Bias Then and Now
That notion of “bad form” had its parallel in the universities. My favorite professor at Pomona College, 1958-1962, got very angry one day in class when someone asked him about his private convictions. “I teach history,” he said. And that was that. We never knew his politics or his religion, and it would have been bad form for him to tell us, or even to teach in such a way as to make it obvious. And as the journalists came out of that sort of university environment, many journalists took pride in concealing their politics. Some of them even refused to vote because they thought they should be untarnished by political action.
All of that is gone, as we all know. As in so many other ways, Italy was a political laboratory for us, and we now have to read the equivalent of my seven newspapers. We read blogs, posts, tweets, videos, and messages of all sorts. And we try to sort them out, sometimes getting it right, sometimes not. We have to read all this stuff because all pretense of objectivity–which is to say, of simply “reporting” rather than making political judgments–is gone. The best we can hope for is “balanced,” by which a news medium gives us “both sides.”
Like the Italians in the seventies, we have accepted bias as a fact of life, and while both “sides” complain about the “other side’s” politicization of the news, hardly anyone complains about the process itself. Indeed, most energy and money are directed at monopolizing the “information flow,” shutting up or shutting down the other side (the recent White House jihad against Fox News being the most recent case in point–the attempted exclusion of Fox people from the White House pool is a textbook example), and seizing upon any excuse to vilify anyone who is taken to be wrongheaded. But it’s only part of a much bigger transformation. On the one hand, Soros pours money into web sites, on the other, Murdoch expands his media empire. Some of these enterprises make some money, but for the most part they are losers. Profit is certainly not the point. It’s all about politics, just as in Italy thirty-forty years ago.
I don’t see any short-term “solution” to this state of affairs. It might be nice to have a generally reliable source, but most politicized consumers would probably find it boring, which means losing money. The only hope is to change the culture, which means, above all, changing the universities. Our elite students are mostly products of super-politicized colleges and universities. They’ve been trained by professors who not only do not conceal their politics, but often impose their ideology on the students. A few years ago there was a poll of Ivy League professors in the humanities and social scientists, which produced a tiny handful of conservatives in a sea of liberals and leftists. Not even a pretense of “balance.” Unless that changes, there is no chance of producing a new generation of reporters.
Of course it’s not all bad news. Along with the politicization of most everything, we got good food from Italy. When we moved back to America in the late seventies, it was virtually impossible to get our favorite pasta in Washington, and you could forget about decent espresso. Now it’s all here. Online, in fact. And it’s great.
“In those years, Watergate was happening over here, and I was very proud that American journalists were, as I then thought, simply reporting the facts about the Nixon Administration, and eventually Nixon had to resign.”
Richard Nixon disgraced himself. This is beyond dispute. Nonetheless, that is not why he had to resign. His biggest crime was that he was a Republican president. The Washington journalistic establishment would have never pushed the matter to that point had Nixon been a Democrat. Martha Graham and Ben Bradlee, for instance, were committed lefties—and close friends of “Jack” Kennedy. They even provided the Massachusetts U.S. senator with advice on how best to defeat Nixon in the 1960 race for the White House.
It’s not all bad. Fox has it’s liberals as a counter point and I saw Laura Ingraham on ABC’s Stephanopoulos.
Michael, I think I told you the story of my Mom coming across a CBC news reporter at an airport.
She told him that you deliver what you think your audience wants. The look he gave her was the same if I told you you had a second head. He admitted that is very much the case.
So, when the decisions are made as to what gets printed, or gets on the tv news (both local & network), or gets on the radio news, the gate keepers rely on what makes sense to them far more often than what makes sense to others. Therefore, up here in Canada, when someone whose politics are more conservative than the governing party, especially when it comes to cultural issues, well the more conservative person gets to deal with the hubris of being racist, mean spirited, and other unsavory details.
Which brings us to today. As long as people go along with the powers that be inside the Beltway, they are allowed to sleep the sleep of the culturally fatigued. But, when someone
communicates a perspective which is attacked by the “conventional wisdom”, well the tables are turned faster than a person can blink, and the attacked is now cast as the attacker.
To wrap it up, Michael, some media outlets have more credibility than others. That is because a greater effort is made to apply a standard which can be utilized with confidence
more than once. For, as the intellectually honest will attest to, the standard which reflects the status quo doesn’t have quite as long a shelf-life.
The best singing is done in the Opera houses attended by the cognoscenti. By the same token, the journalistic standard of a paper is a statistical measure of the intellectual rigor of its readership. This is why most journalists would not last very long in the scientific professions, where theories are ultimately arbitrated by facts. The horoscope industry would go bankrupt if most people did not find comfort in silly beliefs, just because they had acquired a commanding preference for rational thought.
In the “good old days”, Walter Cronkite got away with the “And that’s the way it is!” closing, because most of his audience was content with a nonchalent delegation of their skepticism to an avuncular figure. It was not journalistic rigor, just adequate journalistic rigor.
I salute the man who read seven Italian papers in the morning. Bravo, Signore! Your journalism is as close to science as such a thing can be.
When I was a kid we had two major papers. One was the Republican paper and the other was the Democrat paper. My dad was a “staunch independent”. He said you needed to take both papers to figure out what was going on because both sides would bend the truth to favor their view. The trouble is that most places are single paper towns these days and the content is often the same no matter which ones you read. Section A of the Boston Globe will have mostly the same content as the New York Times. Small city papers will have their Section A filled with the same AP content you read on the web yesterday.
The newspapers might not be in such trouble if they had more original content and less wire service filler that you can read in any newspaper. I would like to see more stories written by local reporters and fewer wire service stories. Give me content I can’t get from practically every newspaper in the region. What is killing newspapers is that they are all the same. It is like 10 restaurant chains with 10 different names but once you walk inside, they are all McDonalds. Seen one you have seen them all. There are 5 major papers in the region here. I can buy all five papers and will bet you they will not only have the same issues on the front page, they will be exactly the same story from exactly the same AP “journalists”. There is no compelling reason for me to buy one or the other, Section A from any of them will be the same. The only thing that differs is the font and the order in which the articles appear.
“Jihad against Fox News”
What a perfect way of putting it!
There is definitely no short-term solution for ‘journalism’/'news’/'media’. If there is a jihad on the internet sources for news and commentary…ugh.
P.S. I’m a foodie and you can’t just throw out the word ‘pasta’ like that without naming the brand! CRUEL MAN! CRUELLLLLLL.
When I moved to Canada in the ’70s I became a big fan of Canadian news, especially radio. Instead of describing what some pol had said they gave you the quote. You got both sides and you got an in depth report. We assumed the mindset at CBC was generally Trudeau Liberal; at that time I didn’t know Barbara Frum (David’s mum) on As It Happens was conservative, all I knew was she did a great job. (I was a socialist NDPer at the time.) They trashed and mocked Liberals as much as Tories. That changed over the years, but I enjoyed it while it lasted.
8. Gary Ogletree:
Barbara Frum was always a liberal and David Frum thinks he is a conservative (I don’t, while he may not be liberal he is not conservative) …I used to listen to Barbara Frum. (not many options back then)
Unfortunately the CBC and canadian news in general is VERY VERY left leaning to downright socialist. They often inject (past and present) opinions into the actual news broadcast.
I do agree with Michael Ledeen (good piece…thanks), the american system is very biased ….back in the Nixon era as well as now.
FOX has it’s liberals on the payrole ..they are not all conservatives and there should be no requirement for it.
I used to watch the McNiel / Leher Hour on PBS. They seemed (to me) to try very hard to disguise their personal politics and biases. …but as time passed I found that this was far far from the truth. (no one can be completely without bias and still be breathing). Many of the News Hour reporters are hard left, and it is visible in what they do not say as well as what they do.
I used to try to catch the pundits on friday night (Jim Leher Hour) …but they have now just 2 liberals instead of one conservative and one liberal. So now I watch Brett on Fox at that time slot. They have excellent pundits …(except for Juane Williams who can not leave his race out of the conversation or give anything but talking points for the democrats).
EVER NOTICE how it takes liberals twice the words and time to try to make their points. The sh!t storm requires a lot of massaging to try to make it sound reasonable (of course it still doesn’t)
As you can see I have done a great job of hiding my personal feelings.
Gary? The CBC? You’re kidding right? Almost continual liberal rule has made them the multiculti state’s pet broadcaster. Stephen Harper couldn’t get a break from them if he walked on water. They’d say Harper can’t swim!
As for your well stated article, Michael, haven’t you got the news? He won.
With all due respect, this commentary is not going to help. The only word that comes to mind to describe this commentary is: lame.
Philanthropic servitude, a universities success is dependent upon it’s ability to generate capital, augmentation relies on investment regardless of the content actuating endowment. A steady rise of so called ‘Middle East Studies’ programs at tier I, II & III universities throughout north America are cardinal examples of this iniquity.
Newspaper circulation down 10.6% per Drudge earlier this week. People are on to the con and the legacy media is doomed. The problem is correcting itself.
I too was in Italy thirty-four years ago. That’s when I realized that there was no necessary correlation between facts and the news–but it wasn’t limited to Italian publications. Time Magazine reported the bombing of a communist rally in Forli as a rally of “Catholic workers.” They had cropped a picture of the demonstration so as to exclude the hammer and sickle at one end of a banner and a drawing of Lenin at the other. Until that event, I had naively believed that it was impossible to print lies as news.
A typo on the first page should say “jail” instead of “mail.”
It might be nice to have a generally reliable source…
It’s getting harder and harder to determine what, exactly, constitutes a reliable source. There is an entire cadre of individuals on any given subject at any given time, an industry, really, trying to sell you on notions like what you’ve understood as “up” throughout your lifetime is really “down”.
Postmodernism has made deep inroads into the culture.
I agree with an article in the American Thinker the other day that Obama is “…is head-faking us all the time.”
So are his minions. So are his sycophants in the Muddy Steamy Media.
Who could determine from the daily barrage of conflicting statements issuing from Congress every day exactly where The Truth lies on any given topic? (long ago, I determined that democrats don’t really want a “healthcare” bill without government running the thing and private insurers run into the ground, & that this entire, painful dance revolves around that issue alone. I believe that is “the truth”
)
Besides professors using the lectern as a pulpit to propound a personal ideology, you’ve got a ton of Left leaning editors in mainstream publications, pushing an agenda as Truth. They base their stories on personal ideological preferences & present their preferred “narrative” as truth.
You have to have personal knowledge of any given story to be able to detect that highly subtle level BS. These days, I tend to believe very little of what I read about anything. I know that whatever is making it into “the news” on any given topic has a complicated backstory that isn’t making it into the news.
My only “reliable” sources are my gut and what I know of human nature.
Michael, while I agree with your major premise…and I agree in large part with your conclusion, I think a very important point needs to be made here.
It is one thing to lament the need to read or resource each day, several competing options to get at the truth in the affairs necessary to self-govern this land of ours.
It is quite another thing to be permanent victims of a long con. I would LOVE the opportunity to weigh facts from each side of the political spectrum against each side and cobble together the best parts of each from the worst.
I am denied that opportunity by the entrenched leftists because they decide ahead of time which “facts” are necessary and which are not. They decide whether to give “truthy-ness”…false but consistent with their pre-masticated theme and message.
They forge documents. They photoshop pictures. They stage events.
They are less documentarians of facts and more carny barkers.
They deliver the “message” not the news. They withhold evidence. They are conspirators against the truth both after the fact… AND BEFORE.
They treat their quasi-public responsibility as a culture war and intend to win….by any means necessary.
It is not merely that they inject a point of view, they blindfold the view and force feed their kitty litter down the throats of the unsuspecting as well as the willing.
In the case of NPR, I believe this is a DIRECT violation of a public trust.
I feel hardly a dust mite’s bit of difference from the other cowards and liars who intentionally mislead and distort their way through the day as faux guardians of our information stream.
I would hang them all from the highest tree, if I ruled the world. I can live with a politician from each side “shading” the way he or she delivers his argument. I could do so, because I know that it represents a “side” in the argument. I would discount points for outright lies and distortions, however.
In the case of the umpires and refs…if they are crooked…there is no game. There is only the fraud and pretense of a game. The entrenched media are crooked refs and umpires. And therefore, EVERY contest in which they participate is a sham.
We can’t self-govern this land of ours based upon a pack of lies and distortions. Hang ‘em, Michael. And hang ‘em high.
No one can completely resist the effects of propaganda and indoctrination which is why such practices are pursued. The only thing you can do, when you discover the deception is never to listen or watch the deceivers again. When you and others do so, eventually it hurts the deceivers and they reform themselves. Just enough to draw you back in, so that they can continue the process.
When you find that Marxists are behind it, you can consider yourself in deep trouble and your children, in greater trouble. And yes the word conspiracy is both appropriate and accurate. It is a cancer which should be excised but is always allowed to grow.
The media has always been biased, and will always be biased. The bias typically is not toward the left or the right, so much as it is towards businesses that advertise in the media. Commercial media depends on these advertisers, so reporting tends not to offend the big business set.
The myth of the liberal media is of course well established – and debunking it here would be a waste of effort. I’ll just say that I have not yet seen a liberal TV network, or a liberal newspaper.
The political alignment of the professors in academia is a small part of the story of bias – the much larger influence is that of money. As noted by the author, commercial interests tend to band together to promote their industries’ interests – just as political interests tend to band together to promote their ideological interests. The difference is that businesses have the cash to exert influence that is simply out of reach for citizens.
Bias in the news will never go away, but when some of the most partisan outlets pretend to be “fair and balanced”, they denigrate the profession itself with such bold dishonesty.
Peace.
DS
I had the same experience as Ledeen when I attended Indiana University 1958–1964. Professors and teaching assistants did not divulge their political views, although over in the Journalism School students who wanted to “change the world” were being tolerated.
I agree with Ledeen. They key to correcting the problem is to change the culture and the universities. That last may not be too far off, as academicians age and retire.
When I was growing up in the 1950′s, my father regularly bought both the New York Post (then arch-liberal) and New York Herald Tribune (Republican if not conservative) to try to get a fix on events.
the scandals that brought down the [Italian] political class in the eighties
That would be the nineties, I suppose.
As for the main topic of this article, I should think that a skeptical readership is much more important than objectivity in the press. If media bias is increasing skepticism, then it is a blessing in disguise.
Michael, normally I agree with your take on matters, but on this one I must staunchly disagree.
Consider, if you will the Presidential Election of 1796, the first truly contested election in America (since President Washington had been all but unanimously elected in the first two).
By that time, we already had the start of the current two-party system: The Federalists (which could be considered the forerunners of the modern Republicans), and the Democratic-Republicans (likewise, the forerunners of the modern Democrats).
Each party had its own newspapers (the mass media of that era) and each side was very partisan. Each side had numerous newspapers, but two of the most notorious were the Gazette of the United States and the National Gazette. The National Gazette was Democratic-Republican and supported Jefferson, and Jefferson–who, prior to the election, was serving as Secretary of State–even gave the editor a cushy State Department job that left him plenty of time to publish the paper. The rival Gazette of the United States was largely Federalist, with Alexander Hamilton writing frequent articles.
Anyway, the point of all this is that a much more fragile America survived that era of partisan media; I daresay that we’ll survive the current atmosphere as well. In fact, it’s arguable that such partisanship is part of our national media DNA, since it goes back so far in history.
Yes, I agree, and have often said, that we are a very fractious people, and always have been. And I don’t doubt that we will survive the current unpleasantness and go on to the next one, heh. I was just trying to call attention to the linkage between media and universities, and document the recent change in “reportage.”
Remember Leon Trotsky’s advice “to approximate the truth compare the lies.” Newsstands could use that advertisement catchphrase-logo.
Sorry, I meant to write -Remember Leon Trotsky’s advice “to approximate the truth compare the lies.” Newsstands could use that as an advertisement catchphrase-logo.
Life is hard for the ADD.
23. ConservativeWanderer: vs 24. Michael Ledeen:
sure the media was always polarized …ansd so has been the population.
there is a difference here since the early presidents never intended to redistribute wealth and destroy the economy of their young country.
so while in one aspect things are similar they are not the same and the end result is much different.
Very good article. Two things are needed; on the supply side, in the universities, more and better teaching of ethics/responsibility and a scientific approach focused on critical thinking and logic. On the demand side, just the critical thinking/logic. People whom are attracted to politics, and therefore ‘political reporting’, *tend* to be very dishonest and delusional; both left and right.
Nowadays the profs wear proudly display their political conformity on their sleeves. it is an amazing shift.
Thanks for yet another great article
Try reading the Guardian. It is so atrociously and blatantly biased towards socialism and islam it brings tears of rage.
Fortunately it is tanking big time. Half of our muslim population are illiterate peasants from Pakistani villages. The socialists hate Labours sell out on Iraq.
Result? Falling circulation.
And as most of the ad revenue is Public Service recruitment with touted Conservative incomer, Cameron planning a huge swathe of cuts that will wither to a fraction of present income.
Result? Financial ruin.
Glad we agree on that, Michael. And I apologize if I over-reacted to one of your points. I just get tired of certain folks acting like political disagreements began 21 January 2009, and so I dug up that example to help refute them.
Media bias. I’d like to use the illegal alien issue to support Mr. LeDeen’s assertions.
Living amongst/ with those who don’t wish to take care of themselves, family or community is packaged as living with ‘Diversity’.
I experienced this while in Santa Barbara for Grad School. CA is one of the few states that accept college credits moer than 7 years old.
The Laissez-faire stance on gangs, public education run amock (ranked 47th in the country.. ahead only of NV AZ and MS) and provided to illegals, as well as Section 8 housing, welfare/food stamps, WiC, in-state tuition, affirmative action, unlicensed/uninsured/ inexperienced illegal folks driving on our highways, state funded celebrations where SB and other big cities in CA can anticipate at least 1 homicide.
UCSB has 1 American History course. It has 5 dozen, 60 – Latino History, Culture and other associated classes available. all in the name of ‘diversity’, right?
The population largely effected by this indifference to citizenship, rule of law was the black communities. Though today, collectively, it’s everyone.
This horrible incident in Richmond (or ‘South-South Oakland’), CA recently is further proof of that state’s elected officials, media breakdown and twisting the true meaning of ‘Diversity’ and ‘empathy’ and combining the two. With CA preparing to release +22,000 inmates due to overcrowding, this epidemic is widespread and moving forward, all in the name of ‘Progressives’ or ‘Moderates’. What a sickened, convoluted group-think mentality many have become..
BTW, with the 300 La Familia members arrested recently, this disgusting incident in Richmond, CA, 287g getting implemented moreso across the country.. where’s the ramblings of that journalist with the utmost ‘Integrity’, Ruben Navarette? – crickets chirping.
Even Navarette knows it’s unfathomable to speak of ‘Amnesty’. What a *urd.
http://canadagoose2600.blogg.de/