The Nation's Pulse/Lichter and the Liberals
Ferguson, Tim W.
THE NATION'S PULSE LICHTER AND THE LIBERALS M edia bias is old hat. So much so that my boss frowns on the topic as fare for our paper's editorial page. Yet the subject is still drawing attention,...
...Let others be as systematic about it, and more overtly biased if they wish...
...A competent news organization will have included comments from the obviously involved parties to a story...
...Consider who emerged on chilly nights to challenge the author in front of either a New York University journalism class in December or the Metropolitan Republican Club (!) in January: Carl Bernstein, once a noted muckraker...
...Lichter et al...
...The important question is, So what...
...Neither of those positions explains what media critics from the right have spotted as a tendency to be accommodationist in foreign policy, interventionist in economic policy, and antagonistic to some aspects of bourgeois morality and values...
...a corporate lawyer who formerly was vice chairman of the New York Times Co...
...We can trust the public to consider the source, whether that person or entity has an academic interest in the news or, like the press critic of this journal, a material one...
...The anchorman may prefer casualness, but he was never in the service...
...Nor does it make any less valid the complaints of critics on the left that major media are ethnocentric, creatures by Tim W. Ferguson of commercial hype, prisoners of a generally comfortable existence...
...For a neutral indicator, they surveyed "experts" in the various fields relating to the news coverage they were measuring...
...Yet the subject is still drawing attention, thanks in part to the publication last year of The Media Elite by S. Robert Lichter and two colleagues...
...A related role, the hardbitten newshound who wouldn't know an ideology if it jumped out of a VDT, was played at the secondsession by Gilman Spencer of the Daily News, who swore freely but did admit to having attended Groton...
...Still, ingenuousness is an inadequate defense from these folks...
...For example, they queried nuclear scientists about stories on nuclear-plant dangers...
...This is not a brilliant insight...
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...Tim W. Ferguson is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...In his annual media guide, Jude Wanniski, the supply-side popularist, assembles a more thoroughgoing rating of journalists based on how they keep up with the current policy debate—as he sees the debate...
...Initially, there's the question of representation (through accurate quotation, one hopes...
...I think he is right and wrong...
...It was not adversarial to NASA all those years, because its sympathies were with that bureaucracy as they are with most non-military science agencies...
...He also served for 11 years as a reserve flight officer...
...People who choose to devote their lives to nuclear science would, you'd think, tend to want to promote the development of the technology...
...That's not to say we're getting very far with it, however...
...This is the only way Mr...
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...Lichter, though he says he's not fond of left-right labels (everybody is against "labels"), comes across as a conservative's thinking man...
...But other failings that are admitted by the doubters of press bias are not the substitute explanation for skewed coverage that they are advanced to be...
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...These press people do seem to get bothered by the Lichter thesis, that elite journalists are culturally and psychologically—and measurably—disposed to bias their coverage...
...Lichter could imagine a cosmopolitan clique in the news business when Tom Brokaw, a former South Dakotan, walks around New York in "his old Marine boots...
...Personally, I'd give a lot of credence to their views on reactor safety, but I'd be a lot more skeptical where other aspects of nuclear power (economics, sociology) are concerned...
...A. M. Rosenthal has acknowledged that he acted during his reign at the New York Times to bring the paper back toward the center politically...
...Lichter has come to New York City twice to discuss the book with a panel of critics, and about a hundred people showed up both times, so there may be some life left in the issue...
...Lichter is affiliated...
...Lichter is prone to agree, that even many journalists in the prestige press are not conscious of being on the battle lines in an ideological war...
...They found them a good deal less worried than the press coverage...
...None of these scorecards is completely fair, but the composite picture drawn from all of them is instructive, particularly when the sample is large and we're more or less familiar with the biases of the evaluating groups...
...I say, bring on the same for the media, and let the content watchers quantify bias to their heart's content...
...I believe any discerning person can quantify bias (though the measurements will vary—more on that shortly...
...QU ESTIONS...
...On that score, a consensus of media critics can be obtained...
...From this "spin" I believe you can in most instances ascertain, if not the journalist's outlook, at least the point intended to be drawn from the exercise...
...Critics of The Media Elite have brought out obvious problems here...
...exec., wondered how in the world Mr...
...At times it can be difficult to evaluate the stories reporters and editors chose not to cover vs...
...So is the quite different but also commonplace acknowledgment contained in Michael Kinsley's savaging of The Media Elite in the New Republic...
...Likewise, I'd be hesitant to evaluate coverage of abortion based on the standard of responses from ob-gyns (although I might be surprised...
...those they did, but toting up what ran or aired is not an invalid way...
...All persons with a professional or passionate interest in holding the press to the straight and narrow should be welcomed...
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...It is not adversarial toward Jesse Jackson in the way it is toward Jerry Falwell...
...Good reporters know they often are called on to do stories that, while intrinsically sound, are more likely to displease one side in a contentious matter than another...
...have gotten under the press's skin...
...Journalists in general see themselves as "professionals" and put aside their biases in much the same way an attorney dutifully represents his clients...
...Jonathan Alter, the media critic for Newsweek...
...Thorough examination of the coverage of a particular story, performed with a minimum of ideological coloration, indeed can be an effective teaching and reinforcing device within the craft...
...This is usually true, but doesn't explain the difference in treatment of, say, a Howard Metzenbaum and a Jesse Helms...
...C ome intelligent skeptics of the idea of ideological bias in the media, such as Mr...
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...What can be said is that Lichter & Co...
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...Alter of Newsweek, say that instead of trying to find some political strain in the reporting, we'd be better off examining individual instances of coverage with an eye to some of those just-mentioned frailties, as well as general laziness and incompetence...
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...Steve Friedman, executive producer of the "Today" show...
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...I'd forgo the search for objective standards, and accept a major criticism lodged against the Lichter study: that it is an ideological critique of the media...
...The unsophisticated assemblages I attended also brought out the showmen in the rest of the panels...
...Indeed, the key to bias in a feature or interpretive account—and by this I refer to virtually all packages from broadcast correspondents and to newspaper stories that begin with a "soft" lead paragraph and end with a real ending—is to note how it begins or how the issue is framed, and how it ends: the emphasis or lilt in the TV "close" or the writer's use, quite often, of a summary quotation...
...Lichter smiles his way through the basic spiel, avoiding the social-science methodology but not patronizing his listeners...
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...Another 'The Media Elite: America's New Power-brokers, by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter...
...And the press is sensationalist, as each reporter competes for space and air time and the various news organs compete with each other...
...Lichter could have gotten many honest responses to his controversial media questionnaire on personal backgrounds and beliefs—a savvy sort would have anticipated the drift of the study...
...It's entirely understandable that a journalist could have all these leanings and not sense himself swimming outside the mainstream, as these are probably what he's been exposed to in the schools since an early age...
...Whereas, if the problem is found to be more systemic, remedial steps can be taken...
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...Surely no persistent ideological bias will be found if the ground rules won't permit looking for it: that is, if individual cases can't be aggregated into whatever pattern they might show...
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...Why this type of scorecard, which many a fair-minded reporter keeps in his head anyway, should strike journalists as outrageous in the way it seems to have affected Mr...
...A more productive session, I'm told, was held at the American Enterprise Institute, with which Mr...
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...But that doesn't change the fact of rather unquestioned acceptance of propositions such as the paramountcy of "arms control," the need to close gaps between rich and poor, the superiority of wilderness to development, or the silliness of objections to sex education...
...Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said he believed many of the respondents did just that and answered outrageously...
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...o now where, in my simplified setting of media analysis, does this leave us...
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...Alter takes particular exception to Lichter's attempt to quantify the slant of a set of stories or to put together a psychological profile of those who produce them...
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...But that's hardly the end of it...
...I don't recall whether Carl Bernstein or Steve Friedman of "Today" led the NYU group in remonstrations and rolled eyes...
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...Friedman (University of Illinois) and Marlene Sanders (Ohio State) boasted of their Midwestern backgrounds...
...is that audience members nearly always asked the type of questions you hear on call-in talk shows: baiting, uninformed, anecdotal if not apocryphal...
...Marlene Sanders, who used to be on the TV news a lot...
...Heaven knows, they are already out there today, mostly taking random pot shots...
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...The remedies to excess or indulgence in the future will be limited to "having a cop on every street corner," or in this case a wise editor in every newsroom on every call...
...I don't quarrel with the straightforward polls showing that journalists vote liberal more often than the general population...
...As suggested earlier, press monitoring is really a game any knowledgeable person can play, and to our mutual advantage...
...The press is adversarial, it is said...
...There's no more need for licensing these critics than for licensing the press itself...
...A big one is specialist bias through self-selection...
...One of the best ways a voter of limited search time has to evaluate legislative candidates these days is to compare the multitude of ratings made of the various representatives based on their voting records...
...at this point chose a method acceptable to them as social scientists to put this count in perspective...
...At the two "discussions" I attended, the lotsa-heat-but-no-light cliche applied...
...Once again, true . . . and yet: What might explain the extraordinarily restrained and compassionate manner in which the AIDS epidemic and its roster of casualties have been treated, relative to other frightening cases of mortality...
...The press likes conflict, it is said, and will seem tto promote the antagonists...
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...Lichter's critics, I don't know...
...and the editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News...
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...One reason the New York sessions were so unelucidating was their emotionalism...
...But to accept this as the sum total, of press review is to concede the argument before it has been settled (or settled to widespread satisfaction...
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...Measuring bias within a particular story is not such a chore at all...
...The expectation is that, over time, the coverage should more or less even out or at least reflect the objective merits of the respective positions...
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...Let's all be ideologues, if that's what you want to call it, and take this matter out of the arena of science (or pseudo-science) and put it into politics, where it belongs...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
