Press Bias and the Campaign
Liberal bias in some elements of the press has always been one of those things that, like the weather, one can complain about but not do much to change. But perceptions may be starting to shift.
On August 1, John Tierney wrote in the New York Times about how he and his colleagues surveyed 153 journalists gathered at the Democratic National Convention. About a third of the respondents were from the Washington press corps, and Mr. Tierney found they favored Senator Kerry over President Bush by a margin of 12 to 1. Journalists from outside the beltway picked Mr. Kerry by a 3 to 1 margin. The journalists also said they would rather be stranded on a desert island with Mr. Kerry than with Mr. Bush. Beltway types picked Mr. Kerry 31 to 17; the others chose the senator 51 to 39.
Then last week came the Unity: Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The gathering, with more than 7,500 registrants, was the biggest convention of journalists ever held in America. At a Friday session, the CEO of Time Warner, Richard Parsons, said CNN "is viewed as liberal" because reporters "tend to want to look under the covers and reveal things that the establishment doesn't want to be revealed, and so they get put in the category of being liberal for that reason."
The "bias towards both discovery and revealing the truth that is inherent in journalism comes through in CNN," Mr. Parsons explained, "and they get characterized as being a liberal network." That must be why the investigative journalists at the American Spectator and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are tagged with such a liberal reputation.
The journalists' behavior at the Unity conference struck many as contradicting Mr. Parsons's assertions. Both presidential candidates spoke at the gathering, but, according to several press accounts, the journalists could not contain their enthusiasm for Mr. Kerry. The Massachusetts senator was given a standing ovation at his entrance and exit. The members of the press interrupted his speech about 50 times to applaud, and they cheered and whistled at Mr. Kerry's jabs at the Bush administration. Mr. Bush, in contrast, was greeted with polite but markedly cooler applause, and his comments prompted disparaging laughter from the crowd. One heckler had to be escorted from the room.
"Giving a presidential candidate a standing ovation during the height of the campaign is as unprofessional as it gets," a staff reporter for the Seattle Times, J. Patrick Coolican, wrote on his newspaper's blog. "Why would journalists, who presumably prize their objectivity and believe in their newsrooms' ethics codes, put their biases on display on C-SPAN?" asked columnist Helen Ubiņas in the Hartford Courant.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that liberals outnumber conservatives at large print publications by a ratio of 5 to 1. For local papers, it was 3 to 1. When the Unity activists spoke about the lack of "diversity" in the newsroom, they were more right than they realized. Something to keep in mind when watching the news or reading the papers.
