Bias and the media
Author contends that liberal journalists tilt the news toward the left
Posted on Sun, Mar. 17, 2002
The Miami Herald and wire service sources
BY GLENN GARVIN
TELEVISION CRITIC
The New York Times called it ''the most astonishing event in the last 12 months.'' Nearly half a million copies of Bernie Goldberg's book are in print, he's been atop the bestseller lists for nearly two months, and he's done 400 radio shows and 35 cable TV shows. There are only three news organizations that don't want any part of him:
NBC, ABC and CBS.
''They won't have me on their news programs, not even the overnight shows at 3 in the morning,'' says Goldberg. ``And they say there's no bias on network news?''
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Goldberg worked 28 years as a reporter and producer at CBS News, winning seven Emmies, before wrecking his career with a 1996 op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that complained about liberal bias on the CBS Evening News.<font size=3> (The report that prompted his complaint called the flat-tax plan of Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes ''wacky'' and suggested he go try it out in Albania before foisting it on the United States.)
Goldberg, who lives in Miami, is now a reporter for the HBO program Real Sports. He has written a book that recounts, in minute detail, what he calls the systematic political bias of network news.
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Goldberg writes of the way his network career crashed and burned: ``I said out loud what millions of TV news viewers all over America know and have been complaining about for years: that too often, Dan and Peter and Tom and a lot of their foot soldiers don't deliver the news straight, that they have a liberal bias.''
He offers plenty of examples:
• ''We pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives . . . but for some crazy reason, didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals.'' So, on a CBS This Morning piece on sexual harassment, Phyllis Schlafly was introduced as ''conservative spokeswoman,'' while Catherine MacKinnon -- a radical feminist who has argued that all sexual intercourse is rape -- was merely a ``noted law professor.''
• When it came to reporting stories about the homeless, network correspondents were very careful in choosing which homeless to show: ''White was better than black. Clean was better than dirty. Attractive was better than unattractive. Sane was better than insane. And sober was better than addicted.'' That not only made for a more compassionate image, but made it easier to blame Ronald Reagan's social policies for the homeless problem, rather than mental illness or substance abuse.
• The networks relentlessly predicted an epidemic of AIDS among U.S. heterosexuals because ''scaring the hell out of people makes for good television even when it makes for shallow journalism.'' When the epidemic stubbornly refused to materialize -- when drug use and hemophilia are discarded, less than 7 percent of American AIDS cases involve heterosexuals, according to government statistics -- the networks simply pretended that it had: ``We showed people with AIDS on television and never bothered to say they were gay. We showed straight suburbanites with AIDS and never bothered to ask if they shot drugs into their veins or had sex with people who did.''<font size=3>
ATTENTION-GRABBER
Praise -- and criticism -- increase as book's sales rapidly rise
<font size=4>Goldberg clearly touched a nerve. Though it was published by a small Washington house with little promotion, Bias immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists and stayed there. President Bush was even photographed with the book under his arm.
The news media -- particularly the networks -- have been less enthusiastic.<font size=3> Andrew Hayward, president of CBS News, bragged to a meeting of TV critics in January that he hadn't read the book and didn't plan to.
Hayward's vengeful defenders were not so muted. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, a longtime CBS admirer, called Goldberg a ''full-time addlepated windbag.'' Michael Kinsley, the retiring editor of Microsoft's www.Slate.com Web site, contented himself with labeling Goldberg ``remarkably dense.''
Counters Goldberg: The dense ones are the guys running the news business, who don't seem to be able to connect the dots between the declines in TV news ratings, newspaper circulation and the public's confidence in journalists.
Goldberg isn't the only whistleblowing journalist with a book about how liberal bias is disfiguring news coverage. In his book Coloring The News, veteran reporter William McGowan argues the news media's crusade to hire members of ethnic and sexual minority groups has spawned a crippling political correctness in newsrooms. The book was released in November.
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McGowan, who has worked for Newsweek and the BBC, says ''diversity hiring'' -- the term news media generally prefer to ''affirmative action'' -- has unquestionably brought talented minority journalists into newsrooms that were previously dominated by white males.
The problem, he says, is that news organizations wind up hiring reporters who have different color skin or a different sexual orientation, but think exactly the same: ``a kind of Benetton diversity that looks good on a poster, but is completely superficial.''
McGowan's book, too, is full of case studies of coverage he says was driven off-track by the political biases of the people who report and edit the news:
• In 1998, when two thugs in Laramie, Wyo., savagely beat a young gay man named Matthew Shephard and then tied him to a fence post to die in the freezing night, a computer search turned up 3,007 stories about the incident in the first month.
But the next year, when two gay men in Arkansas kidnapped a 13-year-old boy named Jesse Dirkhising, raped him for hours, and then left him bound and gagged to suffocate, a computer search found only 46 stories published in the next month. None were on the three major networks or CNN, or in The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times.
''No one admitted the obvious: that the Dirkhising story was too hot to handle because it raised the explosive issue of gay pedophilia and because it threatened the sanctity of the gays-as-victims script which had attained the status of holy writ in the media,'' writes McGowan.
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• The Miami Herald has caved in to ''the city's ethnically assertive and politically influential Cuban community,'' McGowan writes. The Herald ''pulled its punches, shying away from rigorous, searching pieces that might call into question the assumptions of Cuban Miami and the actions of its political elite.'' He is particularly critical of The Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Elián González, which he says ``demonstrated a pattern of foot-dragging in reporting news developments that supported the return of the 7-year-old boy to his natural father.''
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Though the focus of McGowan's book is somewhat different from Goldberg's, the two men agree that liberal political bias is distorting the news. Conservative critics of the press have been saying the same thing for years, but what lends an unusually sharp edge to Goldberg and McGowan's criticism is that they come from the very culture they attack: Both are newsroom insiders with moderately liberal political convictions.
They are also resolute that the bias is not the product of a conspiracy. Rather, the bias is the unconscious product of groupthink among journalists who overwhelmingly share the same liberal ideals.
JOURNALISTS `APOLITICAL'?
Studies show most call themselves liberals who vote for Democrats
That newsrooms are mostly staffed by political liberals is pretty much beyond dispute, although a few keep trying to argue the point. CBS anchorman Dan Rather -- who declined to be interviewed for this story -- frequently says journalists are apolitical. ''Most reporters don't know whether they're Republican or Democrat, and vote every which way . . . [They] would fall in the general category of kind of common-sense moderates,'' he said in 1995.
But there are plenty of studies, dating back to the 1930s, that prove him wrong: Most journalists describe themselves as liberal and vote Democratic, and among the profession's elite -- the staffs of the three major networks, the weekly news magazines and influential papers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times -- the political skew is overwhelmingly to the left:
• A comprehensive study published in 1981 by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs showed that 54 percent of elite journalists identified themselves as liberal but only 19 percent as conservatives. In every presidential election between 1964 and 1976, at least 80 percent of them voted Democratic.
• A 1996 study of Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents by the independent journalism foundation Freedom Forum found that 89 percent of them voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, and just 7 percent for George Bush. Sixty-one percent said they were liberals, only 9 percent conservatives; 50 percent were Democrats, only 4 percent Republicans.
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Whether the personal politics of journalists color their reporting is more difficult to pin down, although some of Goldberg's arguments about distorted stories are statistically verifiable.
Network news really did distort the identity of AIDS victims, the Center for Media and Public Affairs concluded after monitoring 1992 coverage of the disease. Just 6 percent of the AIDS victims shown on the evening news were gay men, compared to 58 percent in real life; only 2 percent were intravenous drug users, compared to 23 percent in reality.
And a center study of television and news coverage of the homeless said the stories ''provide a blueprint of advocacy journalism.'' Of the sources quoted in 103 stories, only one out of every 25 said homelessness was connected to the problems of the homeless themselves -- mental illness, drunkenness, drug abuse, laziness. The other 96 percent blamed political or economic conditions.
But other manifestations of bias are nearly impossible to prove -- if, indeed, they exist.
ABC anchor Peter Jennings says bias is hard to detect because it isn't there. He concedes that newsrooms sit well to the left of American society, but insists that makes no difference.
''We all have baggage,'' Jennings says. ``But one of the good things about journalists is that they recognize bias and work hard to keep it out of their coverage . . You can have all sorts of people who voted for Bill Clinton, but the media gave Clinton one hell of a time. Now we hear a lot from people who complain that we don't give George Bush as hard a time as we gave Bill Clinton.''
Others are not so sure. ''Goldberg is right in that there are belief systems at work here that influence us,'' says Tom Fiedler, The Herald's executive editor, who was so impressed with Goldberg's book that he invited him to lunch recently with several of the paper's senior managers.
``I hate to say there's a political correctness that guides us, but I think there is. We tend to give more credibility to groups on the liberal side of the spectrum than on the conservative side . . . We have to guard against falling into a groupthink.''
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PUBLIC PERCEPTION
Polls show more viewers turning away from network news shows
Whether journalists will confront the issue or not, it's clear that the public believes there's a problem. A 1998 Gallup poll showed 46 percent of the public thinks the news media has a political bias (27 percent said it was a liberal bias, 19 percent said conservative). Network television was seen as the most biased.
There are two other sets of statistics that probably aren't a coincidence:
• Journalism's credibility is slipping. Though the numbers have taken a bounce upward during the war in Afghanistan, before that, the percentage of Americans who agreed that journalists ''usually get the facts straight'' had dropped from 55 in July 1985 to 35 last year, according to The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
• More viewers and readers are switching to the Internet, cable TV or talk radio for their news. Ratings for the evening newscasts on the big three broadcast networks have been in steady decline for 10 years. Meanwhile, the Fox News cable channel, founded by owner Rupert Murdoch as an antidote to what he saw as liberal bias at the big three networks, is steadily increasing its ratings and now consistently beats CNN.
News executives at the big three broadcast networks deride
Fox News as a right-wing clown show. Fox News CEO Roger
Ailes basks in the criticism. Ailes says, ``The public is
so sick of left-leaning media that they're desperate for
anything else. We're not conservative, we're just not
liberal, and the other networks can't tell the
difference.''
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato says the public's concern over bias is directly connected to the decline in credibility and ratings, and that mainstream journalism is in serious need of a wake-up call:
'Journalists would be much better off admitting, `Yes, I'm human, I have opinions, they influence me, they're bound to slip out from time to time. When they do and you catch it, you tell me. We'll try to control it.' People would appreciate that candor.''
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