The Myth of Our "Liberal" Media
Whoever has made observation on the characters of nations will find it generally true that the manners of a nation, or of a party, can be better ascertained from the character of its press than from any other public circumstance.
-Thomas Paine
Once again, I tripped over a tired trope tossed like a caltrop on an online discussion, the myth that our main news reports are "liberal," aka that they lean to the political left. To be fair, this particular discussor provided a link to a study. All well and good.
Wellness and goodness dries right up, though, once you actually read the darned thing. The article, a review of a book from in 2006, notes that "40% of journalists described themselves as being on the left side of the political spectrum (31% said they were “a little to the left” and 9% “pretty far to the left”)." Which, as the review notes, makes reporters "still considerably more liberal than the general public." Ah, but that isn't the whole story:
But that number was down notably, seven percentage points from 1992, when 47% said they leaned leftward.
The percentage of “middle of the roaders” moved up slightly to 33% in 2002 from 30% in 1992. And the number of journalists identifying themselves leaning toward the political right also inched up to 25% from 22% a decade earlier (20% “a little to the right” and 5% “pretty far to the right”).
So one cannot simply say that "the press is liberal," since they are increasingly less liberal than they once were. If this latest trend continues, press reporters might become just like the rest of society.
Still, none of this matters one whit. It matters not where the writer of any given piece of reporting describes him or herself when the only way to get published/on air is to follow the political path blazed by the editor, which is dictated by the publisher, which in turn is determined ultimately by the owner. This leads to yet another article from Pew, concerning censorship. Another poll reveals:
Nearly eight-in-ten (77%) say stories that are seen as important but dull are often (27%) or sometimes avoided (50%). A majority (52%) also says that overly complex stories are at least sometimes ignored. Fewer but still significant percentages report that such stories are not pursued because they conflict with organizational interests. More than one-third (35%) say news that would hurt the financial interests of a news organization often or sometimes goes unreported, while slightly fewer (29%) say the same about stories that could adversely affect advertisers.
(I underlined and emboldened like a fiend!)
And let's be blunt; these are not the only categories asked about in the poll. "Perhaps surprisingly, peer pressure - fear of embarrassment or potential career damage - is mentioned by about half of all journalists as a factor for avoiding newsworthy stories." Losing one's job, after all, would not help one continue as a journalist.
Here's the dirty secret of the "liberal"reporting accusation: it works whether or not it's true.
Let's say you were very conservative. By framing examples of media reporting that argues or merely presents evidence against your ideology as "liberal," you put the accused on the defensive. If enough people accept your argument of liberalism, the reporters start to question if they are indeed liberal in reporting even when they demonstrably are not. When someone shouts "Fire!", everyone starts sniffing for smoke. Eric Alterman called it "working the refs," a reference to a practice in sports where the coaches will accuse the referees of bad call bias against his team; even the accusation of such bias tends to cause refs to question their future calls.
In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a four-fold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But the evidence, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for these view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."
The right is working the refs.
(Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, Basic Books, 2003, p. 12-13, I had to underline the kicker.)
Meaning as the media gets progressively less, well, progressive, the accusation of media progressivism gets more pronounced. Which, in turn, drives progressives out of media, or at least silences their better natures. This silencing is nothing new.
And every time layoffs are in the works for media, those reporters that are heeding the call for a "balance" to "liberal" ideas are the last to go. This sends an important message for those reporters left; conform to the editorial position, or out you go.
Which is by no means an unusual situation for a journalist.
Remember Upton Sinclair? I've mentioned him once or twice. Between his best known book The Jungle and his 1934 run for Governor of California I mentioned in the other posts, he wrote a book called The Brass Check, which you can find in PDF form. (All future referenced page numbers are to this PDF edition.) This book distills all the pressures on journalists into a single, disturbing image, one conveyed by someone running for political office:
The orator described the system of prostitution, which was paying its millions every year to the police of the city. He pictured a room in which women displayed their persons, and men walked up and down and inspected them, selecting one as they would select an animal at a fair. The man paid his three dollars, or his five dollars, to a cashier at the window, and received a brass check; then he went upstairs, and paid this check to the woman upon receipt of her favors. And suddenly the orator put his hand into his pocket and drew forth the bit of metal. "Behold!" he cried. "The price of a woman's shame!"
(Sinclair, The Brass Check, p. 8.)
Sinclair learned "that there is more than one kind of parasite feeding on human weakness, there is more than one kind of prostitution which may be symbolized by the BRASS CHECK." (Sinclair, ibid, p. 9.) His book focuses on the prostitution of news reporters. Though the range of reporters is vast, in his experience reporters must be ever willing to either keep the job and stifle the impulse to "tell the truth," or quit and leave for an uncertain economic future. As Sinclair quotes Ralph Bayes, ". . . we journalists must prostitute our own minds and bodies in answer to the call of that inexorable tyrant, our collective belly." (Sinclair, ibid, p. 382.) Another journalist, John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, making a speech to his fellow editors, is more blunt: "We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." (Sinclair, ibid, p. 367.)
Which leads to the journalist's dilemma:
[As] a rule the professional journalist pockets his Brass Check, and delivers the goods to his master in the silence and secrecy of the journalistic brothel. A professional journalist may be defined as a man who holds himself ready at a day's notice to adjust his opinions to the pocket-book of a new owner.
(Sinclair, ibid, pp. 221-222.)
Fun fact! The Internet did not in any way destroy newspaper reporting, let alone newspapers! The damage has been a much longer time in coming, and it came from a less likely source:
By the logic of the conventional wisdom, if the Internet had never come along and our economy was flush, newspapers and commercial journalism would be doing just fine, thank you. In fact, the evidence is very much to the contrary. Newspapers and much of commercial journalism have been in a pronounced and growing crisis for at least two decades. It is only because the crisis was not apparent in corporate profits that it received inadequate attention. What the Internet and the economic downturn have done is simply make the final push against an already tottering giant.
(Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again, First Nation Books, 2010, p. 30, I bolded up.)
The "pronounced and growing crisis" came from a pursuit of profits over quality, the same forces that squelched the honest reporters in Sinclair's 1920! Sinclair notes with distress the small, honest papers that were bullied into closing or merging with more powerful monied interests. Each time that happened, there was one less outlet for the monied interests to worry about, and so the sham reporting they printed could get even more slip-shod with the facts. This increasing monopoly got so bad few people even bothered with newspapers as anything but lie and innuendo machines.
The tension between commercial pressures and the public interest has been the recurring theme of the past 120 years. By the first few decades of the 20th century, it generated a major crisis in the commercial newspaper system. The profit motive often trumped notions of newspapers as public servants, and sensationalism-publishing whatever generates the most profit-became commonplace. Semimonopolistic ownership of newspapers-initially in smaller communities, and eventually everywhere-often with conservative pro-business politics, left many Americans feeling powerless to raise and alternative voice, except on the distant margins.
(McChesney & Nichols, ibid, pp. 138-139.)
The decline from the early century continued:
Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-sized American city in the late 1960s and 1970s, and you will be surprised by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which "outsiders"-civil-rights activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader-ended up on the front page. Newspapers often actually exposed readers to new ideas, different perspectives and real possibilities-as opposed to weather reports, celebrity gossip, syndicated fare and exercise tips. By the early 1990s-before the Internet was a factor-the same newspaper likely would appear lifeless by comparison.
What happened? The big change came in the late 1970s and 1980s, when large corporate chains accelerated the long-term trend to gobble up daily newspapers. Family owners sold for a variety of reasons and corporations came in to milk the cash cow. The corporations paid top dollar to get these profit machines, and they were dedicated to maximizing their return. They quickly determined that one way to increase profits even more was to slice into the editorial budget; in a monopoly there is little pressure to do otherwise. . . .
(McChesney & Nichols, ibid, p. 33, me boldly going.)
Molly Ivins put it best: newspapers aren't dying but committing suicide.
"What really pisses me off," she told the journal of the newspaper industry, Editor & Publisher, is "this most remarkable business plan: Newspaper owners look at one another and say, 'Our rate of return is slipping a bit; let's solve that problem by making our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.'"
That's one of the reasons people read more news online; the print and telly stuff has completely gone to the dogs in terms of accuracy or balance, choosing instead to be cheerleaders to the economic team signing the reporters' paychecks. By the time the Internet supposedly "killed" the papers, they weren't worth reading anyway.
And what few reporters who still report are careful to cover their progressive tendencies well enough that they cannot be detected by even the closest of readings. Remember, to judge whether a product is a certain way, one focuses on that product, not the worker who assembled it. Reporting must be judged on its own, not based on the false premise that it must somehow reflect the reporter who wrote it.
As a result we in the States have a national media, its editorial positions dictated by the concerns of owners and funders; its reporters often burying their most sacred principals in order to keep working; and an economic/political machine spewing concocted sturm und drang to help keep those progressive principals good and buried. In the process those reporters scratch out a living by hewing to one of Sinclair's more salient quotes:
-Thomas Paine
Once again, I tripped over a tired trope tossed like a caltrop on an online discussion, the myth that our main news reports are "liberal," aka that they lean to the political left. To be fair, this particular discussor provided a link to a study. All well and good.
Wellness and goodness dries right up, though, once you actually read the darned thing. The article, a review of a book from in 2006, notes that "40% of journalists described themselves as being on the left side of the political spectrum (31% said they were “a little to the left” and 9% “pretty far to the left”)." Which, as the review notes, makes reporters "still considerably more liberal than the general public." Ah, but that isn't the whole story:
But that number was down notably, seven percentage points from 1992, when 47% said they leaned leftward.
The percentage of “middle of the roaders” moved up slightly to 33% in 2002 from 30% in 1992. And the number of journalists identifying themselves leaning toward the political right also inched up to 25% from 22% a decade earlier (20% “a little to the right” and 5% “pretty far to the right”).
So one cannot simply say that "the press is liberal," since they are increasingly less liberal than they once were. If this latest trend continues, press reporters might become just like the rest of society.
Still, none of this matters one whit. It matters not where the writer of any given piece of reporting describes him or herself when the only way to get published/on air is to follow the political path blazed by the editor, which is dictated by the publisher, which in turn is determined ultimately by the owner. This leads to yet another article from Pew, concerning censorship. Another poll reveals:
Nearly eight-in-ten (77%) say stories that are seen as important but dull are often (27%) or sometimes avoided (50%). A majority (52%) also says that overly complex stories are at least sometimes ignored. Fewer but still significant percentages report that such stories are not pursued because they conflict with organizational interests. More than one-third (35%) say news that would hurt the financial interests of a news organization often or sometimes goes unreported, while slightly fewer (29%) say the same about stories that could adversely affect advertisers.
(I underlined and emboldened like a fiend!)
And let's be blunt; these are not the only categories asked about in the poll. "Perhaps surprisingly, peer pressure - fear of embarrassment or potential career damage - is mentioned by about half of all journalists as a factor for avoiding newsworthy stories." Losing one's job, after all, would not help one continue as a journalist.
Here's the dirty secret of the "liberal"reporting accusation: it works whether or not it's true.
Let's say you were very conservative. By framing examples of media reporting that argues or merely presents evidence against your ideology as "liberal," you put the accused on the defensive. If enough people accept your argument of liberalism, the reporters start to question if they are indeed liberal in reporting even when they demonstrably are not. When someone shouts "Fire!", everyone starts sniffing for smoke. Eric Alterman called it "working the refs," a reference to a practice in sports where the coaches will accuse the referees of bad call bias against his team; even the accusation of such bias tends to cause refs to question their future calls.
In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a four-fold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But the evidence, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for these view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."
The right is working the refs.
(Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, Basic Books, 2003, p. 12-13, I had to underline the kicker.)
Meaning as the media gets progressively less, well, progressive, the accusation of media progressivism gets more pronounced. Which, in turn, drives progressives out of media, or at least silences their better natures. This silencing is nothing new.
And every time layoffs are in the works for media, those reporters that are heeding the call for a "balance" to "liberal" ideas are the last to go. This sends an important message for those reporters left; conform to the editorial position, or out you go.
Which is by no means an unusual situation for a journalist.
Remember Upton Sinclair? I've mentioned him once or twice. Between his best known book The Jungle and his 1934 run for Governor of California I mentioned in the other posts, he wrote a book called The Brass Check, which you can find in PDF form. (All future referenced page numbers are to this PDF edition.) This book distills all the pressures on journalists into a single, disturbing image, one conveyed by someone running for political office:
The orator described the system of prostitution, which was paying its millions every year to the police of the city. He pictured a room in which women displayed their persons, and men walked up and down and inspected them, selecting one as they would select an animal at a fair. The man paid his three dollars, or his five dollars, to a cashier at the window, and received a brass check; then he went upstairs, and paid this check to the woman upon receipt of her favors. And suddenly the orator put his hand into his pocket and drew forth the bit of metal. "Behold!" he cried. "The price of a woman's shame!"
(Sinclair, The Brass Check, p. 8.)
Sinclair learned "that there is more than one kind of parasite feeding on human weakness, there is more than one kind of prostitution which may be symbolized by the BRASS CHECK." (Sinclair, ibid, p. 9.) His book focuses on the prostitution of news reporters. Though the range of reporters is vast, in his experience reporters must be ever willing to either keep the job and stifle the impulse to "tell the truth," or quit and leave for an uncertain economic future. As Sinclair quotes Ralph Bayes, ". . . we journalists must prostitute our own minds and bodies in answer to the call of that inexorable tyrant, our collective belly." (Sinclair, ibid, p. 382.) Another journalist, John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, making a speech to his fellow editors, is more blunt: "We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." (Sinclair, ibid, p. 367.)
Which leads to the journalist's dilemma:
[As] a rule the professional journalist pockets his Brass Check, and delivers the goods to his master in the silence and secrecy of the journalistic brothel. A professional journalist may be defined as a man who holds himself ready at a day's notice to adjust his opinions to the pocket-book of a new owner.
(Sinclair, ibid, pp. 221-222.)
Fun fact! The Internet did not in any way destroy newspaper reporting, let alone newspapers! The damage has been a much longer time in coming, and it came from a less likely source:
By the logic of the conventional wisdom, if the Internet had never come along and our economy was flush, newspapers and commercial journalism would be doing just fine, thank you. In fact, the evidence is very much to the contrary. Newspapers and much of commercial journalism have been in a pronounced and growing crisis for at least two decades. It is only because the crisis was not apparent in corporate profits that it received inadequate attention. What the Internet and the economic downturn have done is simply make the final push against an already tottering giant.
(Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again, First Nation Books, 2010, p. 30, I bolded up.)
The "pronounced and growing crisis" came from a pursuit of profits over quality, the same forces that squelched the honest reporters in Sinclair's 1920! Sinclair notes with distress the small, honest papers that were bullied into closing or merging with more powerful monied interests. Each time that happened, there was one less outlet for the monied interests to worry about, and so the sham reporting they printed could get even more slip-shod with the facts. This increasing monopoly got so bad few people even bothered with newspapers as anything but lie and innuendo machines.
The tension between commercial pressures and the public interest has been the recurring theme of the past 120 years. By the first few decades of the 20th century, it generated a major crisis in the commercial newspaper system. The profit motive often trumped notions of newspapers as public servants, and sensationalism-publishing whatever generates the most profit-became commonplace. Semimonopolistic ownership of newspapers-initially in smaller communities, and eventually everywhere-often with conservative pro-business politics, left many Americans feeling powerless to raise and alternative voice, except on the distant margins.
(McChesney & Nichols, ibid, pp. 138-139.)
The decline from the early century continued:
Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-sized American city in the late 1960s and 1970s, and you will be surprised by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which "outsiders"-civil-rights activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader-ended up on the front page. Newspapers often actually exposed readers to new ideas, different perspectives and real possibilities-as opposed to weather reports, celebrity gossip, syndicated fare and exercise tips. By the early 1990s-before the Internet was a factor-the same newspaper likely would appear lifeless by comparison.
What happened? The big change came in the late 1970s and 1980s, when large corporate chains accelerated the long-term trend to gobble up daily newspapers. Family owners sold for a variety of reasons and corporations came in to milk the cash cow. The corporations paid top dollar to get these profit machines, and they were dedicated to maximizing their return. They quickly determined that one way to increase profits even more was to slice into the editorial budget; in a monopoly there is little pressure to do otherwise. . . .
(McChesney & Nichols, ibid, p. 33, me boldly going.)
Molly Ivins put it best: newspapers aren't dying but committing suicide.
"What really pisses me off," she told the journal of the newspaper industry, Editor & Publisher, is "this most remarkable business plan: Newspaper owners look at one another and say, 'Our rate of return is slipping a bit; let's solve that problem by making our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.'"
That's one of the reasons people read more news online; the print and telly stuff has completely gone to the dogs in terms of accuracy or balance, choosing instead to be cheerleaders to the economic team signing the reporters' paychecks. By the time the Internet supposedly "killed" the papers, they weren't worth reading anyway.
And what few reporters who still report are careful to cover their progressive tendencies well enough that they cannot be detected by even the closest of readings. Remember, to judge whether a product is a certain way, one focuses on that product, not the worker who assembled it. Reporting must be judged on its own, not based on the false premise that it must somehow reflect the reporter who wrote it.
As a result we in the States have a national media, its editorial positions dictated by the concerns of owners and funders; its reporters often burying their most sacred principals in order to keep working; and an economic/political machine spewing concocted sturm und drang to help keep those progressive principals good and buried. In the process those reporters scratch out a living by hewing to one of Sinclair's more salient quotes: