It’s an interesting thing that people on both the left and the right are utterly convinced that the traditional media are biased against them. The thing is, it’s basically true, but in a very unequal way. The left’s biggest complaint about the media is that they take objectivity to a point where it is no longer objective. Hunter S. Thompson once justified his Gonzo style of non-factual journalism by saying “you can’t be objective about Richard Nixon.” And you can’t be objective about Scooter Libby feeding you a line of crap about aluminum tubes or Mitt Romney saying he “takes a lot of credit” for the upswing in the auto industry. If someone is lying to you and you just repeat it as a report on what was said, then you’re distorting the truth yourself. And it is just a fact of life that Republicans utilize lies as a basic feature of their political arguments. All politicians like to be selective in their use of facts. Many Democrats will make misleading use of statistics or present facts in a grossly unfair way. But there’s nothing on the Democratic side to compare with the denial of global warming or the complete foolishness of the trickle-down theory. The GOP’s entire fiscal philosophy is based on a lie. Their energy policy is bought and paid for by the oil industry. The result is that we wind up debating what constitutes reality rather than what policies make the most sense.
As for the right, the media is biased against them, too. They’re biased against them because they don’t share their worldview. A New York Times reporter might be personally opposed to abortion but they’re unlikely to think a good way to prevent abortions is to deny people sex education and access to contraception. Most reporters have been educated at top-flight schools in deep blue states, many of which are located in our biggest and most diverse metropolitan areas. They don’t have a whole lot in common with the average Fox News viewer. They’re also well-paid and successful, which makes them happier in general with the status quo than the average person. The system is working just fine for them, so they have trouble relating to the Tea Party (or the Occupy Movement, for that matter).
One final note is that the traditional media also think our system and our government are inherently good. This puts them at odds with many people on both the left and the right who think our system is fatally flawed or generally rotten or badly broken. The media think part of their job is to build respect for our laws, institutions, and leaders, even if they also think part of their job is to keep those things honest. This presents a bit more of a problem for the right than for the left. The left at least partly agrees that our system is good. It believes it can function and do worthwhile things. The right just wants to tear the whole thing down.
I am not sure, based upon how you describe it, that the left thinks the media is baiased against it, but rather is biased in favor of the right. The difference may be subtle, but it is there.
And, to be honest, I see little evidence of the media (as a whole) as being biased against the right. It is true that some reporters/journalists may have personal disagreement with the policies projected by the right, but you see little evidence of it in actual reporting.
Well, it depends a lot on context. First of all, the right has sprinkled bastards like this guy throughout our media.
And then a corporation like NBC might make money off left-wing shows but there are definitely limits (see Phil Donahue). It’s really on economic issues where the corporate media is biased, but part of that is the high salaries paid to reporters these days. They’re mostly in the 1% or close to it. That didn’t used to be the case.
But the media is generally simpatico with the left on cultural matters. They’re also respectful of science and academia, which the right simply is not. So, you know, if a reporter writes an article about climate change, he’s biased against the right because he’s using facts that they think should be contested or rejected.
It’s that saying that reality has a left-wing bias. It’s actually true. And if you insist on believing five impossible things before breakfast, the world outside your private Wonderland is going to appear hostile.
And then a corporation like NBC might make money off left-wing shows but there are definitely limits (see Phil Donahue & Chris Hayes).
Fixed!!
My sense has always been that the media is lazy at best and frightened at worst.
That’s the real core of the problem, except I’d say they’re chronically frightened. Plus they know how the plutocrats they work for decide who gets to be anchorperson or news division head — rocking the boat, except for gossip-level trivia, doesn’t do it.
When I get my most pessimistic, I truly think that Obama will lose this thing, not because of his campaign strategy (they are the best and way better than R-Money’s, IMHO), not because of the birther thing (cause if u are apt to believe this birther biz, u are likely NOT an Obama voter any darn way) and not because of the economy (not that the econ news being not so bright helps Obama, but I’m still not sure if it completly kills his chances yet).
I think the main reason is that the deck in the media is already stacked and it just seems like the MSM where people get much of their political news seems so damn afraid to call R-Money and his campaign and the whole GOP pack of liars on their bullshit. Between the bullshit fact checkers, the idiot pundits who just want the rating (I’m looking at you Anderson, Tweety, CNN etc) and the beat reporters and analysts who challenge nothing R-money says or does, but challenges any and everything said by afflitiates of the Obama campaign and WH, it just some times feels like we are fighting against a wall to try to get sound to the other side, but nothing can be done.
Case in point when reporting on R-money’s crew disrupting the Axelrod press conference like they were the Howard Stern Show and baba boo-ee, and R-Money’s contention that the Obama campaign does the same damn thing, Berger and the reporter and now Jessica Yellin laughed it up and made no mention that the Obama campaign would do no such damn thing.
The best moments of holding a mirror up to the media consistently come from Stewart & Colbert. Each night when they delight in making fun of the msm’s reaction to news and faint hearted attempts at analysis, then speak truth to us as well as the pundits one can only hope that a few light bulbs flicker on.
Bias yes. But it’s the lazy ass stupid that loses the day.
I mean….with no obvious push-back from the reporter to Romney’s lying face. Some people still get their news from the nightly news cast. You can maybe say that cable news is mostly not watched by many people (although I’ll admit that a lot of people watch CNN) so if the nightly news is last bastion of truthfully informing the public of what’s going on in politics are now playing the “fair and balanced” game (ie letting liars lie), then what now?
Despite Bin Laden, Romney Gives Obama An `F’ On Foreign Policy
I don’t think bias is the real issue. It’s competence and integrity. Good journalists have a responsibility to check claims made by public figures, chase down the facts, and follow a chain of reasoning to evaluate the claims and their consequences — do they make sense or don’t they? Whether the conclusion comes out left or right is irrelevant — when the chain of facts and reasoning is presented, the audience can draw its own conclusions.
Such reporting is something we never see in the popular media. Journalism started fading away when marketing took control. The worst sin was no longer getting it wrong or missing a scoop, but making the audience/readers uncomfortable or bored by anything more difficult than a 30-second factoid, preferably mostly filled by the “human interest” hook.
If you pay attention to advertising, you’ll notice that its overwhelming mission is to infantilize the audience to assure endless credulity. Journalism has become another path to that same goal — hence the revolving door between careers in “news”, advertising, and PR. The question is, which came first — the stupid audience or the stupefying media?
I don’t disagree with you, but also take into account the influence of ‘access’. Journalists take care to build up their sources, and don’t want to alienate them – and therein lies the conundrum. If fact checking a source means you are going to lose it, and there are plenty of other journalists willing to regurgitate what that source says verbatim, what’s the right path? The honest one, or the one that lets you keep your source and possibly your job? I know that looks on its face like a false dichotomy, but it seems like that is what it comes down to in practice in the traditional media.
I guess my basic view on journalism is that it’s one giant clusterfuck of a prisoner’s dilemma.
Lets not forget that most of the MSM is owned by powerful commercial interests with political interests aligned to the 1%, who probably don’t give a damn about the social wedge issues except insofar as they can be used to defeat progressives. Reporters and analysts don’t get hired because they are the best available – they get hired because they suit the agendas of their masters. That’s why Boo doesn’t have an MSM job even though he did go to a blue state top school…
I don’t think defeating progressives is the main goal. They’re not seen as a real threat. Occupy, for example, got a lot of coverage, as long as no one got too much into the substance of their issues. They became pretty much just another collection offbeat characters exercising the holy American commitment to free expression, however wacky their ideas.
The drive is, as Chomsky has been saying for decades, the manufacturing of consent — not just for partisan/ideological purposes, but for the larger need to keep the population compliant, divided, and childlike.
Frank, I’ve found it useful in recent years to consider the establishment media as a kind of third political party. We have the GOPers on the right, the Democratic Party as a primarily [broken] centrist party, and the media as a party with tremendous influence and resources and with a strong agenda for setting and shaping the terms and the content of political discourse in such a way as to accrue more power and influence for themselves over the citizenry and national affairs in general.
You could refer to this third ideology as “Corporatism” the belief that corporates are people and deserve the same rights to free speech as people and that money and property have the same rights as people. Citizens United would not have been possible without the growth of this ideology. It is the single greatest threat to democracy – greater than the GOP will ever be.
Voters become employees and customers, not people with rights independent of who they work for and who’s products and services they need or buy. Directors of corporates have free rein to use their revenues to pursue political agendas which have no direct connection to the services and products their customers pay for. Your cash is used to support the far right via corporate and superpac money laundering schemes.
Corporatism isn’t just a third political party, it seeks to replace democracy as the prime means of governance.
“The result is that we wind up debating what constitutes reality rather than what policies make the most sense.”
This brilliant-in-its-simplicity observation by BooMan cannot be emphasized enough.
The rightwing propaganda wurlitzer has been outperforming orthodox political arguments from what passes for the modern day `Left’ for over 30 years. They are so adept at not only embedding their lies and distortions into the contemporary political zeitgeist as common wisdom, but also excel at diverting attention away from what they on the `Right’ are up to by systematically changing the subject of what the political conversation is about. This is a huge part of why their ideological lunacy and overly aggressive bombast winds up being so effective and resilient.