Press Bias Summary

Despite ever more frequent atrocities by the MSM, blogger Dingo denies any bias. Dingo was unmoved by three different editorials reaching opposite conclusions (always favoring Democrats) about the filibuster, whether the boss should be held responsible for a subordinate's corruption. He's untroubled by CNN calling a Clinton era unemployment rate of 5.6 percent "already low" but a 5.7 percent rate in Bush's first term a "weak job market could prove tough for President."

Ignoring the evidence, and despite the current Newsweek lied, people died fiasco, Dingo's head remains planted firmly in the sand:

Ok, I have heard enough out of you righties out there claiming that the Newsweek debacle was some kind of left wing media conspiracy. I am guessing you guys are forgetting that the reporter, Michael Isikoff is no darling of the Left. He was the one who relied on 'thin' sources in his reporting on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. You didn't seem to mind his relying on sketchy sources then, did you? No, you ate it up, regardless of the source.

A brief response:

• Isikoff: Until now, I rated Isikoff as one of the better, more fair, reporters. Jonah Goldberg's even more forgiving, "my guess is that Michael Isikoff was more motivated by a reporter’s desire to break a story than by some Left-wing anti-Americanism." Still, Marvin Olasky says the scandal isn't isolated: "At least once before, Isikoff has run with a false anti-military story on a one-source basis." But merely examining Isikoff doesn't exhaust the issue.



• Reporters as a group aren't neutral: The Wall Street Journal accurately traces the problem to events that made the press anti-government:

  much of this media pose goes back to Vietnam, and the betrayal that the press corps felt about body counts and the "five o'clock follies." Reporters like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam made their careers by turning into the war's fiercest critics and creating a culture of suspicion that the government always lies. Mr. Sheehan's Vietnam memoir is titled, "A Bright Shining Lie." And for many of today's young reporters it is a kind of moral template.

  NRO's Rich Lowry says today's reporters operate in a:

  culture of hostility toward the military that makes its mistake so characteristic. That is not to say that any of its reporters or editors harbors personal animosity toward the military. But they work in an industry that has defined its success since the Vietnam War almost exclusively in terms of exposing U.S. wrongdoing. The media collectively want to believe the worst about the military, and in light of Abu Ghraib, they have panted after every possible prison abuse.

  Even ABC News' White House correspondent Terry Moran admitted the allegation:

  There is . . . a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous. That's different from the media doing it's job of challenging the exercise of power without fear or favor.

  So even assuming Isakoff's better than average, the bell-curve reporters' politics is shifted way to the left. More on that in a minute.



• Press culture in the post-modern era. The problem's bigger than any one reporter.
  
  
  1. Cynicism: Rich Lowry says the media's stuck in the 70s:

     During the fallout from last year's CBS forged-documents flap, shrewd Newsweek political writer Howard Fineman said: "A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the 'mainstream media.'" He argued that the media had been identified with a crusading liberalism since Watergate and Vietnam, but their power was waning in the new political and information environment: "It's hard to know who, if anyone, in the 'media' has any credibility."

     According to Instapundit, this instilled the press with over-the-top skepticism:

     When you go out of your way to report the bad news, and bury the good news, when you're credulous toward critics . . . and treat all positive news as presumptive lies, and when it's clear that the enemy relies on press behavior in planning its campaigns, then you've got a problem.

     James Lileks agrees, and says insulation from practical reality makes media hold America to impossible standards:

     It's not right to ask whose side the media are on. They're on the side of America, of course. But it's a rather perfect version they love -- at least more than the real messy manifestation.
     
     They want the United States to be respected and true to its ideals, and that's why it's important to run a little blurb informing the world that .0000000001 percent of its armed forces put a holy book in the loo to get some information from a detainee. . .
     
     They want America to be good, which is why the actions of some yahoos on one wacky night in Abu Ghraib must overshadow and define the entirety of the reconstruction effort.
     
     They want the soldiers to win, of course -- of course! But if a Marine shoots an enemy who's already down but may have a suicide belt, this must lead the news. Future enemies will know we play clean, and do the same. "Play clean" for them means using a fresh scimitar for beheading, but it's a start.
     
     Everything makes sense from an office high in Manhattan. It's all quite clear.

     The anti-government culture explains Isakoff's perspective on Clinton.
  
  
  
  2. Complexity: Over the last 50 years, America and its government has grown and grown more complicated. Unlike, say, Edward R. Murrow, today's press relies heavily on those with specialized knowledge (think Space Shuttle heat tiles or pay-as-you-go Social Security). This actually increases potential bias, for two reasons. First, there's bias in selecting experts. Jeffrey Friedman noted in NRO, "reporters need to put their views into the mouths of experts so they can appear to be taking adequate account of the world's complexity." As a practical matter, the pool of potential experts is capped by the size of the reporter's rolodex. Experts quoted in, say the Boston Globe, will capture the full range of opinions from the faculty table at Harvard to the faculty table at MIT.^*
     
     Second, the expert himself may be biased, as Friedman also argued:

     [T]he unspoken assumption behind the media's complacent invocation of expertise is, in reality, that the facts of the political world, when not immediately plain to the reporter, are at least clear to people who make a career of studying them: people who are "experts." These specialists need only relay their "findings" to the journalist-who, in turn, needs only report them to the public-for the public to gain a clear understanding of the world. . .
     
     In a world that straightforward, honest experts wouldn't disagree with each other . . . The truth, of course, is that honest experts disagree with each other all the time-which calls into doubt the expertise of some or all of them. . .
     
     Honest experts' disagreements are rooted in the very thing to which the new model of journalism pays only lip service: the difficulty of making sense of the modern world. In the face of the world's complexity, the interpretation offered by a given expert will tend to reflect his theoretical — including ideological — assumptions as much as, or more than, it springs from his direct contact with "undeniable truths." . .
     
     [This would require experts] so self-critical that they can get past their own interpretive biases. There is every reason to think that experts aren't capable of such inhuman objectivity.

• Press: liberals, Democrats and biased: Though this observation is undeniable, it's the most controversial. So here's proof.
  
  
  1. The press overwhelmingly votes Democrat: Last summer, the NY Times surveyed 157 journalists, about a third of which were in Washington:

     When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington. Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.

  2. The press concedes bias: Last summer, the Times' "public editor," Daniel Okrent, published an article titled, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?, the first sentence of which was "Of course it is." Appearing on a talk show last year, Evan Thomas, Newsweek's Assistant Managing Editor, boasted that bias brought Dems more votes:

     There's one other base here, the media. Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points.

     Mike Allen of the WaPo explained how to Oxblog's David Adesnik "liberal reporters subtly tell you when conservatives (or occasionally liberals) are lying." I thought lip from a news anchor meant he was lying.
  
  
  
  3. Endorsements: Editorials are political, the paper's own voice. Editorial endorsements are recommendations and thus anything but neutral. So newspaper endorsements for President should accurately reflect the owner or editor's view. By that measure, is the New York Times Democrat or Republican?:

     The cold hard facts are as follows: The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president for over 50 years now.
     
     Even in years where Democratic candidates carried practically no states through the electoral college, the Times would endorse those losing candidates. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis all were deemed worthy of the endorsement while Reagan and Bush, the elder, won the election by long shots. While Reagan carried 49 states, Walter Mondale was the better candidate in the eyes of the editorial board staff at the New York Times.

     Dingo, if someone voted Republican every four years for fifty years, would you insist he's a Democrat? Or neutral?



• Discriminatory Standards Simply put, the press applies two different standards to Republicans and Democrats. For example, Bush was "allowed no triumphs" though "Clinton's botched attempts to negotiate a Middle East peace accord merited more press." Deborah at In My Corner pointed to this recent AP headline on a story during Secretary Rice's trip to Iraq: "38 Bodies Found in Iraq As Rice Visits" What, exactly, is the connection between the first five and last three words? And the story didn't even mention Rice until graph 3.
  
  Indeed, Dan Rather confirmed the discrimination in the midst of Ra^therGate:

  Dan Rather, in the August 30th edition of Broadcasting and Cable: "In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn't do during the Vietnam War? In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns. What's far more import is this: Do they have an exit strategy for Iraq? If so, what is it? How will they address the national deficit? And what are the chances their plans will work?"

  Dan Rather [September 20th], describing the motivation for his story on Bush's Texas National Guard service: "good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism."

  Got that? If John Kerry's background is questionable, it's ancient history; in contrast, President Bush's background is ripe for "investigative reporting without fear."

  And just a few days ago, lefty and free speech guru, Nat Hentoff accused the New York Times of turning lefty lobbyist press releases into Editorials opposing Bush's judicial nominees without fact checking, "editorial writers should be as accountable as the Times' reporters—when the editorial sages ignore the facts in a story and deeply sully someone's reputation." Finally, NRO's Rich Lowry notes Newsweek's slammed Bush for allegedly making the mistake the magazine admitted here:

  How many stories has Newsweek written about the Bush administration allegedly "skewing intelligence" by relying on raw, insufficiently sourced data? How many times has it lamented that these mistakes have hurt the U.S. abroad? Too many to count.

• Proof of Bias: The foregoing examples if anything understate the bias saturating the MSM. Errors happen. But, without bias, you'd expect media accuracy to form a normal distribution bell curve, with about an equal number of errors favoring Democrats as Republicans. It doesn't, shows Marvin Olasky:

  The magazine on Oct. 21, 2002, ripped Jerry Falwell's riot-causing depiction of Muhammad as a "terrorist," since "Islamic fundamentalists are having a field day with these comments, which have been played and replayed throughout the Muslim world." Does Newsweek have a similar responsibility not to cry fire in a crowded theater? . . .
  
  Did Newsweek go easy in scrutinizing the accusation because it is a sucker for attacks on the military and the Bush administration?

  Does anyone think the reporters quizzing Bush spokesman Scott McClellan were going easy?
  
  Ann Coulter agrees that the press is discriminatory, the same reporter and magazine spiked revelations harmful to President Clinton:

  When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.
  
  When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.
  
  When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer The Washington Post -- which owns Newsweek -- decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.
  
  So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.
  
  Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers' highly credible account of Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?
  
  Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter's scoops. Who's deciding which of Isikoff's stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate -- and interesting! -- than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

  As Patrick Ruffini observed:

  What kind of subculture generates these kinds of mistakes -- mistakes that conveniently tend always to fall in one direction? The same news media that was willing to believe this about U.S. troops was also willing to believe that they were deliberately targeting journalists. Had these reporters spent even one day in their formative years around the active-duty military, would we be seeing the slanted coverage we do today?
  
  Apparently, this subculture is content to live and breed in a handful of closed-minded Eastern company towns, never interacting with the military they must cover so closely.

• Funeral for a Dead Objectivity: Press partisanship isn't going anywhere. Which means, according to Chicago Boyz, neutrality's dead:

  I doubt that any single organization can report the news objectively. To do so they would have to create internally competitive teams, each attacking a story from a different perspective. Then they would need some system of reconciling the conflicting perspectives into a single story. I don't really see that happening on a reliable basis.

  Stanley Kurtz reached the same conclusion last year:

  we may well be seeing the initial signs of a profound realignment of the media along more strictly and openly partisan lines. . . Gradually, with the exit of moderates and conservatives to other networks and the alternative media, CBS's audience is probably now composed largely of liberal Democrats. . . In other words, the exit of increasing numbers of conservatives and moderates from the mainstream-media audience is pushing mainstream outlets to the left. . .
  
  Up to now, the media's liberalism was most unambiguously evident on social issues. Political coverage was the one place where real efforts at balance were made. But in this election, we have seen a major shift toward bias even in political coverage. The mainstream media are now working for the Democratic party.

  Few will be surprised by Kurtz's conclusion.

Conclusion: Neither Isikoff nor Newsweek are responsible for 16 deaths--the killers should be held accountable. Newsweek's not the zealot, says NRO's Andrew McCarthy:

Someone alleges a Koran flushing and what do we do? We expect, accept, and silently tolerate militant Muslim savagery — lots of it. We become the hangin' judge for the imbeciles whose negligence "triggered" the violence, but offer no judgment about the societal dysfunction that allows this grade of offense to trigger so cataclysmic a reaction. We hop on our high horses having culled from the Left's playbook the most politically correct palaver about the inviolable sanctity of Holy Islamic scripture (and never you mind those verses about annihilating the infidels — the ones being chanted by the killers). And we suspend disbelief, insisting that things would be just fine in a place like Gaza if we could only set up a democracy — a development which, there, appears poised to empower Hamas, terrorists of the same ilk as those in Afghanistan and Pakistan who see comparatively minor indignities as license to commit murder.

"Minor indignities? How can you say something so callous about a desecration of the Holy Koran?" I say it as a member of the real world, not the world of prissy affectation. I don't know about you, but I inhabit a place where crucifixes immersed in urine and Madonna replicas composed of feces are occasions for government funding, not murderous uprisings. If someone was moved to kill on their account, we'd be targeting the killer, not the exhibiting museum, not the "artists," and surely not Newsweek.

Ironically, Dingo, that's the best evidence of media bias. Muslim atrocities are downplayed -- gotta protect the poor dears! -- while every Palestinian in cammo has a personal photographer. Newsweek paid attention to the Arab street only to wound Bush, says Jonah Goldberg:

Remember all the Ramadan-a-ding-donging about how we should have postponed hostilities in Afghanistan out of respect for the Holy Month of Ramadan? Muslims around the world wouldn’t tolerate such an affront, even though Mohammed himself became a helicopter of fists against his enemies during Ramadan. . . Yes, yes, the irony is rich that for all the bleating from the blame-America crowd about how this war or that invasion will ignite the “street” in the Muslim world it ended up being a ten-line item in the “Periscope” section of Newsweek. But that’s life.

The left and the media don't care about the Arab street. It's just another weapon in pin-the-Hitler-mustache-on-the-President, inspired by systemic media bias. How much lower can they sink?

More:

RightPundit catches NBC lying about Bush's judicial nominees and the history of the filibuster.

Still More:

MaxedOutMama on the NY Times survey cited above: "The survey is hilarious - you should read it. It coyly suggests that journalists might vote for the president they'd rather cover, rather than the president they think would do the better job. Uh-huh."

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^* A corollary to Buckley's first law: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." — William F. Buckley Jr., Rumbles.