Of all the pieces of greasy stinking propaganda shat out by the right wing PR machine and regurgitated by the weak minded slogan robot conservatives on this board and in the culture generally, none is more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and demonstrably false than the notion of persistent left wing bias in the national media. About four years ago I undertook a serious research project on the origins of this claim, in the process accumulating a massive library of "research" on the media's left wing slant. Two conclusions immediately struck me.
First, the type of evidence typically employed to make the liberal media case has, since the late 1960s, been almost entirely comprised of anecdotal or statistical data badly taken out of context. The author of the study will cite numerous published or behind the scenes instances of a particular journalist expressing a left of center (or often not sufficiently right of center) perspective on an issue, and then combines it with a statistic that demonstrates the left leaning attitudes of journalists as a whole, like the oft cited 70% of journalists who voted for Clinton in 1992. The point is, claims about liberal media bias almost always rest on the notion that the personal attitudes of journalists are the primary factor in shaping the content of mainstream news. Now, even if a collection of anecdotes and the fact of voting for Clinton in 1992 indicate a consistent liberal attitude, why are we supposed to conclude that journalists on average are free enough in their profession to control the entire editorial slant of their organizations? What the right-wingers fail (deliberately) to account for in their screeds is the political economy under which the news media, and its employees, operate. The fact of media's narrow concentration into a small number of private hands, and its total dependence on corporate underwriting in the form of advertising for almost all of its revenue, are crucial factors in determining the boundaries of acceptable reporting which any news room -even if it were peopled by Viet Cong or former members of the Weather Underground- needs to consider if its staff wants to keep their jobs. Other important factors journalists and editors need to pay close attention to in order to survive are the willingness of their sources to cooperate with them. Because the news media in this country is a big business, the bottom line at the end of the day isnâ??t quality or integrity, its, well, the bottom line. This has lead to a situation in which packaged stories are preferred to ones that have to be dug for. On any given issue there are a dozen think tanks and PR wings of government agencies that provide regular briefings and mountains of data to reporters for free in order to get their story across. As a reporter, being paid by the word and with crushing deadlines constantly looming, simply regurgitating the stories the think tanks and the PR experts feed them is the only way to get by, and a way that keeps editors, investors, and sources generally happy. With these very real constraints in mind, one can begin to see that the voting pattern of journalists in a given election, or a possible anecdote revealing an individual reporter's personal values, is entirely meaningless.
The second conclusion I drew from my personal study of this issue was that the "liberal media" myth got its start, was cultivated and disseminated, by a series of right wing think tanks and Republican Party loyalists. The attitudes of the person or persons engaged in this type of research has never been neutral. The best example of this is an organization called Accuracy in the Media (AIM), which since the 80s has been publishing a constant stream of "liberal media" bashing in the form of studies of such poor quality they don't stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny, and is funded generously by fortune 500 corporations. AIM is a single example of around a dozen or so "think tanks", all funded by the same sources, that have the purpose of getting their claims, no matter how poorly substantiated, into the public consciousness. They are engines of "political flak" used to intimidate journalists and indoctrinate the public. And fuck you if you buy their shit.
XTC Reviewed by XTC on . The myth of the liberal Media Of all the pieces of greasy stinking propaganda shat out by the right wing PR machine and regurgitated by the weak minded slogan robot conservatives on this board and in the culture generally, none is more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and demonstrably false than the notion of persistent left wing bias in the national media. About four years ago I undertook a serious research project on the origins of this claim, in the process accumulating a massive library of "research" on the media's left wing Rating: 5