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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (2989)	3/22/2002 8:35:04 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 7720

The stern Calvinists can take him, please.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (2989)	3/26/2002 10:02:55 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

Tucson, Arizona Tuesday, 26 March 2002 OK, the media are biased: So what? By Tom Teepen The old charge of media bias is enjoying a new vogue. Two books charging a liberal lean have been cavorting on the New York Times Best Seller list for weeks. Their popularity has whipped talk-radio spielers, for whom the charge is meat and potatoes anyway, into a frenzy of gleeful I-told-you-sos. The books support their charge in no small part by anecdotes, but comparable collections of anecdotes could be assembled, if anyone wanted to bother, to prove the contrary. To the degree they are liberal, most media are liberal only situationally, rather than ideologically. That is, if they seem to care about, oh, poverty or our widening income disparities or shortfalls in health care delivery, they fit the liberal stereotype. But in covering such matters at all, and covering them out of an unspoken but embedded belief that a good, decent, equitably functioning society actually matters, they are profoundly conservative. By current definitions, that sort of understanding has no place. Conservative activists - the real ultras anyway - have spent years torquing the language to the right. They have finally managed to so twist traditional definitions that any utterance short of overtly conservative is now demonized as liberal. In our hyperventilating, there is no longer space for matters of broad concern, amenable to simple problem-solving. Raise an inherently nonideological worry - urban sprawl, say - and the next thing you know it is caught up in the culture war, another item snatched off the worktable and carried away to the land of endless squabbles, where issues never die and nothing ever gets fixed. One favored example of liberal bias is the excited reporting a couple of years ago of a seeming rash of arsons at black churches. Better reporting eventually figured out that black churches were burning at a perfectly ordinary rate, and so were white ones. Was it liberal bias that sent the media on its hysterical toot? Well, pretty much the same phenomenon cropped up last summer, with week after week of shark-attack stories. When someone finally looked up the numbers, it turned out the attacks were running a little behind the average. Perhaps it is one of the quirks of liberals to have it in for sharks, but a better explanation is that both embarrassing excesses occurred in slow news times. The sharks loomed just as Gary Condit had been wrung dry. Except for the pamphleteers and professional haranguers, the working premise of the public seems to be that, yep, the media are biased and so what? With a little gratifying grumping now and then, most don't make a big deal out of it. Conservatives think the media are liberal. Liberals think the media are conservative. Surprise. Not that the campaign - and it is just that - to intimidate the media with the liberal-bias charge hasn't paid off. You have to suspect, for instance, that the years of being accused of bias, and the fear of seeming to confirm it, were implicated in the appalling complicity of most media last year in not just reporting but supporting the smear that Al Gore is a congenital liar. When I was growing up, the Cincinnati newspapers were known in our house as "those lying Republican papers." (There was usually another adjective in front of all that.) My father knew they were up to journalistic no good. And just to be sure, he never missed an edition. * Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.