I’ve always known that the vast majority of mass media tilts decidedly to the left. Sort of like university professors. But people on the left will claim the opposite, esp. regarding Iraq war coverage. And the absolutely froth over the right leaning Fox News. Do I really know that media tilts left or is it just a product of my own right leaning bias?
Well let me tell ya something:
Donations by journalists to major candidates are 9:1 D to R.
Now many outlets are forbidding donations – nice – mask the problem.
]Overwhelming liberal media bias, alive and well.
(crosspost: RMG)
Please share widely!
As liberal as the individual journalists may be, the media is only as liberal as the millionaires who run the big corporations who own the media outlets.
… and this applies to Karen’s extensive takes, and many of her sources as well:
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You guys pitch a fit when I suggest you have marxist cores, yet every single thing in the world has to fit neatly into dialectical materialism or it couldn’t possibly be true. (woah, hyperbole!)
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Facts? What else did I link to but facts? I expressed a belief and supported it with facts.
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BTW, if editors (keepers of the means of production?) were forcing their legions of liberal writers to toe the conservative line, don’t you think one of the liberals would have mentioned it?
But I daresay some of us do have “Marxist cores.” So what?
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I’ve been expressing beliefs and supporting them with facts. As I said, the facts tend to agree with the opinions of those tilting leftward. How can you argue when someone counts up the number of conservative “experts” v liberal “experts” during one season of a talk show? How can you argue the blatant lies of people like O’Reilly–cit and cit–when people use actual taped video and sound recordings for proof?
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Oh, and as for this:
Yeah. They have mentioned it. In places like the websites I mentioned in a previous comment. Who started, runs, maintains these sites? A lot of them are by former MSM. As for current staffers, puh-leeze. It’s very difficult to find a good job in journalism. You think someone’s going to go on record while they have a job? The only people who can do that with impunity are the Simpsons, whose staff can get away with the sharpest jabs at FOX because they are bringing in the money.
Hey you aren’t the only person coming up with facts – and many of your facts are opinions I daresay. Worse, you have linked places like FAIR, which make an art out of selectively presenting data so as not to out and out lie in any given case, but often to paint a picture completely opposite of the truth. If you aren’t careful, the regular reading of Extra! will lead you to believe many untruths.
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Oreilly is a conservative commentator, on Fox News no less – which I will admit leans to the right. (see, that wasn’t so hard!) Whether or not he has made inaccurate statements (lies?) is neither relevant to a discussion of general media bias, nor particularly interesting to me.
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Here’s a quote from the Reagan Diaries that I just read, thought you might find it amusing:
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Feb 23, 1984
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…Back to the Oval office & lunch with about 40 publishers of leading national magazines. Strange – some of their mags kick my head off in the current issues but these publishers are all gung ho for me & what we’re doing. I wish they’d talk to their writers…
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By and large, I think your theory is wrong. I think the media is biased to the left. So what? Thats to your advantage! Be thankful for it!
No one is ever going to agree on this (not that there isn’t a correct or incorrect side) because no one is going to trust the sources quoted by each other. I tend to like to use facts to back up my arguments, and the sources I’ve quoted have used facts.
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It seems incredibly obvious to me that liberal voices are not heard as frequently as conservative/neocons. Maybe right-wing pundits are justs much much much louder.
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One more site to check out:
Media Reform Information Center
Someone who just doesn’t like the facts (“It’s not true! It’s not true! I KNOW it’s not true!”) might also make the above statement.
Worse, you have linked places like FAIR
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…know that FAIR posted a number of lies of Rusty Lamebrain in 1994 or 1995, and allowed him to respond (which no right wing media website allows). Rusty responded, and the responses were posted on FAIR’s web site. The responses were so lame as to be laughable., as FAIR noted when they posted them.
You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel if you think you can use this as evidence of a left-leaning media:
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Journalists don’t run newspapers; journalists don’t even have a major part in deciding what is run. Editors do that. Editors hired by publishers. Publishers run newspapers (like that famous liberal, Rupert Murdoch). Publishers set the agenda and direction of the media they own; they hire people with similar agendas. Those with different agendas probably don’t get as many stories to do or as many important stories.
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There are actual researched reports, like this one from Media Matters that use facts to prove that the mass media is anything but liberal. Facts you can’t argue with, like how many times conservative pundits were on talk shows as opposed to liberal pundits. That stuff’s on record.
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Of course, part of the problem is that most people wouldn’t know real journalism if it hit them in the head. The other part of the problem is that the facts often agree with what liberals are saying. You’ll notice that most fascist neocons will whine about liberal bias rather than attacking what is actually said; they can’t attack what is said because it’s the truth. So you get wingnuts complaining about people leaking information about, say, Iraq–or Alberto Gonzalez–or FEMA–instead of focusing on what the leakers are saying about our corrupt, illegal, and immoral government. Or they just LIE, like Tony Snow or Bill O’Reilly, even though there is TAPED EVIDENCE of what they’ve said in the past.
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The reports about journalists’ donations only show that journalists themselves may lean towards liberal–but it says nothing about the mass media.
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Karen – who do you think WRITES the stuff the editors edit? That would be….the reporters!
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BTW – take a look at the list. There are several editors on it as well.
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Karen – Mrs. Pyncheon (of the old Lou Grant show) is dead.
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There used to be a natural push-me-pull-you between editors (who are usually promoted reporters, like principals are promoted teachers) and publishers. That was when families or individuals owned newspapers, and took an interest in what was published. Now, with corporate ownership, they could publish nothing but horoscopes and Sudoko on the editorial pages and if the ad revenue remained constant, well, hey – our duty is to the stockholders, not some ephermeral readership! In consequence, said editors – who tend to be liberals from a liberal discipline – can veer further and further left with little or no consequence or check.
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Liberal journalists – USUALLY unintentionally – shape the direction of a story by the questions they choose to ask and get answered surrounding an event or issue. Especially in the Boston market – Reporters are gettign increasingly lazy, and their rolodexes are geting smaller – we hear more and more often from the same predictable cadre of opinionistas and are less well informed than Mrs. Pyncheon would have liked.
Peter, my conservative friend,
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I never said that ALL mass media is anti-liberal. I’m just replying to the tired old argument that all of mass media IS liberal. And, to be clear, I’m referring to the American mass media.
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btw, thank you for the mention of the inimitable Nancy Marchand and the Lou Grant show.
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It’s funny–I agree with all of your points, but when I added them up I came to a different conclusion. This is where your argument breaks down:
I wish!
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You’re not paying attention to the key part of this equation: the “ad revenue.” One of the biggest reasons that the mass media is NOT liberal is fear of advertisers; that is, fear of the LACK of advertisers. You are correct in describing the descent into subjectivity as largely “unintentional,” but again, not for the example you described. It starts with the, “oh, what could that hurt,” the small compromises, the “advertorial” (copy that’s written specifically because of an advertiser’s product).
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What’s your background in the mass media? Because I saw this, and fought this, all the time when I was a reporter/editor (and, btw, this was at a so-called “alternative” paper–it was supposed to be liberal and eventually grew out of it). “Apu over at the Kwik-E-mart is buying a full page ad,” says the salesperson. “The Publisher wants you to do a whole section on convenience food, and include some recipes. And oh, by the way, your story on Planned Parenthood/review of Metallica album is offensive to them so we’ll have to cut it.” That is the reality, the pressure. It’s even worse now with the internet, since newspaper (physical newspaper) readership has been declining.
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Would a liberal mass media refuse to run condom ads? Would a liberal media continue to call the antichoice movement “prolife”? Another fine example of Orwellian newspeak.
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You’re also right about journalists getting lazy. But that means they’ll pass along anything without researching–look how they covered Iraq, no questions asked. Look how they’re not covering things like Cheney being accused of war crimes by Colin Powell’s former chief of staff or Donald Rumsfeld being sued for alleged war crimes. Look how they’re not covering the discontinued search for Osama bin Laden; how they bought into the Osama-Saddam link.
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A liberal media would have challenged administration spokespersons from Ari Fleisher to Puffy McMoonface to Tony Snow for their blatant and arrogant lies Tony Snow denying he ever said the firings of the US attorneys was performance based. As a matter of fact, this is a great example of the difference between the journalists and the conglomerates that own them. The journalists did challenge Snow for his “flip flopping” and denial thereof, but that wasn’t picked up by major US mass media.
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If the mass media was liberal, there’d be no Colbert Report.
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A good example on editors spinning what journalists write would be seen down on the South Shore. Quincy’s Patriot Ledger and Brockton’s Enterprise are owned by the same company, has the same managing editor, but each have different editorial staffs. The Enterprise is run by frothing Barbara Anderson types which is reflected in its editorial content, while the Ledger takes more of a mainstream centrist view, just deviating slightly right or slightly left, depending on the issue.
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p>Often an article written by a reporter for one paper appears on the other. However, each paper will have a different headline, and may change a few adjectives and verbs; an article which may be 95% identical between the two papers can convey an entirely different message based on that 5% that the editors put in.
Howell Raines
I’m a firm believer in the theory that journalists are (with some notable exceptions in both directions) neither slanted liberally or conservatively, but slanted to the “sexiness” of a particular story.
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Does Paris Hilton get so much media attention because journalists are liberal? Or because Hilton’s story is easy, sexy and is something they can sell?
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This whole topic is so tired I wanted to pass over this thread entirely until I saw that DEMOLISHER started it. I will only ever refer to DEMOLISHER in capital letters. Someone with such an obnoxious handle cannot simply be referred to in the lower case! Long time DEMOLISHER, welcome back!
I totally agree with your assertion that they are drawn to the sexiness (or the yellowness?) of a story, or spin.
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They are also liberally biased.
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The two are not mutually exclusive, and between them and lack of care about accuracy, they make our media into rather of a mess.
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Thanks for the emphasis on my handle. FYI I haven’t left I just don’t post very often, anywhere, these days.
… I don’t know where to start.
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But why reinvent the wheen when Alterman has already covered this issue here
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You may have heard of it – it’s called ‘Arrogance’, and it’s by Bernard Goldberg. Please, settle down, don’t stalk away! His more famous book is called ‘Bias’, and that was a boring laundry list of who said what when. ‘Arrogance’ is a far better book because it talks about subtle, invisible points of view, the things that ‘everybody knows’ that may not be true.
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My background in journalism consists mainly of eating dinner and hanging out with reporters as a political operative. I love doing GOOD press releases, and getting quotes to reporters timely, as I understand the relentless pressure to feed the beast. I’ve done some opinion writing, and even been paid for some of it, but I’ve never actually been a newpaper employee, due in no small part to the lack of a journalism degree.
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The creeping professionalization of newsrooms is fascinating. It used to be you just had to be able to write, and be willing to get all Jimmy Olsen about getting a story first. Now, with the advent of degreed professonals, the world view has gotten more liberal – as indeed, most liberal arts college graduates are – and the fire has been replaced with calculation and story plans. And dullness. Newsrooms have become sad quiet cloisters of people working on stories, their faces a sickly blue from the glow of computer screens, sitting quietly in a row, churning out copy from notes like it was ribbon candy.
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I don’t know any national media figures (although I HAVE met John Henning a few times as he wandered the State House like a curious ghost) so I cannot speak to your outrage about the lion and ringmaster atmosphere in the White House Press Corps. I only know micro, not macro. And often – stories about selectmen’s conflict of interest, or new zoning regulatons, or a school crisis – they come across as limp and liberal because the REPORTER doesn’t stay for the whole meeting, or tries to reconstruct a story while watching local access broadcast and making some calls for some zippy quotes – missing the atmosphere and the real story which could be told.
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More and more, people phone it in from their stereotypes and preconceptions – and more and more, nobody checks anything but spelling and grammar.
…Goldberg is a commentator for Faux News.
conservative.
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Why on EARTH would anyone take anything Bernard Goldberg has to say as scholarly or unbiased? Geezus.
….certainly, the decline in print journalism should be directly attributed to liberal academia and people with an actual education seeking out professional employment in a relatively low-paying field that they likely went into debt to become educated in and not at all to the rise of the monolithic medium of television and more recently the creeping popularity of instant net news. It can’t possibly be corporate sponsorship that puts pressure on print outlets to have reporters working on stories with particular angles while the editorial staff kowtows to the reality that most people don’t want to pay to read news that they’ve already seen on TV, it must be that journalists (who btw still travel to and live in war zones, refugee camps, natural disaster zones, countries with unstable government and Crawford, Texas [irony intentional]) have grown increasingly slow and lazy and would rather make it home in time to watch American Idol than chase a hot story. Can’t possibly be that American Idol, sadly, has become THE hot story – oh, wait, that must be the liberal journalists’ fault, too.
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I suppose as well that the Savings and Loan Collapse at the end of the last century was attributable to the tellers and branch managers and the ENRON scandal is to be blamed on the payroll clerks and HR representatives. Let’s not blame the bush administration for the war in Iraq – let’s blame the soldiers instead.
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I gotta tell you, the folksy, aw shucks, I just like to drink coffee and chew the fat with the journalists the way they used to be in the good old days schtick is a very attractive diversion, but this clap trap about blaming the employees and not the people in power that it is trying to gussy up stinks like old fish.
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Anthony – I was answering a specific question from Karen – What’s your background in the mass media? Since I am not a professional, my journalistic experience consists of hanging out with reporters. I don’t know the great titans of media, just the guys making $22,000 fresh out of school. I tried to answer her here –
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And it’s interesting – she as a professional and I as guest noticed the same things and reached different conclusions. That’s not blaming, that’s just observing.
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Besides, since there IS no liberal bias, what blame could possibly attach?
…observed the culture of decline in newsrooms have you. No, you had coffee with some journalists once or twice and decided to use that as a basis for expressing authority on a subject you actually know nothing about.
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And now you are trying to aw shucks your way out of being called on it.
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And for the record I never claimed there was no liberal media bias. There is. There is also a conservative media bias and a feminist media bias and a gay media bias and a homophobic media bias. Every media outlet is biased. Is there a consensus media bias that rules all others. I have no idea and neither do you.
Again, I take issue with:
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You have said you don’t have a professional background in journalism, yet you’re making sweeping generalizations about what being a journalist is like. I have a BA in Journalism and I’ve worked in newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, and magazines. I think I know a little bit more about what it’s like on the inside.
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As a matter of fact, the exact opposite of a “creeping professionalization of newsrooms” is happening. Publishers/producers/stockholders do not care about the journalism ethics and mores that are learned by real journalists in professional schools. Real journalists scare them, because they are likely to want to dig deeply into a story, no matter who it exposes.
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And again you are correct in this statement, but not for the right reasons:
(Except hardly anyone checks grammar or word usage anymore.)
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I’ll pick up Arrogance if you pick up Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the news.
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In the meantime, here are some website to check:
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Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
FactCheck.org
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Freepress.net
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Center for American Progress
–Report: The Imbalance of Political Talk Radio
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Journalism.org
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Media Transparency, the money behind conservative media
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MediaChannel, as the media watch the world, we watch the media
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What Liberal Media?
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SourceWatch
Karen, I think a previous poster pointed out that the quote in your sig (and on many bumper stickers I’ve seen) is inaccurate. Will you consider fixing it? I think it is properly attributed to the prominent American marxist Howard Zinn
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http://thinkexist.co…
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Jefferson actually said: “Political dissention is doubtless a less evil than the lethargy of despotism, but still it is a great evil.”
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Its hard for me to see how you people could confuse the two.
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Also some of your sources are heavily leftist.
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I checked factcheck.org hoping to find some data on general media bias but nothing leapt out, do you have a specific article there?
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Here are some for you that seem rather more scientific:
http://www.polisci.u…
http://econ-www.mit….
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And if you could see me I’d be the red-faced one repeatedly slapping her forehead and going “D’OH.” Many apologies.
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My new one came from the Theodore Roosevelt Association directly, not Bartlett’s or Roget’s or any other internet source.
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Thank you for those links. I couldn’t find a year attributed to the ucla one, but a graph with info on it ended at 2000. So that’s before what one could call “the great silence” on the part of mass media to neocon propaganda. It had been building, though–tell me you don’t think it’s ludicruous that Clinton gets impeached and crucified in the press for an inappropriate liaison, while Bush and Cheney get away with lying to get us into a war that has directly led to killing hundreds and thousands of people (that includes thousands of American soldiers); ignoring laws when they don’t like them; wiretapping citizens against the direct advice of the then-attorney general–you know the list. If the media was truly liberal all this stuff would be on page one of every major paper every day–not Paris Hilton.
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The MIT link was particularly interesting, and it pointed out the need for another clarification: the difference between the editorial pages and the news pages. In that respect the argument that mass media bends to the left might actually be correct, but the massive rightward pull of the Wall Street Journal’s insanely reactionary editorial pages (Lucky duckies, anyone? Plus a good Slate analysis of Lucky Duckies Again) probably counterbalances all the others.
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That would explain why, even though the Boston Globe covered the gubernatorial campaign like a bunch of high schoolers writing in slam books, they ended up writing a glowing endorsement of Deval. It also explains the aforementioned WSJ, which can have excellent objective reporting next to editorials written by higher-ups in the Ministry of Truth, all doublethink and newspeak: perfect examples of a two minute hate (for any of you not up with the lingo, look here, or here, or here).
This reads like another one of those efforts to classify Conservatives as an oppressed, under-represented group whose voices are being silenced. Sorry Tories play identity politics. We are asked to evaluate not the content but the hiring of the media. Perhaps conservative demands for affirmative action will follow.
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To prove a liberal bias, one has to go deeper than hiring practices. One has to go deeper, too, than whether this or that news article “favors” liberals or conservatives. Conservatives have been spouting fantasy about evolution, Iraq, global warming, the Clintons, and the like for long enough that merely reporting scientifically supported views or facts might be seen as “liberal”. Some things that conservatives might take as evidence of bias an unbiased observer might take as evidence of being unhinged. Methodology matters here. Bias is always defined with respect to something.
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As Karen has helpfully pointed out, “our side” has written a great quantity on this — including thorough refutations of Bernard Goldberg’s, er, work. I don’t pretend to have read much of that material nor the reasonable conservatives who have written on this — if such exist. I suppose if one really cared about this issue — as opposed to finding the Gotcha of the Week — one might have prepared by reading both sides and thinking carefully about methodology. In a gated liberal blog community populated with inquiring minds, this could be a lot of fun to do.
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That said, it is very odd to read Mr. Demolisher’s complaint when we are spending millions of dollars of day on a useless occupation of Iraq. We got there in large part because our media turned off their skepticism and published lots of anonymously sourced deceits from the current Administration. That’s an obvious, incontrovertible, right-in-your-face sign of bias. Given that history, perhaps, Mr. Demolisher’s focus on hiring is ironically correct and wrong:
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There aren’t enough liberals in journalism.
Apparently my little dig wasn’t far off. The subject of this post was the headline at Drudge for a day this past week. There is a discussion at Media Matters here which gives a very good critique of methodology. Reinforcing Karen, we learn that copy editors, who have no influence whatever over news coverage, were swept into the sample. Relevant too are their comments about Chris Matthews:
Over the years, Matthews has spoken admiringly of McCain and found frequent occasions to let slip his dislike of Hillary Clinton’s personality. In a world where elections have come to resemble popularity contests, such favoritism offers McCain significant help and gives the front-running Democrat a notable handicap.