reference to The New Republic, but I was misattributing to John Steele Gordon a quotation by Fred Barnes cited by Josh Zeitz, while he was arguing with Mr. Gordon. Since I generally enjoy reading Mr. Gordon, and do not recall much pleasure reading Mr. Barnes, I am particularly sorry to have made such a mistake.
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