May 31, 2007
How Important Is Television News? VI Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST Mr. Gordon is absolutely correct that the study I cited, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, includes only the leading cable news stations (Fox, MSNBC, and CNN), and not the network news; and while it differentiates between morning, afternoon, and evening coverage, it does not, I think, single out each outlet’s signature new program for analysis. Still, it is a useful study and does not make Fox look like a particularly serious outfit. On a nitpicky point, Mr. Gordon quotes me as saying that “Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels . . .” Actually, this is not my contention; I was quoting the PEJ study and made that clear in my post. On a more substantive note, Mr. Gordon cites this very fact as evidence of liberal bias in the mainstream press. “Despite the very best efforts of Democratic politicians and their water bearers in the media,” he writes, “no one has been able to come up with a scintilla of evidence that anything illegal took place, a hopelessly dysfunctional public relations operation at the Department of Justice not being against the law. . . . Had George Bush been a Democrat, does anyone think that The New York Times et al. would have given a damn about this story?” Where Mr. Gordon sees liberal bias, I see only an unhealthy media fixation on scandal. (For the record, I do think the U.S. Attorneys affair is important. If not illegal, what the Bush administration did—by putting party loyalty ahead of performance standards—had a chilling effect on morale in U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Consequently, the policy sorely undermined both the war on terror, in which U.S. attorneys play an important role, and the general cause of law enforcement. The media and Congress have a legitimate responsibility to bring such partisanship and incompetence to the public’s attention.) I’m reminded of the media’s extensive coverage in 2001 of the vandalism that outgoing Clinton administration officials allegedly committed in the White House and Old Executive Office Building; it later turned out that no such vandalism had ever occurred. Or the ridiculous attention directed at John Edwards’s and Bill Clinton’s mega-expensive haircuts. Or “Travelgate,” which, despite Kenneth Starr’s best efforts, revealed no misdoings on the part of either Bill or Hilary Clinton, or their top aides. So much of this obsession with scandal must in some way date back to Watergate and Vietnam. Since the Washington Post helped to crack the Nixon administration’s misdoings, and since The New York Times revealed the thick web of lies and intrigue behind successive administrations’ policies in Southeast Asia, every reporter has wanted to be the next Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, or Seymour Hersh. There is surely an important place for this kind of journalism in a vibrant democracy, but when it runs amok, it really runs amok.
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