I know liberals are so tired of hearing about this subject. They think a liberal media bias is non-existent. For example, check out the way the Washington Post covers it in Bull Market for Media Bias:
We in the news business think we’re impartial seekers of truth, but most Americans think otherwise. They view us as sloppy, biased and self-serving….the latest Pew survey confirms — with lots of numbers — an especially disturbing trend that we’ve all sensed: People are increasingly picking their media on the basis of partisanship. If you’re Republican and conservative, you listen to talk radio and watch the Fox News Channel. If you’re liberal and Democratic, you listen to National Public Radio and watch “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” It’s like picking restaurants: Chinese for some, Italian for others. And everyone can punch up partisan blogs — the fast food of the news business. What’s disturbing is that, like restaurants, the news media may increasingly cater to their customers’ (partisan) tastes. News slowly becomes more selective and slanted.
Can you believe this? Samuelson just doesn’t get it. In his assessment, the media aren’t biased; it is us who are biased toward news sources based on our “partisanship.” At the same time, it’s almost a confession, of sorts, that mainstream media is biased, which is why he believes we seek out partisan sources in the first place.
What Samuelson misses is that mainstream media journalists cater to each other. While they may believe they’re fair and objective, “ordinary” people living outside left-leaning enclaves of large cities on the east coast don’t enter into their thoughts until it’s time to consort with the masses the way Peter Jennings did last month.
I give the liberal Samuelson points for trying to understand why us ordinary folks keep harping on and on about bias, but his column reeks of elitism, just like a John Kerry campaign speech (where is he, anyway?). He just can’t seem to take that necessary step: admission. In fact, I find some white liberals to be quite condescending people. I can see right through their phony “compassion” and “I’m very tolerant, aren’t I?” façade. They hide behind a “progressive” ideology, which they seem to think is something noble or superior.
And why people lump Rush Limbaugh in with network and cable news programming, I’ll never understand. Rush is a biased, conservative pundit. That’s OK. Opinion-makers can advocate whatever they want. But if he were a biased conservative reporter, that would be a problem.
Back to Samuelson. He adds:
I’ve worked in the mainstream press for 35 years. Editors and reporters reflexively deny a liberal bias, even though many ordinary people find it and mainstream newsrooms are politically skewed….Most reporters I know believe fiercely in being fair and objective. Still, the debate over “what’s news and significant?” is warped.
I don’t understand why he sees the debate as “warped” or precisely what he means by warped, but what is fair and objective is reasonably easy to determine. The Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell wrote an informative article (and book) about bias and how to spot it.
Samuelson believes that “sorting of audiences by politics” is why conservatives don’t like CNN, and that poses “dangers.” Liberal journalists don’t trust us to pick our own news sources. They see the decrease in newspaper circulation and the success of FOX as dangerous and partisan. He concludes: “The worthy, if unattainable, ideals of fairness and objectivity will silently erode.”
Someone needs to tell Robert those ideals left the building a long time ago.
