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Although I've never read the book, I've certainly seen
the effects of Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media
Distort the News.
Those effects appear in emails that
presume to take me to task for being a member of the Biased
Liberal Media Elite.
If only. My idea of belong to an Elite involves things like having a car that is less than a dozen years old, living in a house with more than one bathroom, and spending Mud Season at a tropical resort.
Besides, I've never figured out whether elites are good
or bad. If a high-school football team puts its 11 best
players on the field, that's the American way. But if the
same school district puts its 11 best English or math
students in accelerated classes, then you can bet this will
be denounced as an elitist program that takes resources
away from those who most need them.
Just pay me the $20 million a year that Rush Limbaugh
makes for attacking the Liberal Media Elite, and I might
develop a better perspective on elitism. And since that
will happen on the same day that George W. Bush announces
his support for national health insurance, let's move on to
the liberal
part of the Liberal Media Elite.
Depending on how you define liberal,
there's
certainly some truth to the charge that the news media are
liberal, at least in the sense of being
non-conservative.
Much of that, though, is
structural rather than political.
For instance, conservatism
is by definition a
preference for leaving things as they are, for avoiding
change. Yet news is about change.
No matter what your politics, are you going to read a
story that says 383,000 American soldiers to stay at
their current posts
or one that says 10,000 soldiers
will be assigned to Afghanistan
?
To ask a question like that is to answer it. Another structural element lies in the idea that liberals allegedly favor more government, and the mass media do pay a lot of attention to government at every level.
Those are conscious decisions, but they're really not political decisions. In other words, in my day as a newspaper editor, I had to decide that a city council meeting was worth sending a reporter to, as opposed to perhaps a junior high basketball game or a hospital auxiliary dinner.
In an ideal world, my staff would be sufficient for every event in town. In the real world, I had to make decisions about where to deploy scarce resources, and those resources generally went to what I perceived as being of the most interest to the tax-paying public.
Liberal or conservative, an editor is likely to be sure the city council meetings are covered by a staff reporter. After all, we're all citizens who should monitor our elected officials. But this means that governmental actions and proposals will get more attention than those from the private or civic sector.
Further, covering those other sectors can be difficult, since they're not under the Sunshine Law. About 20 years ago, the local Catholic elementary school was rumored to be about to close. Its governing board was planning to meet, presumably to discuss whether to keep the school going. This seemed to be of public interest, and I wanted to send a reporter. I was told that the press wasn't welcome.
Fortunately, the priest thought differently, and he smuggled our reporter into the choir loft for the meeting. We got an informative story about a matter of public concern.
Such complications, though, explain a certain
government is important
bias found throughout the
media, from the conservative Washington Times and National
Review to the liberal New York Times and Nation
magazine.
The final structural reason for liberal media
is
that reporters and editors tend to be liberal-arts types
who pay a lot more attention to the First Amendment than
the Second.
But what else would you expect from people who work with words for a living? It's like saying that most corporate officers tend to be business types, or that most automotive engineers tend to be mechanical types, or that Microsoft executives tend to be greedy types.
It's just the nature of the business, and it's not really a political thing -- except that in modern America, the cultural has become the political.
College-educated liberal-arts majors, for instance, are more likely to fish than to hunt. So you'll read more about the delights of graphite rods than the pleasures of finding a trophy buck in your sights.
Perhaps this translates into a public attitude that esteems fishing while hunting is barely tolerated, and this is reflected in political campaigns -- you often see photos of candidates holding rod and reel, but when was the last time you saw one gutting an elk?
Or perhaps the process runs the other way. Who knows?
But the real question might be this: If the media are
really so liberal, and they're really so powerful, then why
is conservatism
the dominant political force these
days?
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