Journalism's confession: Playing Twister...to the right
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Journalism's confession: Playing Twister...to the right
It's so true that freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose -- and so our brush here with terminal illness is occasionally truly liberating for America's newsrooms. This week, in fact, it seems that journalists are rushing to admit something -- openly in one case, tacitly in another -- something that's been true ever since the Nixon-Agnew era, but was rarely talked about.
This uncomfortable truth? That to accomodate the perceived notion that the news media warps things so far to the left, journalists have been playing Twister to bend over backwards to accomodate conservatives -- and tying ourselves in knots.
Exhibit A: The New York Times admits that it's easier to get on one of the most coveted pieces of real estate in American journalism, a slot on its letters-to-the-editor page, if you are a conservative. Here is what Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said in a recent online chat:
The best kind of letter is relatively short (under 150 words), clearly written, strongly opinionated and direct. It doesn’t contain personal invective aimed at the writer or subject of an article. And it’s well written. I’ll be honest: Because of the nature of our readers, letter writers who defend Republican, conservative or right-wing positions on many topics have a higher shot at being published.
Exhibit B: Cynthia Tucker -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has long been the kind of contrarian voice that we journalists allegedly worship -- is being moved up and out of her slot in what local observers say is part of a seemingly futile bid to woo back consevative suburban readers:
It’s safe to say, however, that for the first time in generations, the state’s leading editorial page finally will have abandoned its mission as a progressive voice in favor of a carefully constructed mirage of “balance” — designed not to tell the truth, whether it’s unpopular or not, as much as to mollify conservative readers.
This article about Tucker's move to Washington and away from her key local post at the Atlanta paper does a good job of laying out the broader issues, of why journalists are so self-conscious about their alleged liberalism -- some of it real but a lot of it perceived -- and why we become so accomodating to conservatives that it quickly becomes a case of being too accomodating.
That could be because efforts at balance come across as what they are — a bit patronizing. But it’s also because the practice of journalism is an essentially liberal exercise in the classical sense of the word: It places faith in the ability of people to form their opinions based on facts and reasoning rather than on preconceptions and prejudice. Meanwhile, the South’s brand of conservatism — the brand that has taken over much of the Republican Party — is essentially reactionary: Any narrative, no matter how factual, that challenges a set worldview is seen as a threat from outsiders to be battled, no matter how high the cost.
It's not surprising that there's an overlap between liberal values and journalistic values -- at least as journalists and progressives like to perceive themselves, as rational thinkers and as questioners of authority. But the reality is that at the more visible levels of the media -- inside the Beltway. on cable TV and in the national papers and newsweeklies -- the practitioners of journalism are not so much questioners of authority, that they have a lot on common with the other elites they're supposedly practicing on.
There are social ties, sometimes college ties, shared world views that over the years grow less and less liberal. Many higher-earning journalists share the liberal social values of the blue-state suburbs -- on issues like abortion or the environment -- but also some conservative economic views, and a comfort level with conformity. A good number aren't keen on labor unions (even though a few actually belong to them), aren't familiar with working-class concerns, and were freaked out by the "dirty freakin' hippies" who just happened to be right on Iraq.
What's the one liberal value that journalists retain as we grow long in the tooth and rise up the salary ladder? Liberal guilt. Politicians have played on this successfully for 40 years, ever since too many newsrooms cowered from Spiro Agnew calling us "nattering nabobs of negativism." As I wrote about in my recent book "Tear Down This Myth," Ronald Reagan's "teflon presidency" was in good measure due to journalists fearful they'd be accused of liberal bias with a too aggressive posture.
Did you ever watch the Sunday political talk shows, and the regular cavalcade of aggressively conservative pols and pundits, who usually outnumber and outtalk the handful of passive "liberals," many of whom aren't even that liberal? The Beltway journalists who book those shows tend to book "liberals" who are a reflection of themselves -- low-key, just-a-tad-to-the-left-of-centrists -- while bringing on more rabid conservatives a) to show that they're open minded and not "biased liberals" and b) because they find wild-eyed conservative entertaining. Real DFH liberals scare the heck out of them, and God only knows what they might blurt out about something like NBC/MSNBC/CNBC parent General Electric, also a major defense contractor.
Remember the debate on President Obama's stimulus package a few months back? Everytime I flipped on cable TV, there was a 30-second factual (usually) description of the proposal, followed by five minutes of loud conservative criticism. That's how the "liberal media" shows that it's really fair and balanced.
Even so, I'm still a little stunned and slightly confused by Rosenthal's comment about over-accomodating conservative letter writers because of "the nature of our readers." Does that mean that the majority of the letters-to-the-editor in the New York Times take center-left to liberal positions on most issues? If so, that may not be the nature of the Times' readers but the nature of America, since most surveys show that most Americans hold center-left views on most issues. But instead a reader of the letters page, seeing an unfair weighting to conservative writers, will be getting a false impression of what people out there are thinking.
It's true that the Times' takes liberal positions on many issues, but not all. For example, its editorial page did not aggressively question the rush to war in Iraq, nor did some of the hyperbolic "news" coverage of the run-up by Judy Miller -- and like everyone else the Times ignored or undercovered massive protests before the invasion. But presumably the editorial page also overweighted conservative pro-war letters and underweighted the DFHs who couldn't understand why America was invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. That's balance?
A year later, the Philadelphia Inquirer made a bold decision (and correct, in my opinion) that the Bush presidency was such a danger to America that it ran a series of 21 editorials calling for the election of John Kerry. Yet every day it gave equal space to someone arguing that Bush should be re-elected, so was it really that bold of a move after all? That's balance, but what's the point? Check out this great riff from Jay Rosen on the bogusness of "he said, she said" journalism for a broader perspective.
Ironically, as the Atlanta piece notes, none of this contorting to accomodate right-wing critics has brought in any right-wing support or, more importantly, news readership -- conservatives still hate us, and no amount of sucking up will change that. That said, what's the harm in bending over backwards to overly represent or kowtow to conservative viewpoints? Well, when pundits still believe that America is a center-right nation on the morning after the election of a center-left president and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, that might offer a window into how the greater political debate gets warped by this odd charade.
Journalists should only have one great mission in our career. It is not the quest for something called balance. It is the search for the truth. Period. No matter how uncomfortable that makes some people. Cynthia Tucker knows that, and now she's paying a price.
Ironically, the arrival of the Internet should have been a liberating effect. The unlimited electrons of cyberspace gives plenty of room for the naysayers to have their naysay, in a comments section or on a competing blog.
Instead, it looks like the chaos caused by the implosion of the business model for news has had the opposite effect -- a futile search to give Americans what we think they want to hear and maybe what they think they want to hear, and not what they need to hear. That's not serving balance. That's not serving anybody.
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"...that the Bush presidency was such a danger to America that it ran a series of 21 editorials calling for the election of John Kerry..."What ever happened to that doomed country will? Did it survive? What is the difference between journalism and activism? Is there a difference?— E Plebnista- Comment removed.
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I never taken illegal drugs, but if I can get what your having Will, I might give it a shot.— jmc- More of the "customer is always wrong" attitude from the Will The Shill and the Democrat-Media Complex.... Newspapers are collapsing, surveys show that people think the media has a left-wing bias, but people like you just keep telling us we're wrong. Business that follow the "customer is always right" (meaning correct) axiom will succeed, but the know-it-all, change-the-world, elitist liberals running newspapers will eventually fail, because they think they know what's good for everyone else instead of listening to their (former) customers.— fafafooey
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- Hey Xi, stealing my screen name? :) But that's why I chose it - as a humble reminder to all of us (including myself) that we are the sum of our perceptions and biases. The point is, hopefully, to realize that and still take reasoned stands, yet not devoid of passion. I think the Inky really dropped the ball on that when it ran editorials on the same day and page endorsing Obama and McCain. Regardless of which you prefer or which you think was better, to do that showed not an attempt at being 'fair and balanced' but a total lack of intestinal fortitude. In the Inferno Dante has a place before the actual entrance to hell for those who were neither for good nor evil, but only for themselves - both heaven and hell held such people in contempt. That's what I think Will is decrying here, and he's right.— what is truth?
- I talk about the myth of liberal media bias; I think it's important that this myth be dispelled once and for all. No liberal owns a broadcast license. No liberal owns a major publishing house which creates textbooks for US schools. Everybody in the media in the United States is one of those "other" people, with another agenda which doesn't always phase up with the rights that are guaranteed in the US Constitution. They like to bend the rules and engage in situational ethics, and as long as people are stoopid and docile, they won't fight it. Maybe it sounds like a conspiracy theory to say that the US schools have been purposely watered down or made ineffectual, but it looks that way to me. There's no reason to keep graduating people who shouldn't be graduating at all. They should still be in school learning how to be functional. They should be able to do their own bank balance. They should be able to spell at least, say, 2000 words of the English language, and be able to read them, if for no other purpose than to avoid problems in traffic.— Packard Goose
- The way the rakcet works is this: A right-wing guy who owns the license creates the myth of liberal media bias – with no proof that such a bias actually exists – then demands in the name of fairness that more balance be added into a news story. That buys him the chance to add even more right-wing ideological content into every news story and everything that goes on the air – as if there wasn't enough already. So in the name of fairness and balance, news stories must always contain an extra helping of right-wing agenda. And that's the reason for this whole myth about liberal media bias. It was just a promotion started during the Reagan administration. A very clever manipulation.— Packard Goose
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- I love how the right wants us to think there is something wrong with being "elite." To them, anyone with a college education and a view that does not agree with theirs is "elite" and to be shunned for fear things like the facts and truth might somehow undermine their propaganda efforts. The reality is the truth is not liberal or conservative. It is simply the truth. The right is so devoid of valid truth-based arguments that it has to attack anyone who dare tell the truth or expose their fallacies and lies. And the benefit of their attack on the educated is obvious from all the ignorant posts their uneducated kool aid drinkers make attacking anything that does not fit their preconceived notion of reality, which is based on John Wayne movies, Boys Life and Readers Digest. Saddest part is how many of them don't even realize they are being used by the true elite (in the misguided sense of the word as they use it) -- the wealthy corporate greedheads whose sole purpose and aim is to consolidate wealth and power in their own hands. Their policies offer nothing to truly benefit the vast majority of so-called conservatives, other than pandering to narrow-minded prejudices and fears. Fer chrissakes, they are even still arguing that Iraq was not a mistake. How do you reason with folks who refuse to accept reality?
"More of the "customer is always wrong" attitude from the Will The Shill" . . . . . . . It's not the customer, it's the medium. The newspaper is dead. Progressive journalism however is thriving in many other forms. I can understand Will's romantic nostalgia for the good old days, but it's really getting tiresome. The only folks who seem to want a newspaper are older, conservative low-to-middle income retirees who haven't quite caught on to this internet thing, but alas, they won't be tipping the paper boy for many more years.
As a liberal myself, I read a lot of email from folks like Move On and Democracy for America and listen sometimes to Air America (mainly to Thom Hartmann these days) and usually see some of either Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or both. But I also listen to CSPAN (or watch it) more than any of the above. If you listen to the actual words of our president and his administration and to the Senate and House hearings, it quickly becomes apparent that the main tool the right-wing media have is to set up false images of what actual policy is and then to attack those images. The reason that most serious newspaper or magazine writing is viewed as liberal is that it attempts to be close to the truth (not always succeeding, as Will pointed out in his excellent post above). The right-wing responses that appear in letters to the editor, op-ed columns, and very much in television reporting rely on distortion of facts. That is the main difference between the so-called liberal media and their frequent right-wing guest commentators.- Comment removed.
- bryanc, I'm not clear about your comment at 3:05. You seem to dispute the idea that southern reactionaries are a big slice of the GOP. I would agree that they're really not Conservative, but you can't dispute their influence on the GOP.
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- It seems that we're trapped in this notion that Democrat is interchangeable with "liberal" and Republican with "conservative", when they're really just slightly contrasting shades of the center.
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- "Again, could go on, but your statement is factually incorrect." . . . No bryanc, you're the one making the assumption that donations to the Democratic party means you're "liberal". I really feel sorry for folks who haven't yet figured out this two-party game that the establishment has set up in this country.
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- "Tell the truth and you might win some readers back." . . . . . I'm sure you can list every lie you've discovered in today's DN? Just give us 3, and I'll shut up. Oh, and they can't be opinions, they have to be outright falsehoods.
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- bryanc - I ran a Google search on the phrase "No liberal owns a major publishing house" (with quotation marks). There is one match. It was for an interview with Frank Zappa in December 1989. You might be correcting a dead guy (from an interview nearly 20 years old). ••• http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Frank_Zappa_89-12— Phrossty
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- "when in fact there are many executives from both Pearson and McGraw-Hill who donate to the Democratic party and liberal causes." . . . Well, now that you vaguely add "liberal causes" to the mix, let's assume that's true. Does that mean nobody in those publishing houses ever contributed to Republican or conservative causes? Seriously, how does that prove either of those publishers are owned or controlled by liberals?
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- The American President's call "to free the world of the menace of a nuclear nightmare" was hot air, Mr Sarkozy's diplomatic staff told him in a report. "It was rhetoric – not a speech on American security policy but an export model aimed at improving the image of the United States," they said. Most of Mr Obama's proposals had already been made by the Bush administration and Washington was dragging its feet on disarmament and treaties against nuclear proliferation, the leaked report said.— Fisher
- Here's one conservative cause I find appealing - the secession of Texas, and hopefully the rest of the South. The burden lifted on the rest of the country's taxpayers would be enormous, not to mention the border problem, the drag on the nation's average intelligence, and the steady stream of blowhards in Congress - all history.
- "it shows that there is a textbook maker that sure as heck isn't controlled by the GOP!" . . Again, what makes them liberal just because they supported Dems? What you overlook is the fact that the Dems have become more centrist since the 70s. The GOP has come to be seen as the party of the far right, unwilling to compromise or seek middle ground. So, while publishers don't conform to far right ideology, that hardly means they're bolsheviks, does it?
- Fisher, I share your disgust of French arrogance and that pansy Sarkozy. How dare they diss our President. Freedom fries forever!
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- "What is the difference between journalism and activism? Is there a difference?" This is a great point - and the point that bothers most conservatives. We see what these newspapers/network news doing activism, barely hidden by a label of journalism. An example of this is how Iraq has been covered. The focus of 99% of these stories has been: American soldier deaths, lack of WMD found, terrorists gaining momentum. But the picture has changed over there, and I haven't seen any analysis to tell me that it has changed. I'm interested in what the daily life of an Iraqi is like now -- what's the unemployment rate, what is the comparable income rate, what are the schools, businesses, social life like? What is the IRAQI death toll? Did America get bored of Iraq, now that American GI's aren't dying by the 100s? Or have our liberal journalistic friends forgotten their responsibilities and are now focused on their next conservative outrage -- AIG bonuses?— IggleFan68
"to accomodate the perceived notion that the news media warps things so far to the left, journalists have been playing Twister to bend over backwards to accomodate conservatives -- and tying ourselves in knots." Will, this is hilarious! You do deadpan writing so well, you could definitely write for Comedy Central when this news thing goes bust!- If you want to see where this is going with the NY Times just look at the Washington Post. The house of mirrors has been installed there for years now, a fun house in which the paper is called "liberal" while publishing George Will, William Kristol, Michael Gerson, Robert Kagan, and that's the just the first few names of the extreme right wingers, a litany of leaders of the Neoconservative movement, right wing ideologues, George W Bush speechwritesr, and on and on. It's the kind of roster that explains why people think that someone like David Broder or Richard Cohen are "centrists". What's forgotten these days is that these newspapers serve a community, and in the case of the WAPO its stream of really extreme right wing opinion writers is so out of step with the hugely Democratic community it serves as to have become a bad joke. The NY Times is clearly thinking of heading in the same direction. The WAPO is proof that you can carry that illusion that "We're a liberal paper therefore we have to print conservative writers" to the point of utter absurdity, to where up is down and left is right. I'm so glad that newspapers are dying, at least judging by the way most of the conduct themselves these days. Information has been captive to the corporate, largely right wing system forever, but more so now than ever, and doled out through this filter of insanity that thinks its actually "liberal media". Now information is coming from all sides, and lo and behold, the conservative right wing stranglehold on the news is letting loose, and partly as a result Republicans who have retreated to the farthest extremes on the right have been tossed out of office, more and more. And more to come.— Bill E Pilgrim
As someone pointed out, media companies are not liberal. GE, Disney, Viacom, Hearst, Gannet, Time Warner...point to the liberals...anyone? Will I really liked your piece and I think it is true on several levels, except one. Liberal guilt does not explain a deliberate distortion of the truth to support corporate giants and their greed. It doesn't explain the reporting leading to the invasion of Iraq (among other things). Reporters, whether liberal or not, do not decide what gets reported in the paper or put on news broadcast, and they know where their bread is buttered (not that I blame them, I don’t). This goes way beyond organizations trying to show they are not biased. Hush little baby, don’t say a word…— Hamlet- Suggested hed: "Journalists unfair to leftists, leftist journalist says."— Bradley Fikes
- You don't get it. No one is asking to be treated differently. Just try straight reporting - no agenda. Newspapers aren't dying because people are getting their news on the Web. Newspapers are dying because no one want to read what's being reported. Also it would be comforting if you could spell "accommodate." But then, maybe that's the root of the bias problem.— joeodie
- Great piece. Anyone notice how in the media "debate" on health reform, the subject of single-payer never comes up, except to disparage the idea? As for "balance", the classic "balanced" headline comes to mind: "Scientists say Earth is Round; others disagee."— Aredee
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