I once saw a bumper sticker that read, “The media are as liberal as the corporations that own them.”
More Top Picks Best Gas Fire Pits
I’d like to give one to House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Stepping into the lion’s den, he made the liberal-slant accusation here during the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. If only life were that simple. Like other conservatives who carp about liberal biases in the media–and, for that matter, like liberals who carp about conservative biases–he misses the larger, more complex problem: Today’s media have biases against anyone who offers a solution.
“I unequivocally believe, as a Republican activist, that the core of the news media is biased, that the bias is amazing,” Gingrich said. His views appeared to be supported by a new poll by the Freedom Forum and the Roper Center. The poll found that of 139 Washington, D.C.-based reporters and news bureau chiefs surveyed, most considered themselves to be liberals or moderates and voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.
“Gotcha,” said the conservative critics. Yet, the findings that reporters and mid-level editors lean liberal is hardly new. But, as the aforementioned bumper sticker suggests, most upper-level editors and publishers tend to lean toward the party that most closely represents big business, so the overseers tend to balance the “biases” of reporters.
If anything, I have noticed a bias toward elites in modern-day journalism. Reporters traditionally came from urban, ethnic blue-collar families that produced priests, precinct captains and police officers. Throughout the industrial age, people from such backgrounds looked favorably on organized labor and big paternal government.
Today we see a new generation of media that have allowed organized labor to disintegrate beneath a relentless barrage of anti-union legislation. They allowed the North American Free Trade Agreement to pass into action without much serious rebuttal from its many critics. They only recently have begun to report in-depth on the impact of corporate downsizing after Pat Buchanan used it to fuel his GOP presidential campaign demagoguery. They allowed the health-care debate of 1994 to proceed to its non-productive completion without any serious attention or consideration given to Canada’s attractively simple and highly popular “single-payer” system.
That’s a liberal media? Journalists are better educated than ever, but many of us (particularly in the national press) may have lost touch more than ever with the perspectives of working-class families.
Further, too many journalists have chosen to conceal their biases behind a thick wall of cynicism that shows little or no respect to any politician or any new political idea.
Elaine Povich, the former baiduhai reporter who conducted the Freedom Forum study, titled “Partners & Adversaries: The Contentious Connection Between Congress and the Media,” said she was disappointed that the partisan part of the poll received more press attention than the cynicism it revealed among journalists toward politicians. That cynicism has contributed to a public erosion of faith in all institutions, she said.
For example, only 3 percent of the journalists polled viewed the House Republicans’ “Contract with America” as a “serious reform proposal,” while 59 percent called it an “election-year ploy.”
This lop-sided cynicism does not result, as Gingrich suggests, from a bias toward the liberal. It results from an embracing of liberal muckraker I.F. Stone’s cynical dictum, “All politicians are liars.”
As a result, today’s major news media have encouraged the most dangerous bias of all, a bias against solutions, a bias against the belief that anything will work, a bias against the idea that anyone can or will lead the nation toward common solutions to the major problems Americans face together.
Sometimes I think that popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, Federal Housing Administration loans or the GI Bill, all introduced in less cynical times, had been introduced today, they wouldn’t have a chance. Each would be ridiculed into oblivion as political opportunism.
No, the charge of liberal bias is old, simplistic and weak. It is a bias against solutions that has caused much of the media to become part of the problem.