The Media Lost, But Their Bias Won’t Change
By Richard Davis (11/07/04)
Campaign coverage by the mainstream media, ranging from biased to felonious, mirrored the hate-Bush platform of the Democratic Party so closely the line between press and party was blurred to the point of indeterminacy. Would the party itself have covered the race any differently?
Without doubt the media served as the enabler, if not instigator, of much of the vileness coming from the Democrats and the left, and they deserve a fair share of the defeat. But unlike their Democratic brethren, the media won’t be trying to regain public support by turning to their center. They couldn’t do that even if they still had a center. They’re not that kind of media anymore.
In the past two decades Americans have watched a moderately liberal press become defiantly partisan and openly hostile to majority opinions and values. It is a press willing to forsake ethics and even laws to get its way, and it’s as arrogant as Howard Dean after a good drubbing.
Imagine one of the nation’s largest news organizations conspiring with felons, knowingly or through gross negligence, to sabotage a national election and undermine the presidency--and then refusing to divulge information about the conspiracy for fear of hurting its candidate’s chances. Weeks later, in stunning contempt for anyone’s opinion, the same organization, CBS, planned to unleash a trumped-up story about missing weapons just hours before the election, timing so reprehensible even CBS’s accomplice, The New York Times, balked, and that paper shelved its ethics manuals years ago.
Then there were the phony election polls, orchestrated smears against Kerry critics, suppressed or distorted news stories, and coverage so slanted that reporters refused even to ask Kerry questions for fear he might sabotage his own campaign.
In the past, scandals like Rathergate, coupled with mounting public criticism over bias, would have provoked industrywide soul-searching and initiatives to promote greater fairness and objectivity. Today they provoke comradely defiance, emboldening journalists to be even more partisan, public be damned.
Why? Because this increasingly concentrated and insular industry is undergoing a generational shift from an old guard that grows more defensive as criticism escalates to a new guard that is by its very nature dismissive of public opinion. For many of these new liberals, media bias is not the problem. It is the solution.
And so the industry marches triumphantly toward self-destruction. Journalists’ approval ratings are in free fall, the quality of their work is second-rate and their credibility is shot. Imagine if the corporate press had been our only sources of information after 9/11. When the going got tough, these media revealed themselves to be reluctant compatriots at best--overtly partisan, insanely politically correct and about as trustworthy as one of their investigative reports. They’ve become practically a fifth column for anti-American sentiments.
Their leftward trend, accelerating even as the country turns right, is being driven by radicalized liberal arts departments, institutional liberalism, political correctness and the industry’s obsession with diversity and multiculturalism. The rise of the opinionated media, cable and the internet, also has encouraged mainstream journalists to be more open with their politics, to come out of the closet.
Which leads to another factor, though not one open for discussion--the effect of the increasing number of gay and women journalists, virtually all of them liberal (or liberalized) and unsympathetic to conservative thought. The father of Mary Mapes, the producer in the CBS scandal, told an interviewer that his daughter “went into journalism with an ax to grind, and that was to promote radical feminism.” Not all women journalists are radical ideologues, but there’s no doubt they are changing the industry in fundamental ways.
Though old-guard liberals have always viewed the majority culture with condescension, they’ve done so from within it. Diversity journalists see the majority culture as the source of all sexism, racism, ethnocentrism and homophobia. They’re minority loyalists, new voices, or so they believe, correcting old wrongs.
Not long ago journalists subordinated their personal opinions to ideals and standards such as truth, accuracy, fairness and objectivity. At least that was the goal, and it provided an ethos that helped hold bias in check. But in this Marxist, postmodern haze these standards are now seen as illusory, even dangerous, the instruments of a repressive culture.
What is the value of objectivity, after all, if it gives a voice to people you see as bigots or whose ancestors, if only a few of them, inflicted wrongs against your own tribe in the never-too-distant past? Being balanced in that case means being disloyal to yourself and your group.
And so a new ethos is taking control. Now it’s personal. Objectivity becomes subjectivity, truth becomes perspective, and the primary constraints are now political. Diversity journalists are acutely sensitive to the political nature of everything they do. As a result, newsrooms are more politicized (and polarized) than at any time in the past. Journalists don’t talk about it because they can’t. Diversity liberals have bullied their way into control, and they aren’t free speech advocates.
These new journalists align closely with leftist Democrats because they are allies in the ideological battle currently raging for America’s hearts and minds. They’re alike in almost every way, socially and politically. They share the same intolerant disposition, and both view their ideological opponents with disgust. It’s unfortunate that the livelihoods of just one of these fellow travelers depend on the popular vote.
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