I'm sure those dead media barons do indeed have as much influence as living ones... on your world. On my planet, dead people are not influential bosses.

jleader: Mostly we're in violent agreement. Except the part about what politicians will say to get elected. Campaign talk is a special kind of Clydesdalean horseshit that drops outside rational discussion.

QQ:I think there have been plenty of rich media barons (not Rupert) with a liberal perspective. The Sulzbergers, Ted Turner, the Grahams, the Paleys. I would say the NYT, WashPost, CNN and CBS continue this tradition. I consider these to be quite major news outlets.

I think the real complaint is "people with access to a forum I don't have access to aren't me, and don't agree with my biases". I've seen this from the left, and from the right. The critics all seem to think that they're near the center, and therefor anyone who disagrees with them very much must be on the far side of the center.

Edited by author 03-10-2003 03:44 PM
Even assuming that young up-and-comers are liberal -- they tend more to be radical on whatever end, and I've seen a lot of very conservative radicals amongst the young 'uns of the past 20 years -- you would have to assume that the owners of the major (and most minor) news outlets, print and broadcast, do not exert any influence on their employees. This is just unbelieveable. Even if, and this is also a big big if, the owners didn't outright push the coverage toward their views, and even if they had no hand in who was hired to run these organizations (which would be bizarre), the employees certainly are bright enough to know how's signing their paychecks, and this alone produces an effect. To suggest it wouldn't is to suggest that newspeople are unlike all other people everywhere. The only thing you're left with is to argue that the extremely rich owners of the vast majority of all news media outlets are overwhelmingly liberal, and that's just plain nuts.

Actually, chico, I think appearing to stand up for the little guy is the Prime Directive for _all_ American politicians!

In fact, if you have a one-vote-per-citizen democracy, with a power-law type of distribution of wealth (which I suspect is a natural result of free-market capitalism, but that's not important here), politicians _must_ claim to stand up for the little guy, since there are so many more of them. After all, no one gets elected by saying "I'm standing up for the people who are so rich and powerful, they don't really need my help".

Likewise, where's the drama in a story about an unpleasant malevolent minority, easily controlled by the more powerful good majority? Dramatic tension comes from fighting against the odds, so journalists are much more interested in writing about underdogs who are good guys, if at all possible.

It seems to me the liberal media bias in the U.S., which obviously to some isn't leftish enough, is not political as much as generational. Young journalists, in fact, most young people, see their mission as standing up for the underdog, the little guy. This is a noble pursuit. It's also the Prime Directive of the Left, which, given a choice, will always choose Humanist goals over Realist ones. It's why, for example, Israel, once the fashionable underdog in the Middle East, has been underdogged by the even more woeful Palestinians. Underdog reporting, with its human-interest approach, is necessary to balance the actions of established institutions, which always seem too cold and pragmatic. Underdog reporting has brought about much positive social change, and its establishment-defying, power-to-the-people quality is why it's popular among the writers, reporters and journalists who influence the country most. Rancorous conservative voices fill the lulls now and then, but they pose no real threat. The liberal bias of the Fourth Estate is the natural, and inevitable, state of journalism.

What Pat said and more. The bias in the language of the US media is bad, but the real point is in their choice of agenda, what gets reported and what is unreported.

Excellent point, Dave. I watch BBC t.v. news and listen to the Canadian Broadcasting Service pretty much every day to get some kind of reality check on what's happening. It isn't just media bias in favor of conservatives, but their pervasive lack of reporting on anything else on the planet that gets me.

Yeah, Bennett, and I guess the Clinton's 20 thou loss on an ancient real estate deal was all about national security. The serial hypocrisy of the rightwing is truly breathtaking.

And if you think the "mainstream" media has a left wing bias (and I don't believe that you really do), take a look at the international press and see the difference between their reporting and US reporting, from the NYT to CBS News.

The Bush national guard thing is basically a story about book keeping, not national security. In other words, it's a non-story.

The media still has a left-wing bias, and those who say otherwise aren't paying attention to broadcast TV, newspapers, and magazines. The right has an edge on the much less important Fox News cable channel and talk radio, and that drives the left insane.

Edited by author 03-09-2003 02:20 PM
Ah, well that's different. His campaign staff says he simply ignored direct instructions from headquarters to report for duty for 6 weeks. And he didn't do the service he was supposed to be doing with either his Texas unit or the Alabama unit he supposedly transferred to. That's much better. So we'll just have to change "for 18 months" to "for an extended period". No problem. I'm sure they gave eveyone the benefit of the doubt like that during the Vietnam war.

Then you point out that the problem was that the difference between Clinton and Bush is that Clinton followed his stated principles at that time, while Bush didn't. I think this would play differently if the political parties were reversed.

"A hawkish pol getting deferred would be interesting but minor, but AWOL for 18 months? And it's documented?"

Uh, no, it's not documented very well at all which is the big difference. If something akin to the documentation that occurred with Clinton had shown up, then it would have been a much larger story. Instead what you have here is the opposite -- a one year (not 18 month) gap in Bush's service record.

TomPaine.Com has a nice look at the whole situation (http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/3671). One thing you will note is that when Bush moves to Alabama he requests to join what is basically an Air Reserves paper unit and that unit accepts him. Howver, that transfer is rejected by Director of Personnel Resources for the Air Reserves. But by the time that rejection gets around to getting sent, Bush has already left Texas and is working on the Alabama political campaign.

The difference between the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush stories is that Bush was not dumb enough to put in writing that a) he was actively trying to avoid the draft, b) he supported draft resisters, and c) that he loathed the military. If Clinton had never made the mistake of spilling his guts to Col. Eugene Holmes in 1969, that story would have died a slow death as well.

Edited by author 03-08-2003 09:19 PM
And it was reported on rather extensively for such a minor story during the 2000 campaign by everyone from the Boston Globe to the Washington Post.

Was it? Here's the question asked on www.awolbush.com: "Why did Bill Clinton's "draft dodging" merit 13,641 major news stories, while GW Bush's desertion merit only 49?"

A hawkish pol getting deferred would be interesting but minor, but AWOL for 18 months? And it's documented? During wartime? And no retribution? That's a minor story? During the Vietnam war, Guard members who went AWOL were typically immediately drafted into the regular forces and sent to Vietnam. The other option would be jail. Yet neither of these things was done with Bush -- nothing was done in fact. That's not a minor story. Imagine the reaction if the pol in question was a Democrat who'd gone AWOL for 18 months in wartime with no retribution. It would dog him throughout his presidency, with Republicans calling for impeachment every step of the way.

Edited by author 03-08-2003 08:21 PM
Nunberg undermines his argument with this comment at the TAP weblog, IMO:

"But those comparisons are as transparently loaded as Goldberg's are. After all, the Sierra Club membership came close to adopting a resolution favoring immigration restriction a few years ago, and Planned Parenthood proudly points out that Peggy Goldwater was the founder of its Arizona chapter. To insist that the press describe these groups as liberal amounts to demanding that it adopt the lexicon of the right on a wholesale basis, like a baseball manager demanding that the team's own fans should determine the strike zone. Again, this one is for the bleachers."

When you are reduced to arguing that the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood are not liberal groups, you've stretched your argument nano-thin. That would be like claiming that the NRA and National Right to Life are not conservative, and that to say they are is simply adopting the Left lexicon wholesale.

Frankly all of this "the press is conservative/liberal" arguments seem like pointless inside baseball which largely serves simply to illuminate the particular political bias of the person making the claim.

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/bias.html

On the Bias
Geoffrey Nunberg
Commentary broadcast on "Fresh Air," March 19, 2002
revised, 3/22/02

"For the most part, Goldberg's book [Bias] is a farrago of anecdotes, hearsay, and unsupported generalizations. But at one point he strays into territory that can actually be put to a test. That's when he claims that the media "pointedly identify conservative politicians as conservatives," but rarely use the word "liberal" to describe liberals."
[...]
"For purposes of comparison, I took the names of ten well-known politicans, five liberals and five conservatives.[...] Then I looked to see how often each of those names occurred within seven words of liberal or conservative , whichever was appropriate." [in] "about 30 major newspapers, including The New York Times , the LA Times, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe , the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle ."