Q: Is the media biased? You’ve written about this before and said that reporting in the United States always has been biased.
A: I believe that’s true. One has only to look closely at the media during the time of Lincoln. Modern scholars know that newspaper reports of, say, the Lincoln Douglas debates were available through a stenographic press adept in shorthand reporting. And they also know that the reports were, shall we say, glossed by papers sympathetic to either Lincoln or Douglas. The reports of Lincoln’s remarks were touched up by the Lincoln media, while the reports of Douglas’ remarks were left untouched. And the same was true of the Douglas media. So, searching for what we might call the real Lincoln speeches, modern scholars retrieve them from the media that supported Douglas, because these remarks were unredacted. And the same would of course be true on the other side of the political divide. The notion than media reporting on politics can be unbiased is a relatively new fable.
Q: So, then bias in inherent -- or systemic, to put it in modern terms -- in all reporting. That is your view?
A: Your formulation is a little overstated, but yes. There is bias in reporting ...
Q: … overcome though by modern journalistic practices.
A: Such as what?
Q: Well, reporters are still answerable to editors. And presumably these editors can view reports objectively, weeding out obvious bias.
A: Editing of that kind has been on the mortuary slab for a long while. In the absence of watchful editors stamping out bias in news reports, political journalists self-edit. Recent polls suggest that the anti-bias filtration system, if it ever existed, has all but disappeared. Almost every non-tendentious poll relating to bias in reporting indicates that the vast majority of reporters in the United States are left of center politically. Editors too. Axios , in a recent July 2020 report, cites a Knight Foundation and Gallup study showing that “73% of Americans see bias in news reporting as ‘a major problem.’” This is not a fringe group
Q: Assuming the media is indisputably biased, listing to the left of center, what can be done about it? In one of your pieces, you mocked the notion of objectivity as a corrective for bias in reporting. An editorial page editor you believed was biased told you that bias did not matter because his editorial page staff was objective, and you replied scornfully that what was needed at his paper wasa handful of biased and objective editorial page members who were right of center, to which he said, “Over my dead body,” proving what?
A: It showed he was resolute in defending his bias, his political preferences, which placed him in the camp of the saints, for which I congratulated him. The saintly camp, by the way, knows how to bar heterodox writers; you simply refuse to print them. In 2020, all the political saints in Connecticut are Democrats. The real problem is that there is little balance in media bias. And the imbalance is adversely affecting the principal mission of journalism.
Q: Which is what?
A: To “say the truth and shame the devil,” Cardinal John Henry Newman’s formulation. In a media that has abandoned its principal mission – to rightly inform the public – the more you read, the less you will know. This is a problem not exclusive to partisan political reporting. Moderns who have come of age in a time of extreme partisanship, both in politics and in political reporting, know partisan reporting when they see it, even though they may not be able to describe in precise terms why they know what they know. Increasingly, an attentive public has come to mistrust reporting as such, and that is why 73% of Americans see bias in news reporting as a major problem. How many editors of major newspapers, do you suppose, would regard bias in their paper’s reports as a major problem? Not 73% surely. They would deny the bias, or retreat behind an opaque shield of objectivity.
Q: To be fair…
A: Like love, fairness is in the eye of the beholder…
Q: … to be fair, the Axios report notes “Views on media bias, like most issues, cut along partisan lines. 71% of Republicans indicated they have a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion of the news media, compared to 22% of Democrats and 52% of independents.”
A: Those figures are not at all surprising. If media bias favors the political left, one supposes that the left will be comfortable with the bias, not so the right. Partisanship is a problem only in the absence of a balance in partisanship. During Lincoln’s day, bias in the media was fairly shared between the Lincoln and the Douglas press, and the media of the day was aggressively partisan. There were Republican and Democrat papers, all fishing for voters. In our time, the claim of objectivity is a mask. I do not think there are in Connecticut’s media a great number of reporters who will plausibly claim to be objectively Republican.
Q: … or, to be fair, Democrat. Most reporters and commentators are unaffiliateds.
A: Yes, another mask. Bill Buckley told a story of his travels in Ireland, shortly after the “troubles” there had moved into a less violent mode. Pub hopping, he was surprised that nearly every conversation he had sooner or later drifted into a religious discussion. When the name of a prominent atheist commentator popped up, Buckley affected shock: “Do you mean to say there are atheist writers – in Ireland?’ he asked. “Yes, Mr. Buckley,” he was told. “But you have to understand that there are two kinds of atheists in Ireland – Catholic atheists, and Protestant atheists.”
I would say, similarly, there are two kinds of unaffiliated reporters in Connecticut: Republican unaffiliateds, and Democrat unaffiliateds -- far fewer of the former. The point to notice is that news consumers have noticed the point: “52% of independents [i.e. unaffiliateds] believe, according to the Axios report, that there is bias in news reporting. There will be a more balanced bias as the disaffected figure increases, especially among unaffiliateds. It’s going up every year. When bias is more evenly distributed, perhaps newspaper sales will increase. Purely as a practical matter, I do not think the current political arrangement in Connecticut -- in which the General Assembly, the office of Governor, all the Constitutional offices and all the members of the state’s US Congressional Delegation are controlled by Democrats – would have survived a media equally balanced between the right and left in the state. The imbalance can only be revealed when all the masks are stripped away.
Q: Ah, and here we reach the nub of the matter. Editorialists you perceive tending to the left argue that they endorse “moderate” Democrats and possibly would endorse moderate Republicans were there any in the Republican Party, but the Connecticut Republican Party has veered sharply right in recent days.
A: It’s a fiction, a smoke screen. Reality beats that argument into the ground. Exactly the opposite is true. All the moderate Republican members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation – Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons, Chris Shays – were defeated by Democrats moving swiftly from liberalism to progressivism. That movement, by the way, represents a crossing of an ideological bar; modern progressivism is NOT liberalism. U.S. Senators Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal have little in common with traditional Democrat liberals such as President John Kennedy and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
The Harford Courant, during the 2012 election for Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, endorsed Elizabeth Esty over State Senator Andrew Roraback, plainly a leftist on social issues in line with the paper's ideological predispositions. The paper endorsed Esty because its editors were comfortable with an all-Democrat delegation. In all their campaigns, Democrats style themselves economically moderate and socially liberal, neither of which is true in our day; state Democrats are far left radicals on social issue AND economic issues. They win elections because Republicans are fiscal conservatives on economic issues and mute on social issues, chased from the social – now socialistic – playing fields by aggressive progressives in the media
Presently, the masks have fallen away: Connecticut’s two
U.S. Senators are unapologetic progressives on both economic and social issues;
both are Green New Dealers, and so is the rest of the crew. Connecticut’s
government is what it is -- progressive on both economic and social issues --
because Connecticut’s media is what it is, uncritical progressive enablers.
Within the last 5 months, Coronavirus has crowned Governor Ned Lamont with
laurels once worn by Roman emperors, and the state’s look-the-other-way media
continues to deceive. Caesar ignored his Senate; Lamont has shut his down. It
would not surprise me if he were up for a Profile in Courage award dispensed by
the Kennedy Center. Weicker got one for having instituted an income tax over
the fruitless cries of Connecticut’s tax milch cows. The cry from the state’s
dominant party and the media match perfectly – more power to state government,
more debt, more taxes, more Democrats, fewer businesses, fewer Republicans,
fewer contrarian reporters, a winning ticket for everyone not yet done in by the
game.
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