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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (175742)	8/29/2001 2:55:15 PM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 769670

From WSJ Opinion site: The Washington Post's Thomas Edsall, writing in the journal Public Perspective ropercenter.uconn.edu (link in PDF format), notes a recent poll that shows "only a fraction of the media identifies itself as either Republican (4%) or conservative (6%)." Result: The press, in the course of the past four decades, has been blindsided by some of the most significant political developments because so few members of the media share the views of the voters who have been mobilized by these movements. Examples include the white, working class reaction in the North to the civil rights movement, starting in the late 1960s; the emergence of Richard Nixon's "silent majority" in the 1970s; the conservative upheaval of 1980 that produced Ronald Reagan and the Republican takeover of the Senate; the rise of the Christian Right; the Gingrich revolution of 1994; the popularity of welfare reform in the 1990s; and the unexpectedly conservative appointments and legislative priorities of the current Bush administration. Edsall himself succumbs once or twice to those biased liberal assumptions. He asserts, for instance, that "the educational requirements for admission to the field" help create a distinctively liberal journalistic workforce. Oh, those uneducated conservatives! We read about Edsall's piece in a column by his Washington Post colleague Robert Samuelson, washingtonpost.com who adds, as an example of liberal bias, the appointment of the New York Times' liberal former editorial-page editor as executive editor--the man in charge of the Times' news pages: Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views? And because they are so public, Raines's positions compromise the Times' ability to act and appear fair-minded. Many critics already believe that the news columns of the Times are animated--and distorted--by the same values as its editorials. Making the chief of the editorial page the chief of the news columns will not quiet those suspicions. . . . Even more revealing has been the press coverage. Since Raines's appointment was announced in May, there has been almost no criticism of possible conflicts. (I examined stories in the Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair and in the forthcoming issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.) The silence suggests that the press tolerates conflicts as long as they conform to its dominant--mainly liberal--beliefs.