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

To: Mr. Palau who wrote (217780)	1/13/2002 1:07:48 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Left, left, left: media bias on the march The Sunday Times (U.K.) \| 01/13/2002 \| Andrew Sullivan sunday-times.co.uk The American press should own up to its political prejudices. On the next page, The New York Observer pays tribute to his exceptional war commentary. One evening a few years ago an American network television reporter, Bernard Goldberg, came across a story by another journalist on his news show. It was purportedly about the then presidential candidate Steve Forbes’s proposal for a flat tax, an issue that temporarily propelled the multi-millionaire to the front ranks of Republican contenders. The CBS segment on the evening news began: “Steve Forbes pitches his flat-tax scheme as an economic elixir, good for everything that ails us.” Then three economists were interviewed to discuss its merits. All three said it was a terrible idea. Then, to jazz up the piece, the reporter went into a David Letterman riff: “Forbes’s Number One wackiest flat-tax promise . . .” was that it would give parents “more time to spend with their children and with each other”. The report ended with the words: “The fact remains: the flat tax is a giant, untested theory. One economist suggested, before we put it in, we should test it out someplace — like Albania.” Now this was surely an entertaining way to present what might have seemed like a dry topic. But nobody in their right mind would describe such a setup as “objective” or “unbiased”. The flat tax is controversial but it has plenty of serious intellectual supporters, garnered support in the mid-1990s and still remains a favourite for neo-classical economists. But when the shocked Goldberg complained about this bias, and when he wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal complaining about it, you’d have thought all hell had broken loose. The politest comment from the man’s colleagues at CBS about the very idea that there might be liberal bias at the network went: “It’s such a wacky charge, and a weird way to go about it . . . I don’t know what Bernie was driving at. It just sounds bizarre.” Dan Rather, the chief anchorman for CBS News, who has hosted fundraisers for the Democratic party, opined: “It’s one of the great political myths, about press bias. Most reporters don’t know whether they’re Republican or Democrat.” Goldberg’s career flatlined soon after his outburst. Although many colleagues told him that his complaint of unthinking media liberal bias was true, few said so publicly. This week marks Goldberg’s last laugh. His book recounting his experience at CBS news is top of the New York Times bestseller list. This “wacky” idea, this ludicrous suggestion that the media are biased and most reporters are left liberals is selling books by the hundreds of thousands. But the head of CBS said last week that he wouldn’t even read the book. It seems that the only people who don’t acknowledge the mainstream media tilt to the left in America are the people in the media themselves. I’ve had frustrating conversations with many friends in the business who genuinely think they are neutral. But when the independent Freedom Forum foundation sent out a questionnaire to 139 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional reporters, it found that 89% of journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 compared with 43% of the population. Seven per cent voted for President George H W Bush in 1992. In party affiliation, Democrats beat Republicans by more than 12-1. Now would any sane person believe this doesn’t affect not just how issues are covered but which are chosen? When the odds are stacked that significantly in favour of one kind of politics, it’s impossible for a certain slant not to seep through. Ask yourself: how many producers for news programmes on Radio 4 voted Tory in the last election? How many news reporters for Channel 4 News are members of the Conservative party? During the early stages of the Afghan war, the mainstream media didn’t actually oppose the war, but they greeted every stage with warnings of “quagmire”, of the “brutal Afghan winter”, of the tenaciousness of the Taliban, and on and on. Did they base this on their knowledge? Of course not. They were soon revealed to be talking nonsense. So what persuaded them to run this relentlessly negative coverage? Could it be that many of them are middle-aged liberal boomers who came of age during the Vietnam war? Could it be that they were . . . biased? Goldberg also notes tiny, revealing details. He shows, for example, how anyone right of centre is routinely introduced on radio or television as a “conservative” writer, or “right-wing” activist, but leftwingers and liberals are referred to as writers, activists or professors. Here’s a classic from CBS on sexual harassment. “We’re going to ask noted law professor Catharine MacKinnon and conservative spokeswoman Phyllis Shlafly . . .” Catharine MacKinnon is about as a radical a leftist as you can find. She has argued that all sexual intercourse is a form of rape. But would the BBC or CBS dream of introducing her as “left-wing law professor Catharine MacKinnon”? If they did, she’d walk out of the studio. If you do a search for the terms “right-wing” and “left-wing” as adjectives, you’ll find that every mainstream media organ in the United States is jam-packed with the former and almost devoid of the latter. Yes, both views are presented. But one view is marginalised before it has even been expressed. None of this is the end of the world, of course. We all have biases. The paper you are reading is broadly right-of-centre. So am I. The BBC is left-of-centre. The difference is only that I’ll admit it and the BBC won’t. The same goes for television.Take Fox News. It leans right while CNN is a liberal news channel. The New York Times, for its part, is only marginally less tilted to the left than The Guardian, but it, too, resists admitting it. What Goldberg is trying to say is that everyone else in the country has noticed that these emperors of alleged objectivity have no clothes. And only those elite armies of condescension keep marching on, their privates swinging in the breeze.