week of 4/17/02
 
 
 

The myth of the unbiased media
By Scott McLeod
The notion of the unbiased, perhaps bland, media, I’m afraid, is becoming passe. It doesn’t sell, and in today’s news marketplace that is the kiss of death.

So we have the Fox News Network becoming the nation's top-rated TV news channel, gunning down CNN from its perch atop the 24-hour programming style it created. I’m not knocking Fox News. It is good, sometimes a bit edgy and ... conservative. What I want to know is this: does the conservative part of its description matter to those who rely on it for forming their world view from its many opinions, interviews, analysis and news stories?

I was at an arts event a few nights ago when a label was pinned on me. As the evening progressed, I found myself in a familiar place — away from the main event, close to the bar, discussing politics, business and life with whomever was around. My conservative friend nailed me: “Oh hell, he’s as bleeding heart liberal as they come. Don’t try to tell me you're not,” he said, eyeing me, smiling the smile of victory, knowing there was little I could say.

He’s right. Toss a political or social issue into the air, ask me to give my opinion, and almost always I’ll lean left. Now, I don’t want to pigeon hole myself, and I don’t define myself by how I stand on the political issues of the day. I’m willing to listen, and like most people in business I’ve become somewhat more “conservative” (this hurts) on a lot of issues involving taxation and regulation. Still, I relish the discussion of politics with those who think differently, and at all costs I respect the right of people who hold opposing views.

So I’ve admitted a bias, but what does that mean for this newspaper? I believe that the greatest influence my personal beliefs will have on my position as editor and publisher is in story selection. Count the number of environmental stories we publish. Notice how we look oh-so-closely at land-use issues. Those are where local government and the private sector (ie, the public) are clashing, where that debate about how much government is too much is put on the table almost every day.

If we are successful, however, the stories about these issues will be relatively unbiased. As an editor, I constantly search for more conservative writers and publish their opinions on our editorial pages. Unlike TV, print journalists work extremely hard to keep opinion out of news stories. For a TV journalist, summing up a story with something like this — “So it appears that council believes it can ....” — is perfectly normal. But it is a lead-in for an opinion. A print journalist will never say that in a news story. A source might say that, and then it is the job of the job of the journalist to look for an alternative opinion, the other side of the story. The end of a news story is not where we try to bang you over the head with an opinion.

But no matter how hard we try, biases exist. Perhaps we should just admit them, run a banner across the front of the newspaper or the bottom of the TV screen so readers and viewers can read or watch knowing that some sort of bias exists. When Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were having their great debates about the expansion of slavery and the authority of the federal government, many of the newspapers of the day were controlled by particular political parties. The Whig papers would print one side and the Republicans the other. These publications, like almost all newspapers of the day, were mouthpieces for one political party or another. They tried to convince people of their opinion. They weren't concerned with being fair and covering all sides. There was no unbiased media.

For years we have been bombarded with accusations about the shortcomings of the liberal media, and in some instances the charges hold up. Whether it’s Dan Rather or NPR’s Cokie Roberts, a liberal (or conservative, in other instances) bias is exposed by how stories and questions are framed. What they report is accurate, but Cokie will say something like (this is not an exact quote, only an example) “Republicans in Congress suffered a major defeat and appear divided after the president’s economic stimulus package was stripped of what Bush considered its most important elements.” However one feels about the stimulus package, that kind of reporting could be interpreted as biased toward Democrats and the liberal perspective.

It’s OK for Fox to be the most watched television news show in the country, and it’s OK if its news analysts are somewhat conservative. Viewers of that network, like viewers of all the other news shows and readers of this country’s newspapers, should at least be aware that these biases are out there.

What we have lost in recent years is not the unbiased media. That has always been a rare beast, but today it has become just too boring for most news consumers. No, what we have allowed to erode is our ability to know when we are being led by the nose down a path some loud-mouthed commentator.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)