Good issues. Let's see.
1. Publishers and content. Graham (and I think Luce) were owner/publishers. A bit of a different thing. IME, which is admittedly limited to direct knowledge of local and regional media, not national, the publisher has little to do with content, having a full plate dealing with financial and production issues. I have written for a variety of magazines and newspapers and have never had any editorial contact with the publisher. I was also a commentator on a Seattle TV station, and dealt entirely with the news editor.
Advertisers: it always surprises me how little influence advertisers have on media content. There have been conservative attempts from time to time to get advertisers to pull advertising based on content, and it occasionally has some impact (as on the Ellen show where she revealed her homosexuality, but those slots got filled by others quickly enough), but generally advertisers go where the readers are without worrying much about what brings the readers there. I do know of one major local advertiser who pulled all his grocery store advertising and moved it to another paper because the paper he was in wrote critical articles about his attempts to expand another enterprise, but what is interesting is that the paper said "okay, go, then" rather than change its coverage, even though the advertiser was their single largest advertiser. Pretty gutsy for a struggling local paper. If they can and will do it, surely the Times, Post, etc. will do in fact what they say they will do, which is pay no attention to such threats.
I'm sure somebody could point to isolated instances of advertisers affecting coverage--there is anecdotal evidence to support ANY position one wants to take--but IME it is rare.
2. Role of reporters. Feature reporters are assigned stories by editors, though they do have input. But beat reporters -- those assigned to cover crime, or the Governor's office, etc. -- have more scope to decide what they will write about and, sometimes more important, what they won't. And even feature reporters can, consciously or unconsciously, slant a story they have been assigned.
3. Politicial affiliation of reporters. I do think much bias is unconscious, not conscious. If a reporter is covering a story of a cross burning, do they start with a completely open mind, or do they start with the opinion that cross burning is generally a bad thing? I suggest most often the latter. If so, the questions they ask, the people they decide to interview, and their unconscious belief in whether the people they are interviewing are telling the truth will be different. In interviewing the alleged victims, will they ask "hard" questions (maybe: "what do you think you might have done which caused the alleged perpetrators to feel that they needed to burn a cross on your lawn?"), or will they start with a sense of sympathy and concern which will affect the questions they ask and the way they ask them? Similarly, if the reporter goes to the skinhead leader for an interview, is the reporter going to start with a position of sympathy and trying to understand the reasons for the action, or is s/he going to go in with a sense that these are people who did a bad thing, and approach the interview and ask questions accordingly?
What is a liberal viewpoint? That, of course, is a key question. Yes, we should get into it later. Of course, it's a spectrum, and most people have views that are a mixture of liberal and conservative. But I'll toss out a few what I believe are broadly accepted differences: If you're a strong supporter of abortion-on-demand you're more likely to be liberal, if you generally oppose abortion you're more likely to be conservative; if you favor strong gun control you're generally more liberal, if you strongly support second amendment rights you're generally more conservative; if you think Rush Limbaugh is right on you're generally more conservative, if you think he's a dickhead you're more likely to be liberal; if you think minorities have too many special privileges as it is you're likely to be conservative, if you think minorities deserve special privileges to make up for past discrimination you're more likely to be liberal; if you think the police generally do a good job and if they occasionally go a bit overboard that's not a good thing but is understandable you're probably conservative; if you think the police engage in unfair racial profiling and are often racist or sexist in their approach to minorities and women, you're probably more liberal. And more broadly, if you think more regulation, especially by the federal govenment, is needed to solve social problems you are probably more liberal; if you think there is already enough (or too much) government interference in our lives, you're probably more conservative.
Do you disagree with any of those?
4. Determining the bias of a publication. Actually, I generally don't do it from the editorial pages. That's overt and can be dealt with. I look at the news stories, and look at several things: the choice of stories and decision as to what to feature and what not to feature; whether some people or organizations are described more sympathetically than others (in a story on gun control are the anti-handgun organizations and the NRA described evenhandedly, or is one described more positively and the other more negatively); whether editorializing intrudes into the news story (Time and Newsweek are infamous for this; their news reporters are always saying what so-and-so should do, which is not reporting, but opinion, and should be on the editorial page, not in news stories; what approach to the story is taken by the reporter (if a reporter is sent to write a story on a cross which was burned by skinheads on the lawn of a black family, does the reporter write a purely factual, "here are the facts on this cross burning incident" story, or write a here's a sympathetic view of these victims of discrimination and why we think this was an awful thing to do, or write a story on here's why those agitators deserved to have a cross burned on their lawn); and other factors like those. Or, look at the Kosovo situation; except for a piece in the NY Times several years ago there was virtually no coverge of the attempts prior to the war by the Albanians to ethnically cleanse the Serbs out of Kosovo, and there was a great deal of media sympathy for the Kosovar Albanians who were killed by Serbian troops and virtually none for the Serbians being killed by the U.S. bombing.
4 redux: Consolidation. I remember P.M. too, and my family got it for as long as it existed. Izzy Stone is gone, too. But the Nation and Mother Jones are still around. And there is an argument that could be made that the media have moved more toward the P.M. point of view -- national newspapers are no longer as jingoistic as they were a hundred years ago and I don't think any newspaper today could get a war started almost all on its own.
Finally, let me quote your conclusion: This leads me to my characterization of the mainstream press as "Establishment."
There is a spectrum of "accepted views," from "left" to "right," and of "accepted
topics for discussion." The problem with the mainstream press, in my opinion, is not
that it is politically "biassed" towards the left or right wing of this spectrum, but that it
is not intellectually adventurous and/or inclusive enough.
My point is that there should be NO views, accepted, left, or right, in news coverage. That should be left for the editorial pages and the openly opinion magazines (such as New Republic, Nation, National Review, etc.) The news should be as objective and factual a description of what happened as is humanly possible. In a news story on the Kennedy plane crash, for example, there should be no place for sympathetic tributes to the Kennedys (who are a political family generally regarded as on the liberal side of the political spectrum). The stories should just say here is what happened to whom, and leave the decision whether this is a tragedy or just retribution (which I hasten to add is not my opinion but is the opinion of some people I know) to the reader. |
