Media bias.

As Ted Barlow says, there is little reason to believe that anyone can be convinced on the subject. There are two media watchdog organizations, AIM (Accuracy in Media) and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) whose job it is to watch the media and prove biased. The catch is that AIM is convinced that the media is liberal while FAIR that it is conservative. Both sides have their feet planted firmly in the ground and will provide endless ammunition for the footsoldiers of their ideological camp to use in order to prove that the media has it out for them.

I think that both sides are generally paranoid on the matter, but conservatives are more correct in my personal experience. Of course Whitlock thinks that, you may be saying, he's conservative. While it's true that I am objectively right of center, that is more or less a recent development and much of my experience comes from when I wasn't.

In my life, I have held both radically conservative and liberal positions. Readers of this weblog may be surprised to learn that I still hold some of each. Since I started following politics when I was seventeen, I have noticed several things.

1) The more liberal I am, the less biased I believe the media to be. When I was younger and leaned to the left, I did not believe the media to be biased at all. There were a few subjects in which I believed coverage was "bad" (specifically the death penalty),but I didn't notice a pattern. I was pro-choice, against vouchers, and in favor of gun control. I didn't have enough conservative views from which to be able to plot a pattern.

2) I believe the media coverage of subjects in which I am liberal is much more "balanced" than subjects in which I hold a conservative view.

There are two specific issues where my views fall to the left of what Clinton and Gore can politically say on the subject (gay marriage and the death penalty), and I find the media's coverage to be quite fair. I don't view the media's coverage to be right-wing by any stretch of the imagination, even though my own views are well out of the mainstream.

There are a handful of issues where my views are out of the mainstream to the right and I believe the coverage on those issues to be absolutely outrageous. Abortion protesters seem to be constantly portrayed as latent clinic bombers. The NOW is portrayed merely as a group concerned with the rights of women. Planned Parenthood, according to the media, has no political agenda except helping people. Religious institutions, on the other hand, are entirely about ordering people around.

Now, I'll concede that coverage on the abortion issue is not as drastic as I make it out to be. However, the point is that I notice it to the point that it makes me angry. On issues where I am liberal, on the other hand, I don't notice it at all. It's not just issue-by-issue based, because...

3) As some of my views have shifted from left to right, my view of the media's coverage has soured. Inversely, on the subject where my view has shifted left, I find media coverage to be much more fair.

My views have changed over the years. More have moved from left to right than the other way around, but the results have been consistent with #2 both ways. For instance, when I was younger I was pro-choice and pro-death penalty. Coverage on the first was fair and the second infuriating. As I've become anti-death penalty and anti-abortion, the coverage on the former has magically gotten better and the latter deteriorated. As I've become pro-gun, media coverage has gotten worse.

I don't have statistics to back it or any smoking-gun, but I simply don't have any other explanation for it.

Unlike some conservatives, I don't believe there is a big giant media conspiracy. I don't even believe that it is intentional. I don't believe the media covered Clinton's back or that they have it in for Bush (NYT excepted, more on this later). I believe that if they get ahold of a big, credible scandal, they will not hold back on it regardless of who the suspect is. I think the media's coverage of the Clinton scandals was prosecutorial rather than defensive, but I also believe that's because scandal is sexy for news outlets. The same for Bush and Harkin. During the 2000 election, I actually believe that Gore got the shorter end of the stick, though not by as much as most liberals claim. That, too, was circumstantial and ironically probably was a product of left-leaning bias. I don't think the press ever really thought he'd lose.

Which leads to one of the reasons why I think the reporters are unintentionally biased: the belief that the public agrees with them. Reporters are generally left-leaning folks and most reporters for big news outlets live in the already left-leaning urban areas. They are insulated from opposing opinion in a way that conservative writers are not. The Weekly Standard and National Review are based out of liberal areas, so they're surrounded by dissent. Liberal writers at the New York Times are surrounded by other liberals. This, I believe, leads to sloppiness. Or maybe they are all pushing an agenda and I am just naive. I don't know, but I prefer the former explanation.

On a more positive note, I believe that it's gotten better in some places. The Washington Post, which used to lean left, doesn't seem to do so much at all anymore. Television stations did a pretty good job of playing up Bush after 9/11 as they surely would have done for Clinton. The exception, of course, is the New York Times. I disagree with those that believe the media isn't by-and-large biased, but I can't understand how anyone can say, with a straight face, that the NYT is. When the economy was in free-fall, it posed a problem for Bush. When it started recovering, it posed a problem for Bush. When things are good it's bad for Bush. It took them less than a couple weeks to start comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam.

Bias is a difficult thing to pin down. The best example I can give to liberals so that they might be able to relate is Fox News. They have liberal guests and conservative ones. They report positive and negative stories of President Bush. However, any liberal (and most honest non-right-wingers) can see that Fox News's "Fair and Balanced" slogan is a joke. They pit sharp-tongued conservatives against conciliatory (if articulate) liberals. They stack the pundit deck. They do all of these little things that present the right more positively than the left.

What's the liberal/conservative ratio in the NYT punditry? The Washington Post's? ABC? As with Fox News, they'll all report anything big, but the context makes all the difference in the world. Even in basic news reporting, two articles concerning the same subject matter with the same set of facts can sound wildly different.

Conservative news: Experts say that there are thousands of gallons of crude in barren government land in Nevada, but critics want the government to keep out.

Liberal news: House Republicans want to open up drilling in a nature wildlife preserve in Nevada, but environmentalists say the results could be disastrous.

Both of these leads say have the same basic facts, though they paint very different pictures. The first lead points out the proposed benefit of drilling while the second emphasizes the possible problems with the drilling. The first pits "Experts" against "critics" and the second "House Republicans" against "Environmentalists." Until recently, I rarely heard the terms archliberal or left-wing associated with anyone. Moderate Democrats were called "Conservative Democrats" while moderate Republicans were called "Moderate Republicans." The first time I even heard the term "Liberal Republican" was when Jim Jeffords jumped ship. This has improved recently in part because of books like Bias, which is one reason why I'm pretty sure it's not an orchestrated liberal media campaign. Rather, they didn't realize they were doing it, but now that they do they've stopped.

This post has meandered more than I would like, but a quick review:

1) The views are based on my personal experience and my reactions to how the media covers subjects where my beliefs are liberal compared to those where my beliefs are conservative. My reactions may be tainted by something, but I don't know what that might be since it's a comparison of the media's handling of both liberal and conservative causes I support.
2) The media is more sympathetic to liberal causes than conservative ones.
3) The media is naturally more sympathetic to those that pursue liberal causes, but does not engage in "ass-covering" for Democratic politicians or outright prosecution of Republican ones. A scandal is a scandal, and they love scandal.
4) The biases of the media are probably unintentional and, when placed under scrutiny, often correct themselves.
5) Not in the New York Times, though, all hope is currently lost there.
6) Fox News (and the New York Post, for that matter) are a good example of the inverse bias. Both will cover any scandal, but are generally more sympathetic to conservative viewpoints and skeptical of Democratic politicians.