If there is no liberal bias in the media...

So you could get falafel at three in the morning, and still make last call afterward. Why else would you move to NYC?

to add to what i posted the "market" is not necessarily the population of city but like all advertising based media from CNN to NYT its the marketable audience that is aimed for just as in prime time CBS-NBC-ABC is aimed (i assume) at the 25 to 45 yr old and not the total available population-J Leno seeks advertising $$ oriented towards a specific demographic as does every media FOX aims at a market audience of middle class middle aged angry white men and succeeds very well whereas CNN is rethinking its target audience (and probably losing more than gaining) and as Craven said no one is changed by the bias, university profs in the liberal arts are bound to be liberal, profs teaching in the business dept are more likely to be conservative.

Ahhhh, for the good, honest days of W.R. Hearst. "You give me the pictures, I'll give you the war."

We don't look to the military for the information on which we make decisions such as for whom to vote in our elections. On that basis, the need to expect a reasonably honest, unbiased accounting from the media is to me critical to the best functioning of our system of government.

Consider the bias Mr. Carroll points out in the article in question; do you find it acceptable? It appears the author has taken one side and relates the information based on his view that position A is valid and position B is not. Is he leaving it to the reader to decide, or attempting to push his own view on the reader?

Everyone reading this has a personal political bias. Are you personally incapable of putting that bias aside? Hopefully not. Now, assume you were going to make your living reporting the news. Wouldn't you have an obligation to try to do so?

(I realize that this is a reply to a separate post by CDK, but I would like to respond to it on it's own merits.)



It would appear to me that this memo, if credible, would indicate that the editor of the LA Times is making a concerted effort to do just that. A point of view is absolutely essential to reporting the news -- it is what dictates what one determines what is news and what isn't. A reporter and/or a section editor appear to have made a journalistic mistake, and this mistake appears to have been addressed. But to expect any journalistic publication to be utterly free of political agenda is absurd; without an agenda, it is impossible to determine whether or not knowledge of certain events will be useful to their readers. And I, for one, would rather have some idea what this agenda is -- and it should be relatively clear from a reading of the editorial page -- than go about with the illusion that there is any such thing as impartial, objective news coverage.

(Of course, a cynic might say that this memo was written for the express purpose of its being leaked to another news organization so that the LA Times could cover its ass with readers from across our relatively narrow political spectrum; you can play with that, if you like.)

Actually, I didn't want to die of boredom.

Is New York City A Liberal Market?

Here in the most liberal of cities, overseen by it's second in a row Republican Mayor, one can peruse the pages of several papers.
Let's see them lined up right to left.
The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Village Voice

I read a copy or parts of a copy of all of them over a ten day period, I read the New York Times or the Journal at lunch, and swipe a copy of the News or the Post from one of my co-workers after they have finished the sports section to read on the way home. (Post readers in NY always swear they only buy it for the Yankee/Mets/Knicks/Giants coverage. uh huh) I can usually get through them on the bus ride to the subway. I read books on the subway, mostly historically based fiction or non-fiction, because they are easier to handle on a packed train. I just finished The Piano Tuner, a first novel on a par with another first novel Cold Mountain.

I like reading all the papers because I can see how a story is handled from different points of view. The Post seems to me to view the world with an exclamation mark after every sentence!! It's a here or there sort of paper with the appropriate grouchs writing their editorials. (Bush-all good, all the time.) IE :No mention of the tax breaks stopping on the lower income levels, a subject covered by all the rest. The WSJ and the Daily News are earnest in their efforts to cover the day's events with, of course, the Journal's emphasis on business news and the New's on, well, the news. It's really a hometown newspaper and though it tries, it's international coverage (in an international city) is weak and the national news spotty. (There's apparently Washington, Miami and two other cities in the US, Chicago and LA. The rest is empty except for baseball stadiums.)
The shriekers on the left amuse me too. The Observer always seems to be looking for a fight but can't get anybody to put some gloves on, and the Village Voice (dear to my heart since I was fuzzy-chinned pinko hippie peace creep) has become thickly written in it's old age though it still breaks new ground on all subjects regarding the poor, workers, healthcare
and immigration. The New York Times is still the paper of record. It's coverage is broad, the writing concise and the editorial staff doesn't hyperventilate even when offering an opposing stance, and it has room on it's pages for Molly Ivins and William Safire, amongst the other giants.

What else? Oh, yeah, I subscribe to the New Yorker and Wired

It's a good thing I live here and have one hour commute so I can do all this reading otherwise there's no way I would dare offer opinions here on A2K where I should add, I read some of the best writing from all sides.
==
peace, still possible.

Joe

Isn't that what I said?

(god, this day is never going to end.)

Patio - Good comments. I was very impressed and heartened to see this memo. Clearly zero bias is an ideal, and not one everyone is likely to attain at all times. Still, I thought it an interesting item, especially since the editor was clearly not citing this as an aberation, but seemed to be holding it up as an example of a recurring problem. I admire him for his efforts, and hope that more laud than decry him for making the points he made.

Since it might pertain, though of course it is another isolated incident, I worked for a couple of weeks (as a temp, you unnerstan) in the office of the editor of the Chicago Tribune. Seemed a very fair sort of person. One of the running themes of the Tribune that year was uncovering some of the corruption associated with Mayor Daley (a Democrat whose brother, to my consistent dismay, was one of Gore's handlers for the 200 election), and I would consider the Trib a pretty liberal newspaper, as American newspapers go. I really do not think that impartiality and good journalism go hand in hand. Reporting itself is a fairly political process.

For what all that's worth. I still think the media as a whole is run by a morally bankrupt bunch of people for whom any sort of ideology generally takes a backseat to market share and profit. But that's just my curmudgeonly thinking. No doubt I'll lighten up as I get older.

Nope, they kill for us. I hold them to a higher standard. But I get your point, the problem is that with newfangled "embedded" reporting the military does indeed control information at some crucial times.



A perfect balance is simply not possible. It does not exist anywhere in nature.

The "biased" media we talk about are generally much more objective than we are. That there is a slight bias is inevitable.

It's, to me, comparable to the "bias" newspapers have to local events. It's news, news about people. People are biased.

They do their best and your initial post reflects that. The editor said that they live in a bubble and to try to think outside of it and be objective.

If your point is that individuals within the press have personal biases I fail to see the point. It's under the "no duh, so what" category.

What you have illustrated is an example of the media striving for objectivity against the tendency to allow personal biases to creep in.

Like I said, you can make a case for biases media much more easily than the way you are doing it here.

Also for what it's worth -- the standard journalistic practice of finding two experts to weigh in on opposite sides of an issue is hardly fair and balanced itself: I work with "scientific experts," and there are a number of issues on which I could find you two very different points of view within ten minutes. One of those points of view might be held by .01% of the researchers in this particular field and the other might be held by 80.43% (with the remainder withholding judgment until further data can be produced, or not really caring because it doesn't have anything to do with any of their own grants), but in the story it comes off as though the jury is still out. Still, though, the appearance of integrity and ethical journalism dictates that both points of view be printed.

(A hypothetical situation; I don't know anything about breast cancer v. abortion studies, and neither do the vast majority of human beings, including reporters and editors.)

scrat ....
you don't get it. look at this:

This guy is nuts. First, he says
then he says

Yeah, says who, yoyo. ???
the question for reporters is what agenda is he pushing?
The reporter went to great lengths in the story to present the current view of the scientific community's view on this issue and presented evidence that apparently contradicts this editor's view of fact.
[quote]In February, the National Cancer Institute - the federal government's cancer research organization - asked more than 100 of the world's experts to review more than 30 studies that have been conducted and attempt to resolve the issue. Their conclusion: having an abortion "does not increase a woman's subsequent risk of developing breast cancer." The American Medical Association has not taken a formal position on the issue but most large health-care organizations, including the American Cancer Society, agree with that conclusion.[/quote] [QUOTE]
emphasis mine.

Just because this editor has decided to ignore the National Cancer Institute opinion does not make his opinion true. What he has decided is that the readers of the LA Times will not get the truth. So much for his purging all political bias from their coverage. Choosing to hold on to an opinion in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a right, but it does not make it true.

What this editor is apparently asking his staff to do is reflect his own bias despite whatever evidence they find to the contrary and report that bias as a fact. I hope the reporter brought this memo to the editorial staff meeting and if it was upheld, quit. No sense working for a paper that can't report reality.

Joe

Were the staff at the LA Times "doing their best" their editor would not have need of admonishing them for not "doing their best".

Joe,

I believe that the editor's beef is with two words: "so called".

They are fantastic literary tools. It means something simple yet can be a great tool for derision and spin.

I think the editor had a point.

Some newsmen friends of mine once put this entire issue in perspective for me with a pithy comment apparently very popular in the industry.

"They have a very stong and unambivalant editorial policy at that newspaper. Unfortunately they articulate it in the news stories on their front page."

Taking, first off, the sketchy & rhetorical approach:

If the American media really did have a 'liberal' (that's used simply as in, 'tilting to the left', right?) bias,

* You would read about poverty in the US in a front-page article
* Bush would be as critically interviewed as European government leaders are by their countries' media
* Every later retraction of earlier CenC statements would receive an equal amount of airtime as the initial statement got
* You would get a review of "what the papers abroad write" on the day's news programme
* A shooting at a black ghetto school would get equal newspaper columns as a shoot-out on a suburbian white school
* Rupert Murdoch would be critically interviewed on his own stations about media ownership, clustering of such, and implications for editorial independence
* "Crossfire" (does that still exist?) would not feature a moderate rightwinger as 'liberal' and a radical zealot as 'conservative' (note: I grew up watching Pat Buchanan as the 'conservative')

Etc etc. I'm sure we can all add items to this list.

Political biases will always be represented in the media landscape, and luckily so - there'll be far-left, moderate-left, moderate-right and far-right newspapers - or there should be. As long as everybody knows who's what, damage is limited. Ideally people should be optimally educated (at school, for example) in critically evaluating information.

The bigger problem is if a market becomes limited in scope, and thus entire opinions start being left out altogether. TV is more of a problem than newspapers, simply because there are less media to be divided up among the various biases. For a while, CNN was the only 24h news station. Its better if you have both Fox and Al-Jazeera broadcasting alongside it, increasing the diversity of information. But the trend is the other way around. The increasing clusterisation of ownership, where two or three magnates own ever bigger swathes of the media landscape (much encouraged by new Bush legislation, I understand), is a serious danger.

The other problem that's bigger than actual overt political bias is this complex of instinctual biases at work in a journalist's day-to-day business. For most journalists, any political bias they might have is overridden by - mostly undeliberate - biases such as: will i create a sensation with this & become famous, will this be a scoop for the paper, who do i have in my cellphone memory that i can ask for comments quickly, does this approach help me meet my deadline, what will the newspaper owner / advertizers think about this story ...

The scoop/'tasty'-story/shock-value factors will encourage stories/angles on crime, law and order, war, terrorism, scandals, welfare abuse, illegal immigrants, etc; and discourage angles on education, development issues, gradual social change, poverty, labour conditions/trade unions, etc - and I'll leave it to you to conclude whether the net result is a more 'liberal' or more 'conservative' appeal to the reader's emotions emanating from the pages.

The "who can I quickly ask for comments, how do I get my story done in time" factors encourage relying on governmental / official sources, domestic sources, acknowledged experts that are "known from TV" (preferably from within the Beltway), retired generals, etc; and will discourage seeking new, grassroots, oppositional or foreign voices. Again, I'll leave it up to you to conclude what 'liberal' or 'conservative' impression this engenders, however undeliberately, on the whole.

The latter kind of factors will also discourage the digging in oneself, to research a story in-depth, on the spot, or to doublecheck a story with sources from other backgrounds. It is much quicker and easier to write a scandalous (and thus good-selling) story on "how the French are helping Saddam's officials to get new passports", relying solely on anonymous DC officials, as the Washington Post did (a thread here was devoted to it), than it is to dig in and research, in France, Iraq and at home, to what extent there is actual basis, precedent, or credibility for such allegations, and if there isn't, who in DC then is spreading the story in question and why.

Overall, journalism is very sensitive to various laws of theatre - a story needs to have a good guy and a bad guy, it needs to offer the prospect of a good ending, at least, and the whole plot of the story needs to take place within an overseeable range of time, or the viewer's concentraton will be lost; the viewer needs to be involved in the action, if only by proxy, characters in the story should immediately be recognizable to the viewer, reconfirming stereotypes if need be; and every episode needs a cliffhanger.

Some kinds of stories do much better in terms of these criteria than others. They are not necessarily also the stories that are most important, ultimately, to our lives. Environmental pollution is hard to describe in such terms, whereas the daily intrigue of DC politics easily is. And those stories that do meet the criteria are easily kneaded further into shape by both government officials and the journalists themselves, who in this respect have a common interest. Take wars, for example, which are easy to cover within these 'laws of theatre', if they dont last all too long, especially if they are "our" wars. Who wouldnt want to read a story about a heroic, female compatriot, lost on enemy terrain, then rescued by 'our' soldiers, with the help of a brave individual hero from the other side? Everybody's happy with that story - government, journalist, reader. Much happier than with the boring, protracted, unpromising story line of WMDs that are never found, for example.

The nuances of reality often fall victim to this entertainment/satisfaction factor. War in the Balkans must mean either brave, freedom-loving democratic Croatians versus dictatorial, Communist Serbs - or treacherous, fascist-Ustasha Croatians vs proudly independent, Partisan Serbs - or fiery, passionate Balkanese souls locked in their mountain people's instinctive urge for battle and the region's tradition of ancient ethnic hatreds. Those are easily recognized storylines, easy to either identify with or watch in romanticised shock and awe - with stereotypical roles we can quickly seem to comprehend, place and judge on.

A story that would involve people just like you or me, who one day lived modern lives, yet a year later were fighting bloody battles, because a convolution of political manipulations had triggered escalating mutual fears, distrusts and closings of ranks - that's harder to sell. To have to see the parallel with how easily we ourselves are stirred up against those bloody French, those scary Muslims, those arrogant Yankees, is more uncomfortable, more difficult - we'd rather zap on. And since the one and single overriding motivation of today's hypermarketized media is to prevent us from zapping on, they'll tailor their story to our wishes. That's the really dangerous bias in today's journalism, whether left or right.

There's another small point. Since Bush came in, all press conferences have been rigidly controlled, including dress codes, what questions are asked (very little freedom here - most are given a select list of questions), and that's it. Caned news from the press secretary. There also seems to be a punishment detail if someone gets out of line. So the question is - how does the press report? If it doesn't question, and risk consequences, where are they? For instance, the infamous imbedment of the press during the late Iraqi incursion. It turns out, according to various reporters, that there were areas and conditions they could not cover. So we really have no outstanding copy or photo coverage. The biggest story was the Private Lynch one, and that was stage managed and faked.

Another factor is the editorializing that has been allowed to be substituted for reporting. You have a full and comprehensive study there, nimh. What is happening now to us is not new. What is different is the tighter and tighter controls of the government. Only now it is beginning to look like some newspapers have finally begun to question. perhaps the best news coverage we get today is from the comic strips, which offer up amazing bits of news.

If there is no liberal bias in the media......would it make a sound?

The sound of one hand clapping?

(No, I am NOT intoxicated...)