All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Glass half full? Or glass half empty?

Last week I wondered which way the media narrative was going to head, when I saw – in the same day or two mind you – the New Republic note that things in Iraq were possibly turning around, that they weren’t “unrelentingly ghastly” right before I saw another story saying that 2007 had become the deadliest year for American forces in Iraq.

Given the fact that it contained a hard statistic, the bad news story seemed to grab more attention – at least according to this writer’s observations. The ‘Progress in Iraq’ story is far murkier and relies on some observational evidence and an anecdote here or there, so I wasn’t all that surprised.

Former USA Today writer Richard Benedetto did a similar – definitely more concrete – exercise when he came across another story a little while ago, the story that September 2007 had seen the fewest deaths in Iraq since March of 2006.

He shared his observations in The Politico:

None of the top newspapers played it on their Oct. 31 front page, the day after the reports were released.

Many, including The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, played it well inside the paper. But some, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, didn’t mention it at all, instead trumpeting bad news from Iraq.

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If you're at all interested in the Great Media Bias Debate - and if you're here, there's a decent chance you are - you've probably seen MSNBC's report about journalists contributing to political campaigns. In a development that should shock precisely no one, 125 of the 144 journos identified gave to "Democrats and liberal causes," while only 17 gave to Republicans. (Two gave to both parties.)

There is a ton going on here, so let's get to it. First off: As is usually the case when trying to translate the messiness of life into easily digestible statistics, things aren't as cut-and-dry as they may seem. For starters, these aren't all political journalists - a quick review of the list reveals a travel writer, classical music critic, and sports statistician, among others. I'm not sure how the political beliefs of a sports statistician are particularly relevant to a discussion about ideological media bias - I'd be more concerned about him being a Yankee fan. Many of those listed also said that the contributions were made by family members, even though Federal Election Commission records listed their names as contributors.

Additionally, some of those mentioned work for media outlets that wear their political leanings on their sleeves - Salon.com, the Washington Times and the New Yorker, for example. I'm not sure I would necessarily lump them in with the "mainstream media." Another interesting inclusion is MTV's former correspondent Gideon Yago, who offered up the most amusing quote in the MSNBC piece: "I don't understand. Things that I do as a private citizen? I mean, what the f---, man?"

Still, there are plenty of journalists on this list who cover politics and/or military issues, and the report seems to confirm the worst fears of those who feel that the press corps is hopelessly liberal. CBS News had two folks identified in the piece, former "Sunday Morning" correspondent Serena Altschul and "Sunday Morning" producer Edward H. Forgotson Jr., both of whom gave to liberal politicians or causes.

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Last week it was reported that the BBC had hired an outside group to investigate whether or not they had a problem with ideologicial bias. My first thought was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if every outlet could do that?” My second thought was “Well, did they find out?” According to the Telegraph’s reporting on the study:

After a year-long investigation the report maintains that the corporation’s coverage of day-to-day politics is fair and impartial.

But it says coverage of Live 8, the 2005 anti-poverty concerts organised by rock star campaigners Bob Geldof and Bono and writer Richard Curtis, failed to properly debate the issues raised.

This was echoed in the (rabbit hole alert) BBC’s reporting of the BBC investigation of BBC content as well:

The BBC needs to take more care to ensure it is impartial, according to a report commissioned by the corporation.

That seemed about right to me: It's certainly reasonable, after all, to expect a reporter covering a story like this to let the facts speak for themselves and not cheerlead for one side or the other.

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In the Los Angeles Times today, James Rainey explores the ethical questions raised when political journalists have spouses who work for one of the presidential candidates.

It's a worthwhile topic: In the cozy confines of elite Washington, after all, such relationships are not uncommon. Times political reporter Ronald Brownstein is married to the chief spokeswoman for Sen. John McCain; the wife of Time magazine's Matthew Cooper is a chief ad strategist for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton; Fortune and Fox News' Nina Easton's husband is a McCain media strategist.

Former White House aide Dan Senor, meanwhile, passed on a possible opportunity to join the campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in part to keep his wife, NBC's Campbell Brown, from facing a conflict.

How are reporters dealing with the issue? Brownstein's bosses banned him from covering the presidential race in news pieces. He is now an opinion columnist. Easton is opting for "occasional disclaimers" on Fox. And Cooper expects "to acknowledge my wife works for Hillary … at least on Hillary-centric stories."

There are obvious and legitimate ethical concerns here, and I do think that, at minimum, a full disclosure is required in cases like this. But I also wonder about the slippery slope that requiring these types of disclosures could logically lead us down.

If reporters have to disclose their spousal connections to candidates, should they also have to disclose to readers who they voted for in a past election? Or which of the candidates they like most on a personal level? We need to think about exactly how much faith we have in reporters to put aside their personal, professional and ideological biases in order to cover a story fairly. If we don't feel they put those biases aside, after all, the whole notion of objective journalism goes out the window.

"The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another…Nearly two-thirds of those online respondents who detected bias in the media (64%) said the media leans left, while slightly more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they see a conservative bias on their TV sets and in their column inches."

--Results of a IPDI/Zogby Interactive poll.

BONUS QUOTE: "26% speculated that the reason news organizations are placing blogs on their Web sites is that 'blogs give news organizations a chance to promote a political agenda they could not promote in their regular broadcasts, cablecasts, or publications.'"

Bruce Bartlett, writing in the conservative National Review Online, has written the kind of piece that one rarely sees these days: One that tries to take an evenhanded and non-hysterical look at the issue of media bias.

Bartlett notes that charges of media bias used to come almost exclusively from the right; today, "[w]hile conservatives still believe that the major media are biased against them, one hears more and more criticism coming from the left." He argues that the media used to exhibit a left-wing bias, but that this bias has largely disappeared. And that, he claims, is what has liberals upset – they've lost their advantage. Well, that and the fact that "conservatives have become better at using the media, taking advantage of its institutional biases to spin stories in conservative directions."

I'm not endorsing Bartlett's position, though it sure is nice to read a discussion of this issue that goes beyond "the msm is liberal/conservative/corrupt/run by a cabal of Jewish financiers who live at the center of the earth."

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Gallup has found, unsurprisingly, that most Americans (56 percent) believe the media is providing an inaccurate portrait of the situation in Iraq. Here's the fun part: 36 percent of those that question the coverage said it makes the situation appear to be better than it actually is, while 61 percent said it makes it appear worse that it actually is. In other words, people are sure that the media is hopelessly biased. They just can't agree on which way the bias runs.

These findings point to the challenges faced by large news organizations like CBS, which want to hold on to the wide audience they've traditionally attracted. A large portion of the audience, it seems, wants the network and its competitors to skew their coverage in one direction, while another large portion wants them to skew their coverage the other way. And they can't do both.

In the days before the Internet, when the "Evening News" was one of the few available news sources, the middle was a pretty safe place to be. Viewers from the left and right might occasionally be annoyed by the tenor of the coverage, but they gravitated to the evening newscasts anyway, since (a) they remained more or less in the middle and (b) viewers had little in the way of alternatives.

That has changed, for three primary reasons. The first is the rise of the alternatives – blogs, Web sites, and news outlets that cater to just about every ideological position out there. If you want your news more liberal or more conservative than you find on the "Evening News", it's easy to turn off CBS and find it. The second reason is the sustained assault on the media's credibility by partisans, from Spiro "nattering nabobs of negativism" Agnew through David Brock and Brent Bozell and George W. Bush. And the third reason is mistakes by the media such as "Rathergate," which have lessened the press' credibility and played into partisan media critics' hands.

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Much of the debate over media coverage of Iraq hinges on the notion that the press doesn't report enough of the good news from the region. It's an argument that typically comes from conservative critics excoriating the liberal media and, naturally, we've covered this territory many times before.

Yesterday, however, conservative National Review columnist Rich Lowry argued that on this particular point, the "conservative campaign against the mainstream media" has led some astray. "In Iraq, the media’s biases happen to fit the circumstances," writes Lowry, adding, "[m]ost of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war." As for the "good news" that many conservative critics have complained is conspicuously absent from the mainstream media's reporting, Lowry writes that such information "has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war."

Lowry highlights what complicates much of the bias debate: a predisposed assumption that bias always exists – on either side of the aisle – can often end up just obfuscating the actual truth. In that sense, the outlets that exist for the explicit purpose of rooting out bias – liberal or conservative -- don't necessarily help so much. Certainly, biases exist, and sometimes they are reflected inappropriately. But if you're looking hard enough for bias one way or the other, you'll probably find it – maybe even both ways.

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A new study on media bias, "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers,” is getting some press today. I haven't read the study, but among the articles I've read about it is the New York Times piece, which (oddly) was written by a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Since the study comes from a pair of University of Chicago economists, I'd wager the Times piece is a fair representation of the study's contents.

There are two main points in the Times piece. The first has to do with the way in which the study determined how a news outlet is biased. Authors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro looked through the 2005 Congressional Record to find the "1,000 most partisan phrases" that year, a determination based on how often a phrase was used by Republicans or Democrats.

Phrases like "death tax," “illegal aliens,” and “Terri Schiavo” were found to have been used most often by Republicans, while “minimum wage,” “public broadcasting,” and “middle class” were used mostly by Democrats. The authors looked at how often newspapers used these phrases to determined which party they were biased toward.

To some extent, this makes sense. One could argue that a newspaper that uses "death tax" over "inheritance tax," for example, is to some extent tipping its hand. (My favorite such tip-off has to do not with words but punctuation – that is, the decision by the Washington Times to put quote marks around the phrase "gay marriage.") At the same time, if a newspaper were to run a story with the headline "Why The Republicans' Handling of the Terri Schiavo Case Proves Their Incompetence," it's probably not the best evidence that the paper is biased toward Republicans.

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According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, network news coverage is favoring the Democrats this year. Part of the reason, of course, is what the CMPA calls the "predominant storyline" over the course of the study, which began right after Labor Day and wrapped up on Oct. 22nd. I'll give you three guesses what said storyline might be. (Hint: Send me a "pic!") The other dominant storylines? Iraq and terrorism.

The study found that Democrats got positive evaluations on the nightly news shows 77 percent of the time, while Republicans only got such treatment 12 percent of the time. This news will be greeted as further evidence of liberal media bias in the MSM – yup, there it is – but it is important to remember that when the news is bad for one party or another, the stories are going to reflect that. I'm not saying there aren't ideological biases at play in the media, only that it would be ridiculous to expect the nature of the news not to influence the tenor of the coverage.

One could, I should add, plausibly argue that the focus on Mark Foley and the war is itself evidence of bias. (Though it's worth pointing out that there are plenty of people who think the media isn't talking about the war nearly enough. As for Foley, I think we've all pretty much had our fill.) CMPA director Robert Lichter told USA Today that the problem for Republicans is two guys who aren't even running. “What's hurting Republican candidates is the media's focus on two non-candidates: Mark Foley and George W. Bush,” he said.

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