And then manage it, challenge it, and account for it
By Thomas Edsall
Columbia Journalism Review
October 8, 2009
The floodtide of e-mails and letters to New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt after his September 27 column on the paper’s failure to promptly investigate the conservative-initiated stories about Van Jones and ACORN testifies to the failure of the mainstream press to deal with the issue of liberal bias.
“Many readers were not buying [the] contention that liberal bias had nothing to do with the slow response to ACORN and, before that, to the resignation of Van Jones, a White House aide,” Hoyt wrote this past Sunday.
Hoyt quoted correspondence from angry Times readers: “‘So, beside Jill Abramson, Bill Keller and Barack Obama, were you able to find anyone, not resident in a cemetery, who was so tuned out?’ asked Charles Harkins of Spartanburg, S.C. Jerry Komar of Collingswood, N.J., charged that Times editors ‘hoped the story would blow over. They were caught in their own web of bias.’”
Glenn Beck, FOX, and a couple of conservative video reporters have, in effect, forced the editors and ombudsmen at two of the nation’s leading newspapers, the Times and The Washington Post, to assume a full-scale defensive posture regarding charges of liberal bias…
…The mainstream press is liberal. Once, before 1965, reporters were a mix of the working stiffs leavened by ne’er-do-well college grads unfit for corporate headquarters or divinity school. Since the civil rights and women’s movements, the culture wars and Watergate, the press corps at such institutions as The Washington Post, ABC-NBC-CBS News, the NYT, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, etc. is composed in large part of “new” or “creative” class members of the liberal elite—well-educated men and women who tend to favor abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. In the main, they find such figures as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell beneath contempt.
In a UCLA study of media bias, reporters were found to be substantially more liberal and more Democratic than the public at large. Hoyt, in a column last year, acknowledged this finding: “Being human, journalists do have personal biases, and a long line of studies has shown that they tend to be more socially and politically liberal than the population at large. There is no reason to believe Times journalists are any different.”…
Read the entire article here.
Thomas Edsall is the political editor of the Huffington Post and the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
