I think that the power to shape public opinion also makes a big difference, and the media is biased, to the point of irrational hatred of Republicans, as that article showed.
But, the tide is turning.
--
Who says there's media bias?
William Rusher
To a conservative, the question of whether the media are biased
in favor of liberalism is right up there with the burning
question of whether the sun rises in the East. Their bias is so
obvious, and has been demonstrated statistically so many times,
and (for that matter) has been admitted so often by members of
the media themselves, that it's hard to believe the issue is
still open for debate.
And yet, the reigning monarchs of the media, both print and
electronic, suavely and unanimously deny that they have any
bias whatever. Their whole lives, they tell us, are dedicated
to the search for objective truth, and anyone who charges
otherwise is merely revealing his own bias.
This leaves a conservative with only two choices:
(1) To assume that the overwhelming majority of people in the
media are so smugly self-satisfied that they genuinely believe
their bulging portfolio of liberal opinions is in fact the
simple truth about the topics in question.
(2) Or to assume that they are lying through their teeth.
Personally, I belong to the school that thinks they are lying
through their teeth.
Conceivably, there are one or two pompous windbags in the
journalism business who are so full of themselves that they
actually believe their steady output of liberal bushwah is
simply the product of old-fashioned journalistic enterprise,
refined in the white-hot kiln of their hard-earned wisdom. But
the average New York Times reporter or NBC anchorperson is
under no such illusion. He or she knows exactly what he or she
is doing when describing the Heritage Foundation as
"conservative," while leaving the Brookings Institution
uncharacterized, or calls a Republican proposal a "scheme" and
its Democratic rival a "plan." These people have been doing
this sort of thing so long that it doesn't even bother them.
The statistical evidence that members of the media are far to
the left of general public opinion is overwhelming. As long ago
as 1981, a painstaking study by Robert Lichter and Stanley
Rothman established that never less than 80 percent of the
media elite voted Democratic in the presidential elections of
1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. What's more, 54 percent described
themselves as "left of center," and only 19 percent as "right
of center."
In pure theory, of course, these people could keep their
leftist bias out of their reportage. But they don't, as some of
them across the years have incautiously conceded. Thus, the
late William A. Henry III of Time magazine admitted, "We're
unpopular because the press tends to be liberal, and I don't
think we can run away from that." And CBS correspondent Bernard
Goldberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal several years ago,
was even blunter: "The old argument that the networks and other
'media elites' have a liberal bias is so blatantly true that
it's hardly worth discussing anymore."
Mr. Goldberg hung on at CBS for several years after that
impolitic admission, but was finally eased out. Now he has
written a whole book, titled "Bias" (Regnery Publishing, 2001),
on the subject, and it is well worth the time of anybody who
still somehow manages to hang onto a belief in the media's
objectivity, or who would simply like a few fresh illustrations
of how they tilt the pinball machine.
Is there any likelihood the media will recognize their bias and
reform? I doubt it very much. The truth is that they have too
much contempt for conservatives to feel any obligation to play
fair with them, and they get too much satisfaction out of doing
their small bit for liberal causes and leaders to stop doing
it.
But the American people caught on to their game years ago and
hold them in appropriately low esteem. And now, at long last,
cable TV networks and radio talk shows are beginning to break
the monopoly that these arrogant liberal "journalists" long
held on the airwaves. So, better times are ahead.
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