Your "liberal" media

Time to retire the facile construction of a "liberal" mainstream media that supports Democrats and hates Republicans:

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But the following morning, [Mike] Allen wrote about the story, first belittling it by calling it "a late-afternoon/early evening frenzy stirred up" by Waas, and said that Senate Democrats see it as "a new chance to poke the attorney general." Allen's sole contribution to the story, as usual: relaying "what the administration told [the Politico] about the development."

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Allen then copied a long anonymous quote from the White House which asserted that there was nothing secret about the order because "it was published in the Federal Register," and blamed the story on "Chairman Leahy's creative imagination and thirst for perceived scandal." Allen proceeded to pass on a variety of other statements from the White House -- all anonymous -- claiming that there was nothing unusual at all about this delegation of hiring powers.

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Were the White House's claims about this revelation true or false? One would have no idea reading Allen's piece. Investigation and reporting on whether the White House's statements are true is not his role. That's what a journalist does. Allen's role is to shape stories in accordance with the version of his White House sources and dutifully to pass along those claims with no effort whatsoever to determine if they are true.

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In fact, the White House's principal response to Waas' story, copied so efficiently by Allen, appears to be factually false, as the order unearthed by Waas does not seem to have been published in the Federal Register at all. Indeed, the memo itself prominently bears the designation: "Internal Order -- Not Published in F.R." And the only seemingly relevant Federal Register entry does not remotely constitute publication of that delegation order. Did Allen even look at the memo or the Federal Register to see if the White House claims which he mindlessly repeated were true? It's hard to believe he did.

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Mike Allen, consummate Beltway "journalist" | Salon.com

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Imagine how the media would react if a multimillionaire, East Coast, big-city, thrice-married presidential candidate who was a progressive Democrat said his most recent music purchase was opera, his favorite fitness activity, golf, and added that he doesn't drive -- he navigates.

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Or if a progressive Democratic candidate who had launched his political career by marrying into a wealthy and politically connected family, then promptly running for Congress, revealed that he has pet turtles named "Cuff" and "Link."

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Or if a progressive Democratic candidate who was the son of a governor, who has a net worth of around $200 million, whose own campaign staff was concerned he is seen as not tough enough and that his hair looks too perfect ... imagine if such a candidate said that if he weren't running for office, he'd probably be chief executive of an auto company and whose staff boasted that the difference between him and the president is "intelligence."

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The media would have an absolute field day...But when the three leading (for now) Republican presidential candidates reveal their fondness for opera (Giuliani), have their pets named after fashion accessories (McCain), and boast that if they weren't running for president, they'd probably be running an auto company (Romney), it passes without notice.

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So when longtime lobbyist and Hollywood actor Fred Thompson -- a man who once rented a red pickup truck in order to campaign in Tennessee as a man of the people -- indicated this week that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination, we knew how the media would describe him: Authentic. Folksy.

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No webpage found at provided URL: http://mediamatters.org/items/200706020001

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This year's first Post article about Edwards' finances, a January article in which Post reporters John Solomon and Lois Romano explored Edwards' 2006 sale of the Washington home he bought while serving in the Senate, was described by the Post's ombudsman as "a 'gotcha' without the gotcha."

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(The article, and defenses of it offered by Solomon and Post editors, contained several other flaws. For example, Solomon suggested during an online discussion with readers that Edwards had violated "federal campaign law" by not disclosing the identity of the buyers of the house. In fact, as Media Matters pointed out to the Post, it appears that there is no such law. Neither Solomon nor the Post has yet to correct the false claim, and Solomon continues to be allowed to write about Edwards.)

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Washington Post editor Bill Hamilton reportedly defended his paper's treatment of the bizarre article by telling the Post's ombudsman that the sale justified front-page coverage because it involved a "presidential candidate [who] just happens to be a millionaire who is basing his campaign on a populist appeal to the common man."

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No webpage found at provided URL: http://mediamatters.org/items/200705120002And that doesn't even get into the ridiculous coverage of the Al Gore 2000 campaign, where the media completely fabricated a number of statements supposedly said by Gore ("I invented the internet", "I was the inspiration for Love Story") and then used those fabrications to portray Gore as arrogant and out-of-touch.It's time to abandon the foolish notion that the media bends the truth in favor of Democrats. In a world where a candidate whose staff rents a pickup truck is called a "man of the people" by the media and a rich man promoting policies to help the poor is labeled a "hypocrite", the idea that the media is on the side of the Democrats is just 100% ridiculous.

Sorry, Frog, you can find exceptions to every position. A few quotes do not negate the base premise.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

I'd have to agree with AZ here. The media, like any other entity, is composed of individual networks, individual philosophies, and individuals. Fox, for instance, have been caught lying in favor of republicans many times before. But the fact remains that the media is largely liberal even if there are a few here and there who are bent toward republican ideals.

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We are BOG. Resistance is voltage over current.

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

And bare assertions do not support it.

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When, where, and how was this fact of liberal bias in the media established?

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I'm not sure what you think is "exceptional" about what I've quoted. They were representative samples, not the whole of the data set.Are you saying you never heard the media talk about Al Gore "inventing the internet"? Or ridiculing him for asserting that he was the inspiration for Love Story? Which were two things he never said?Are you saying that you didn't hear about Pelosi's "Plane-gate"? John Edwards' $400 haircut? (Mitt Romney's haircuts are equally expensive, by the way, but I can't find a single news story on it. Edwards' haircut returns almost 300 stories on Google News.)How many stories have you heard recently about Fred Thompson having to rent a pickup truck to look folksy? Can you imagine how the media would treat a Democratic candidate for president who had done the same thing? Indeed, if I'm talking to someone who never watches the news, then from what basis are you able to dispute my points?Here's how they treated John Kerry in 2004:

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GIRARD, Ohio, Oct. 21--With 12 days to go before the election, it was time to show the serious artillery.

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John Kerry brought his campaign for president to a duck blind here in far eastern Ohio Thursday morning, and while he did manage to clip one goose, he was really aiming for undecided voters in this battleground state.

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Now, keep in mind that John Kerry has been a life-long hunter, and going hunting is something that he does quite often. (As compared to, say, Mitt Romney - who called himself a "lifelong hunter" but was revealed only ever to have hunted twice in his life.) But in your "liberal media", it becomes just another transparent ploy for votes - just another "flip-flop". The media makes it look like he's just pandering.There's a hundred examples. A hundred hundred. If the best your side can point to is that tired old survey about how liberal reporters are in their own personal politics, then the debate is over. For starters, being personally liberal doesn't eliminate the possibility of a systematic bias against liberals as a kind of "over-correction"; it doesn't eliminate the possibility of bias against liberals as an explicit editorial strategy (plenty of liberals work for Fox News); and it doesn't substantiate the position that just because reporters may be liberal, they'd be biased in favor of liberals.Quite frankly the idea of a "liberal media" has never been substantiated; it's a right-wing shibboleth, nothing more. The hypocritical treatment of Democrats and the reliance on "narratives" about Republicans (i.e. John McCain is a "maverick" who "stands up to the President") being privileged over the facts about Republicans (John McCain has voted in favor of the President's proposals nearly every time) is proof of that.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

People in the media may be liberal, but that's irrelevant. Their personal politics have nothing to do with slanted media coverage - which, again, predominantly favors Republicans at nearly every turn.How many news outlets carried John McCain's attack on Obama last week ("Obama doesn't know how to spell 'flack'") without noting that, in fact, Obama actually spelled the word completely correctly? All but two of them. How many news networks allow anonymous administration sources to corroborate the administration's official position? Every single one.Liberal bias in the media is a myth that has never been substantiated.

The leftward political orientation of US journalists as a group (when compared to the general US population) is documented. The amount of 'bias' resulting from the situation is debated.One source:

2006 October 6
The American Journalist: Politics and Party Affiliation
The American Journalist | Pew Research Center

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... [A] new book concludes that the nation’s journalists have moved a bit to the right since the 1990s, but are still considerably more liberal than the general public.

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This political snapshot of the media comes from the new edition of The American Journalist in the 21st Century: US News People at the Dawn of a New Millenium, the major academic study of the characteristics of American newsrooms. Published every 10 years since the 1970s, it is based on four decades of survey data, the latest a national telephone survey of 1,149 mainstream journalists conducted in 2002.

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In the most recent survey, 40% of journalists described themselves as being on the left side of the political spectrum (31% said they were “a little to the left” and 9% “pretty far to the left”). But that number was down notably, seven percentage points from 1992, when 47% said they leaned leftward.

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If newsrooms have moved slightly rightward, the research shows, however, that journalists are still more liberal than their audiences. According to 2002 Gallup data in The American Journalist, only 17% of the public characterized themselves as leaning leftward, and 41% identified themselves as tilting to the right. In other words, journalists are still more than twice as likely to lean leftward than the population overall.

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Journalists consistently register as Democrats in proportionally higher numbers than the general population as well. This skew, though, was also less pronounced in 2002 than in earlier decades. full article_____________Edited by Archer Opterix, : url

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

I asked for oranges, and you gave me apples.It is true, though, that you did note they were apples.

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Real things always push back.
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I gave you data. Crash gives you anecdotes.

The plural of anecdote is not data.
- Nator

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

This is the same tired old survey that gets trotted out every time we talk about media bias.Of what possible relevance could this be to media portrayals and bias? None whatsoever, that I can see. Can you defend this as being anything but non sequiter?

Well, who a journalist votes for is far more important than what is actually printed in newspapers and broadcast on TV. Why does this sort of reasoning surprise you? We see it all the time among the creationists and evangelists on this very site.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Well, hell, I can give you data. I could give you:1) The average yearly rainfall of the Amazon basin;
2) The batting average of each hitter in the starting lineup of the 1996 Yankees;
3) The number of motorcycle accidents involving alcohol in 2003.Take your pick. All of that data would be equally relevant to media bias as the survey you've presented.For what we're talking about? I wonder how you respond to this informal survey:

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Bernard Goldberg is hardly the first person to claim that the media have a liberal bias, and his Bias is far from the best-written or best-argued book to try to make that point. Even so, it has climbed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, maybe because Goldberg is himself a CBS insider with lots of tell-all tidbits to offer about the likes of Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer.

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For the most part, Goldberg's book is a farrago of anecdotes, hearsay, and unsupported generalizations. But at one point he strays into territory that can actually be put to a test. That's when he claims that the media "pointedly identify conservative politicians as conservatives," but rarely use the word "liberal" to describe liberals. As Goldberg explains the difference: "In the world of the Jennings and Brokaws and Rathers, conservatives are out of the mainstream and have to be identified. Liberals, on the other hand, are the mainstream and don't have to be identified."

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...I went to a big online database and did a search on the articles from about 30 major newspapers, including The New York Times , the LA Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe , the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle .

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For purposes of comparison, I took the names of ten well-known politicans, five liberals and five conservatives. On the liberal side were Senators Boxer, Wellstone, Harkin, and Kennedy, and Representative Barney Frank. On the conservative side were Senators Lott and Helms, John Ashcroft, and Representatives Dick Armey and Tom Delay. Then I looked to see how often each of those names occurred within seven words of liberal or conservative , whichever was appropriate...

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In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

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At first I wondered whether I had inadvertantly included a bunch of conservative newspapers in my sample. So I did the same search in just three papers that are routinely accused of having a liberal bias, The New York Times , the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times . Interestingly, those papers tend to use labels of both sorts slightly less than the other papers do. But even there, the liberals get partisan labels thirty percent more often than conservatives do, the same proportion as in the press at large.

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Geoffrey Nunberg - Media BiasIndeed, it would be very difficult to construct a controlled survey model of media bias, because the media reports on current events, not fictitious ones, by definition. It's impossible to control current events.But it's time to retire the ridiculous idea that a survey about reporter voting habits is authoritative on the issue, particularly since it's rarely reporters who determine editorial stance. (For that matter, it's barely editors who determine editorial stance.)

I was a journalist for a year. It is not the reporters but rather the editor (with the implied permission of the publisher) who decide what appears in print. If the publisher feels they are losing money because their advertisers don't like the unvarnished truth, you can forget the truth.This is why the broadcast media is nothing more than a propaganda ministry for the politics of their advertisers, which are large corporations such as pharmaceutical, oil, and auto companies. In many cases these are the very same companies that buy off conservative politicians to prevent health care reform and serious fuel conservation measures. If anything, the media has a pro-advertiser bias. Once they let drug companies and lawyers advertise on TV, any professional ethics concerning independence from advertiser pressure disappeared.The myth of liberal bias is just a preemptive strike to hide the actual bias, which is conservative if anything.Where were all those TV reporters asking the hard questions prior to the Iraq War? They were silenced by the administration and their big business friends, through pressure on media executives, by threatening to withhold access and advertising. Edited by anglagard, : improve sentence

The survey is conducted and published anew every decade. The journalistic profession itself finds this data significant enough to track. The poll provides data about journalists as a group in much the same way as the Gallup Poll provides data about the general population. One reason it is significant is because, while bias itself is an elusive thing to define and measure, the self-professed political affiliation of individuals is not.The surveys show that for the past forty years US journalists as a group are at least twice as likely to identify themselves as liberal (no scare quotes) than the general population.A significant skew in one direction is consistent with an assertion of bias in that same direction. It is not proof of bias but it represents relevant data. Why? Because the skew is exactly what one would expect to find if assertions of bias were true.The converse also applies. If one asserts bias in the opposite direction, one is obliged to explain, given the data, how a group acquires a bias against beliefs its members hold as individuals.It's odd that you should need to have this explained. I suspect the significance of the data would be apparent enough to you if, for example, a survey of CEOs of the corporations buying the most expensive media advertisements showed that these same people were twice as likely as everyone else to register as Republicans.Data about the political affiliations of media sponsors would also be relevant to the discussion. And welcome. Done.Can you defend your OP as anything but partisan whining about stories you don't like?__________Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.Edited by Archer Opterix, : typo.Edited by Archer Opterix, : ongoing quest for literary perfection.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.