Oh, That “More or Less Fair and Balanced” Media
Did you know that the problem with the media before George Bush became President is that they were too nice to Republican Presidents and that media executives lived in constant fear of running afounl of conservative media watchdogs? That’s how E.J. Dionne remembers Life Before Fairness.
From the late 1960s until the past few years, media criticism was dominated by conservatives railing against a supposedly “liberal media.” Hearing mostly from this one side, editors, publishers and producers looked constantly over their right shoulders, rarely imagining they could be biased against the left or too accommodating to Republican presidents. This was a great conservative victory.
The Bush years have changed that. Aggressive media criticism is now the rule across the liberal blogs, and new monitoring organizations such as Media Matters for America police news reports for signs of Republican bias, often debunking charges against Democrats. When you combine liberal and conservative media criticism you get a result that is more or less fair and balanced. Score a net gain for liberals.
Got it.
The Dan Rather/CBS News forgeries that became national news and went entirely uncorrected by him or his network? The New York Times al-Qaa Qaa weapons story that was entirely false and ran on the eve of a Presidential election? The Big NYT/Washington Post expose on a financial monitoring program that was not only squarely legal but had actually broken down terrorist operations that was nevertheless spun into a story of the President cruelly violating our privacy?
That’s simply “balance” to the rampant lies spread by Fox News, all by its lonesome. Such a juggernaut is Fox News that it takes three regular networks, a couple cable networks, and the largest newspapers in the nation to provide “balance”
How about this most recent Paul Wolfowitz “scandal”? Dionne’s own paper can’t even manage to print the fact that Wolfowitz did what is being reported as scandalous because he was specifically directed by the World Bank’s own ethics committee to do it? Are articles full of inuendo and uncorrected whispers from character assassins considered “more or less fair”?
Dionne says it is.
The problem here is that he’s not even objectively correct. Most MSM news coverage is slanted toward the left’s positions. An amazing number of reporters and talking heads self-identify as liberal or Democrat. Most MSM outlets give most of their political contributions to leftist or Democrat candidates. Neither of these statements are in serious dubt by anyone who has read any of the dozens of objective studies made of media reporting in the past decade. The MSM tilts left just as Fox News and “talk radio” tilts right.
The difference between the two is that neither Fox News nor righty talk radio hosts claim to be scrupulously objective. The MSM not only claims objectivity but demands that we give it special Constitutional protection because of it.
That’s not new. It’s the same old arguments made by the same old people in the same old way.
E.J. Dionne sounds like he’s telling us something new. He’s not. He’s simply reading the same old leftist cue cards that have been propped in front of the mavens of the MSM for as long as I’ve been alive.
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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media.
