Liberal Bias

I get really tired of hearing people say that the news media has a liberal bias. These are usually people that watch Fox News. If they can't see that this news is so biased as to be inaccurate, you aren't going to convince them that news that they don't agree with or don't like to hear isn't "biased" as opposed to wrong. Actually, they aren't saying that news they don't like is wrong, they are saying it's being presented in an unfair way. So if it's correct, but we don't present it delicately, that's not a good thing?

In the "old days" newscasters worked by pulling information directly off the AP or UPI wire. I remember reading Bob Schieffer's autobiography, This Just In, and noting how he would read the AP and UPI wire for newscast material. They were directly wired in to the news at that time, reading the raw feed prior to reporting the news on the air. This is similar to what Walter Kronkite reported about his early career. I think that journalists as a group closer were to the source of knowledge back then. That they could easily study the raw material of news close to when it happened. I think this is something that has leaked out of news coverage over the years. I think what most newscasters are analyzing is opinion or speculation by the time they see it. That, plus the phenomenon of a short attention span means that no one really digs in depth to an event to the point where they can really understand it.

When you are closer to the source of information, you can't hide from reality. Raw data, without filtering or editing, will give a confused, yet complete picture of events. Sort of like looking at something giant from a few feet away, you can't see it clearly. A good newsperson crawls all over the giant subject, then puts it together in their mind by mentally stepping back from it. It takes time, and it's not easy, but you have to be hard working, persistent, and thorough.

Conservative talk radio and talk shows have always struck me as being fiery, but empty of real substance. Here, the goal is not to explain the truth with all its nuance and complexity, but to inflame passions and invoke a reaction. They are often deliberately ignorant, deliberately ignoring reality, both because they don't prefer it and because the truth is rarely satisfying in a simple, easy to swallow manner. The truth has contradictions and conflicting interests in it. People are not one dimensional, and neither are most news subjects. However, it is easier to pick a viewpoint, and crop the truth down until it fits neatly into this viewpoint.

It's not unlike recent interviews about how Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were said to come up with the justification to go to war in Iraq. They started with the idea that this is what they wanted to do. All of their efforts were to try to make reality bend to their ideals.

We're not asking individual newscasters to give up their viewpoints. Most people have opinions on everything from the big subjects of the day to the trivial news fillers like celebrity gossip. The real trick of a good newscaster is to explore a subject fully in a way that exposes the most relevant information about a subject, but leaves you ignorant of that newscaster's own opinion. Interestingly, Slate.com recently polled their reporters, around the time of the 2008 election and found that 90% of their reporters had liberal leanings. Yet I hear them criticizing Obama and other liberal politicians all the time and have heard defenses of everyone from Sarah Palin to most Israel supporters.

I don't think bias is the problem, I think it's reporting the facts that is the problem. When Stephen Colbert started the Colbert report, he admitted that he was spoofing conservative pundits in order to make fun of them. One of his most often repeated saying in his conservative Colbert Report persona is that reality has a liberal bias. If the facts don't fit your own pre-conceived ideas, they must have a liberal bias.