Cronkite Spills The Beans
By Michael R. Bowen (09/09/03)
Walter Cronkite, in his new role as print journalist, has published a column in the Salt Lake Tribune with the grandiose (and inadvertently revealing) title of "Siding with the powerless: Ideas from 60 years in journalism". In this little sermon he lets us know that "most of us reporters are liberal". Sure, they're biased, but it's OK because it's the right kind of bias.
Uncle Walter intones that journalists are liberals for a good reason, not just for the heck of it. "We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful."
Uhh ... Walter? Reporters are supposed to tell us what happened. They aren't supposed to side with anybody.
Apparently, reporters are naturally liberal because they see more of reality than others do: "… likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities -- the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and hungry, the underclothed and undereducated." Well, that explains all those conservative policemen, firemen, doctors, and soldiers! They've just been having a day at the beach while those gritty reporters were knee deep in ugly reality. A liberal, then, is the only decent thing to be; reporters are decent; therefore reporters are liberals. Q.E.D.
Clearly, journalism doesn't broaden the mind; it narrows it. More than 80 percent of journalists voted for Clinton. They're all in favor of homosexual rights, gun control, affirmative action and abortion, and the major talking heads routinely sneer at President Bush and his cabinet. These people are all in lockstep. And being an advocate (sorry, reporter) doesn't seem to open the eyes; it closes them.
They all told us we couldn't fight in the deserts of Iraq, and when we did, they told us that Saddam would use nukes or bioweapons on us, even though he didn't have them. When that didn't happen, we were going to get bogged down. When we didn't bog down, they predicted a Stalingrad in the cities. No Stalingrad forthcoming, they warned of environmental catastrophe and widespread starvation and disease. Unable to find any starvation, disease, or environmental catastrophe, they announced that through our careless arrogance, hundreds of thousands of priceless artifacts were destroyed. When the artifacts were found safe and sound ..... Well, you get the picture. These are people who've already decided how the world is, and they're not going to let the evidence of their own eyes get in the way.
Liberalism is so predominant in the media that they don't even know it's there. It's not even a position on the political spectrum; it's just how sane people think. Conservatism, by contrast, is abnormal and almost a mental illness (as recently diagnosed by some Berkeley researchers). This is why you'll see constant news references to "right-wing Republicans", but you'll never see the term "left-wing Democrat". In the liberal world, there aren't two wings: there's the right wing, and then there are all the normal people. And when, like Uncle Walter, you have become blind to the fact that even you can have political biases, it won't set off any alarms in your head when you decide to push stories which fit your worldview and bury those which don't. You'll be able to say, in the same breath, that you're unbiased and that you're on the side of the good guys.
Saturated in liberalism and unable to see their own weaknesses, journalists can no more acknowledge liberal bias than a fish can feel wet.
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