Journalists Should Come Out of the Closet about Bias
By Richard Davis (09/16/05)
Is there anyone more pathetic these days than a liberal journalist who feigns ignorance of media bias? We’ve heard just such feigning in the past few months from such liberal illuminati as Nina Totenberg of NPR, Bill Moyers of PBS and Bill Keller, editor of the NY Times -- a list of characters to which one can only add, “Oh, please.”
While the know-nothingness of these liberal know-it-alls stems from arrogance, mainstream journalists in general are inflicted with a self-imposed ignorance so willful and belligerent it borders on the pathological. Either they’re lying, in which case they’re unethical, or they’re stupid, in which case they’re incompetent. In either case, they’re not fit to be journalists.
No reasonable person monitoring press coverage of Katrina, Cindy Sheehan, Iraq or any other major news story could fail to recognize the media’s liberal agenda. The only real debate today is whether liberal bias is increasing or decreasing.
Ann Coulter took exception recently to a NY Times book review by Judge Richard Posner, who asserted that media such as CNN were conceding the center-right to Fox and friends and moving left to solidify their liberal base. Coulter believes such a move “doesn’t make economic sense,” i.e., you don’t stay in business by going in the opposite direction of your customers. She sees signs that the media are “becoming more sane,” though in this she is almost certainly wrong.
Sometimes you do ignore the market. The network newscasts have lost nearly half their audience in the past 25 years, a staggering drop-off, and they haven’t changed their product one iota. Newspapers are suffering a 30-year decline in readership and now teeter on the brink of extinction, yet they grow more liberal each day.
Take Keller’s NY Times. For half a century the paper was known as the country’s “newspaper of record,” the flagship of American journalism. Bias, fraud, arrogance and shoddy work have shredded the paper’s reputation in less than a decade. Circulation is in free-fall. How has the paper responded? By haughtily dismissing all criticism and becoming more brazenly partisan, more ideological. Instead of seeking the best and the brightest the paper hires identity journalists for whom bias is a tribal creed. And, no, they don’t care what you think about it. They’re on a mission, public be damned.
The media are moving left for two primary reasons: 1) The leftist ideologies of political correctness and multiculturalism continue to gain momentum in America and exert tremendous influence on the media. 2) And the same is true of diversity, both in hiring and ideology. Identity journalists are becoming the norm -- journalism schools are filled with little else -- and their identity isn’t male, heterosexual, conservative white Christians. They’re ethnic, racial, gender, sexual leftists, and they’re imposing a stultifying leftist conformity on the industry, whether they’re smart enough to see it or not. Moreover, they’re never going to turn to the right; the vehicle they arrived in doesn’t steer that way.
Actually we've reached the point at which the words mainstream media denote a press with a liberal ideological viewpoint, a press, in fact, that appears on the verge of coming out of the closet and embracing its liberalism openly. They can’t help themselves. They are who they are. All pretense of objective, consensus journalism is disappearing. Soon they’ll be able to be in public what they are now on the sly, liberal Democrats. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In a letter to his own book editor concerning Posner’s remarks, Keller defended journalists like his who “strive to keep opinion sequestered from news” -- oh, please, read your damn paper for once -- and gushed about “the idealism of reporters who think they can make the world better.” Spoken like a true liberal elite, utterly blind to the statement’s ideological implications.
Make the world better for whom and how? Terrorists have that goal, too, of course, as has every mass-murdering socialist ever born. Do the gays and feminists or the black and Hispanic activists on the Times’ staff -- and the Times has many -- slant the news to meet that goal as they see it? Of course they do. They aren’t able to report any other way, and their “idealism” excuses their inabilities.
Keller’s remarks are the typical puerile rhetoric one gets from the left these days, particularly from the media. They only want to make the world better. Thus, anyone who criticizes them must by definition want to make the world worse, or at least keep it in its same sorry state.
The way a journalist makes the world better is by doing his job the best he can, by telling the truth as completely, non-ideologically and impartially as possible. When a journalist these days thinks his job includes “trying to make the world better” then watch out. You don’t have an idealist on your hands, you have an ideologue.
Worse, you have an ideologue blind to her own prejudices, and one that is increasingly disinclined toward self-examination. A siege mentality is setting into MSM newsrooms. Journalists are growing ever more partisan, loyalists of that dying liberal establishment that believes half-truths suffice for the whole truth and only their critics can be biased. They’re making us better. God help us.
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