That the mainstream media list hard to port is so obvious to anyone who doesn’t share their reference frame that it’s hardly worth mentioning — or at least it would be so if everyone on the left didn’t deny it so fatiguingly and disingenuously at every opportunity. With that in mind, here’s a refreshing post from Greg Kandra, who “worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News in both New York and Washington”.
Hardly credible, I suppose, and no doubt just a case of public disgruntlement — but I expect it will lighten our more conservative readers’ shriveled, flinty hearts nevertheless.
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If you want to make the argument that the media have a left wing bias in their coverage, this example does not support your contention.
The segment on MSNBC – which I saw – was about Romney’s clumsiness in retail politics. It showed a few clips of him being stiff and a little weird. In one of them, he either had a senior moment or he doesn’t know what a donut is. In the last clip, he tries to ingratiate himself with a local crowd in Pennsylvania by asking them if they shop at “Wawa’s.” The point, of course, is that it’s Wawa, not Wawa’s, and he looked as foolish as if he told residents of downtown Manhattan how much he likes Houston Street, but pronounced like the city in Texas.
After bungling his attempt at being a regular guy by inquiring where the local populace buys their hoagies, he then went on to marvel at Wawa’s whiz-bang technology. This was omitted from the MSNBC segment for the simple reason that it had nothing to do with its topic, which was Romney’s clumsiness on the stump and not his views on how government should operate more like a convenience store. How this segment on Rachel Maddow – which incidentally is an advocacy show, and makes no pretense of being unbiased or objective – became proof positive of a perceived liberal bias is an absurdity too gross to insist upon.
If the media is biased to the left, to what do you attribute that? News people are more or less on the front lines of politics, that could make them more informed, arguably more credible politically than right-biased pet store owners, crossing guards, recording engineers. Yet you imply some kind of subversion.
If a foot soldier tells me war is hell, I tend to belive him/her.
Right, Pete, nothing to see here. We’ll move along.
Churchgoer, that’s a fair and important question.
First, let’s be clear that we are talking not about who is more or less informed, but about philosophical and ideological biases (everybody’s got ’em): opinions not about what is, but about what ought to be.
So with that in mind, I attribute the prevalence of left-wing bias among journalists and academics to the fact that there is a certain sort of intellectual whose livelihood and reputation (and happiness) depend not only on commenting on the flow of events and the evolution of culture, but in shaping and directing them as well. And those types will be disproportionately drawn to journalism and the media, because those fields offer a way to Make A Difference. (And as for the academic intelligentsia, they of course are the ones who will be called upon to design the new, improved world, so their own relevance and importance is enhanced if the world constantly needs improvement by redesign — and greatly diminished if it doesn’t.) Conservatives, because it is in their nature to greet social innovation with skepticism, are going to be less interested in constantly redesigning the world, and so less in need of soapboxes — except as reactionaries.
Also there is something about being In the Thick Of Things, where Big Things Are Happening and News is Being Made, that tends to make one imagine that one Knows Best — when in fact it is the simple necessities and obligations of making ends meet from day to day that really make the world go round. Most people are happiest when the ground doesn’t shift under their feet too fast.
To put it another way: Theodore Dalrymple once observed that it is a “disagreeable thing” for an intelligentsia when a country is already satisfactory in its political and social arrangements; it deprives the intelligentsia of a providential role.
Glad you agree.
Also, it’s prevalence, not prevalance.
“Prevalence”. Of course. Corrected.
Not sure what you think I agree with, though: you’d be able to recognize breezy sarcasm at this point, I should have thought. At any rate I emphatically disagree, as you already know, with your oft-stated opinion that there is effectively no left-wing bias in the major media.
Anyway, the piece I linked to was based on Mr. Kandra’s 26 years in the trenches; I think we can be confident that his opinion wasn’t formed ex nihilo on the basis of the Wawa story.
Well, I thought that perhaps you retained your belief in an all-pervasive media bias, but recognized that the clip of Romney acting like a doofus does not provide support for this assertion.
You could have reached this conclusion by noting that Romney’s remarks about putative government inefficiency had nothing to do with the subject of the MSNBC segment, or that nothing he said was distorted a la Breitbart (as, for example, the Romney campaign ad which showed an Obama speech where he apparently said that he didn’t want to talk about the economy, while the fact that he was paraphrasing John McCain was omitted).
Or perhaps you agreed that using MSNBC as proof of left wing media bias is as silly as positing a right wing media bias and using National Review as your justification.
Or maybe you recognized that the media are equal opportunity manglers, as when Obama commented that the private economy was doing fine, relative to the public sector, which was taken out of context by everyone from the New York Times to your local Penny Shopper to mean that he really thinks that everything is A-OK. Let’s ignore that the narrower context was his comparison of a public sector which is gaining jobs to a private sector which is losing them, or the larger context of the speech he was giving, whose topic was the necessity of passing legislation to spur job growth. But hey: if you can take six words out of context and get a story from it, it’s fair game. What-ever.
See, there are many ways in which you could have agreed with my eminently reasonable post, while retaining the conservative dogma that it is an a priori truth that the media are infested with pantywaist leftists who violate the truth on a daily basis to effect their partisan agenda. So forgive me if I thought that you were on the path to enlightenment – I must have been misinformed.
It’s simple enough: the media are run by human beings, not Vulcans. If a preponderance of those in charge have a prevailing sympathy for one political philosophy and a corresponding antipathy toward its opponents, it would be naive and unreasonable to imagine that these sympathies and antipathies never influence their coverage of events, or that the “mangling” you refer to occurs with anything resembling a random distribution as regards political polarity.
(And just as an aside, Obama’s “the private sector’s doing just fine” was perfectly fair game in any context. It was a stupendously idiotic thing to say in a closely covered political campaign at a time of high unemployment, and he went ahead and followed it up by calling for expansion of the size of the public sector.)
Just to be clear: it isn’t an a priori truth that “the media are infested with pantywaist leftists who violate the truth on a daily basis to effect their partisan agenda”. It is merely a contingent truth — though not a surprising one, for the reasons I outlined above. And to be fair, media bias isn’t about “violating the truth” — it is more about things like selective editing, choosing what and what not to report, mentioning the party affiliation of Republican politicians when they get into trouble but not when Democrats do, using affective descriptions that go beyond the facts of what is being reported, and so on.
While I will readily concede that most journalists probably have a leftist tilt, the majority of them are so cowed and timid that they bend over backwards to go the other way in their actual reporting. There is a phony equivalence where all things are assumed to be equal, and a false modesty which prevents reporters from calling things as they are.
For example, Romney repeatedly says things in his stump speech which are demonstrably false and pointed out to be so, yet he continues to repeat them day after day. Most people call that lying. However, you will never see the mainstream media report that “Romney lied again today.”
While I could come up with plenty of examples of media bias – and so can you – this is a fool’s errand, as these things are non-quantifiable and eye-of-the-beholder.
Your assertion that the party affiliation of Democrats who get into trouble is not revealed is demonstrably false. Is there anyone in the country who thinks that Anthony Weiner, William Jefferson, or Charlie Rangel are Republicans?
Really? (You must have read that in the Times.) I have a bridge you might be interested in.
No, that sort of thing happens all the time, and has been pointed out often by the loyal opposition. (Obviously when Charlie Rangel is up on Congressional charges or Anthony Weiner junk-tweets to the nation, there’s no chance of his party affiliation slipping under the radar.)
Oh, and as for truthiness at the podium, it happens that Victor Davis Hanson issued a zingy little item on the subject just today.
(Not that I would ever stoop to anything as low as a tu quoque argument, of course; I just thought readers might enjoy Hanson’s piece.)
A. Weiner junk-tweeted and I was a recipient?
Lawdy. Whoever made available that ‘Exclusive Filter’ option deserves a Nobel. Pulitzer in this context maybe.
At least everyone is in agreement on that one.