On Media Bias

Hector Diego asked me to take a moment and put together an overview of how bias works in the media. Sadly, I don't have time to break off the 5,000 word tirade I have in me on this subject, but I can give you a very shallow take on the media and where it stands at present.

The media is not a monolith. What we refer to as the mainstream media consists of several large chunks. Cable news, network news, internet news outlets, wire services, blogs, and talk radio all have their own internal dynamics that result in varying degrees of bias and distortion. When all of it is considered in total, in my opinion, I would say that the media doesn't really have a deliberate bias. There are, however, enough flaws, such as naked conflicts of interest, that add up to create what amounts to a conservative advantage. Much of that is accidental, but some of it is quite intentional.

The repeated mantra of talk hosts like Limbaugh and Hannity that the media has a liberal bias is based on the situation that existed in the late 1960s. The media began taking sides in some very big issues. Perhaps most famously Walter Cronkite declared the war in Vietnam un-winnable. But the argument that the media is liberal has been laughable for well over a decade.

Now, many bias charges stem from the reporting of a fact that one side simply does not want to hear. Al Gore's phrase "An Inconvenient truth" drives a lot of cries of bias. Making matters worse, politicians have gradually become more and more dependent on the technique of blaming the media for stories that just don't make them look good. Many a politician has staved off scandal by screaming persecution and pointing their finger at the media.

Unfortunately, the situation is further clouded by the fact that journalists are human beings. As such, they behave according to a cost-benefit analysis. Since a lot of them work for companies that hold military contracts or other massive business interests, their objectivity in certain matters becomes questionable very quickly. Journalists don't have to be very smart to know that the information they choose to give out can really hurt their career. You don't see too many damaging stories about the pharmaceutical industry, but you certainly see a lot of advertising. Is that ad revenue really about advertising a pill for an ailment that didn't exist three years ago, or is it an excuse to flood the networks with money they wouldn't dare jeopardize with some investigative reporting?

Luckily, this is a capitalist country last time I checked, and if a liberal can survive long enough to get a TV show and if that TV show survives long enough to get good ratings, then the parent company--even if it is owned by a weapons contractor--has to let that show stay on the air. That is the story of Keith Olbermann. The only source of nakedly biased coverage in favor of liberals on a cable news station (until Olbermann flexed enough muscle to add The Rachel Maddow Show to his network).

But remember, Maddow and Olbermann did not set out to do shows like these. When they cut their teeth as journalists, they intended to be journalists. The current landscape was created by the advent of Fox News. The combination of a thinly veiled Republican propaganda arm spewing damaging and dishonest, yet effective, attacks against prominent Democrats and liberals and the hyper-patriotism of the post-9/11 hangover created a chilling effect on almost all dissenting opinions for years. If CNN had a liberal on the air, they would book three conservatives to balance it. This kind of over compensation allowed Rovian lies to sustain themselves long enough to get Bush enough votes to get back into the White House.

But as this fear bubble abates, we're settling back into a media that tends to slant right primarily because of corporate consolidation rather than brilliant White House manipulation or any real conservative fervor in the country. One structural barrier remains that increased competition and less corporate influence emanating from interlocking boards of directors would probably alleviate, and that is the fallacy of false equivalency. This is the binary trap that leads reporters to tell "both sides of the story" as if all stories have two sides.

This post at TPM does a great job at looking at the problem of false equivalency in the coverage of the election.