Are The Media Too Liberal?

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Claims of media bias persist regardless of the outcome of any particular election. One has to ask which of the media: the Philadelphia Inquirer or the National Enquirer, the Wall Street Journal or the New Republic, Nightline or A Current Affair? And on which issues? Few people fall at exactly the same place in the left-right spectrum on everything from economics, the environment and foreign policy to such social issues as gay rights and abortion. On many economic and environmental matters -- and even, to a lesser degree, on the social issues around which the Republicans focused their convention -- the mainstream press mirrors the concerns of average Americans, according to many polls. If "bias" is defined as deviating from the statistical consensus, front-tier news organizations show bias mainly by lacking a sizable conservative minority to temper the prevailing view.

The pivotal question is whether reporters' personal values actually color their stories. Although it seems self-evident that they do, some scholars, such as political scientist Michael Genovese of Loyola Marymount University, contend that there is no clear proof of it. ABC's Brit Hume says his avowed conservatism never intrudes on his work: "It's not hard to keep bias out; you just have to be conscious of it. Most reporters are in denial." Some journalists go to great lengths to appear neutral. Executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. of the Washington Post abstains from voting and urges his staff, especially political correspondents, to do the same. Still, no one who reads the Post news columns regularly can have much doubt about the paper's basic point of view.

As the late CBS commentator Eric Sevareid was fond of pointing out, there is plenty of biased reading and hearing as well as reporting. Many news consumers object fiercely to a story not because it is inaccurate but because the truth it tells is unhelpful to their side. Often the objection is not to the content but to the amount of attention it is given, and thus to the story's effect on public opinion. That amounts to denouncing media manipulation while urging an alternative manipulation of the electorate's right to know.

In truth, journalists are rarely loyal ideologues. Says syndicated columnist Richard Cohen: "Liberal or conservative, a reporter is a primitive being who would go after his own mother if he thought that was a good story." Some of the toughest stories about Clinton have emerged from the liberal New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Bush's two most ferocious critics, syndicated columnists William Safire of the New York Times and George Will of the Washington Post, are staunch members of his own party. That summarizes the deepest objection most politicians have to journalists -- not that they are liberal, nor that they are conservative, but that they are stubbornly individualistic and persistent.