Today's morning news roundup contained a link to and a three paragraph quote from a terrific op-ed piece from the New York Times, The Boys Who Cried Fox, by Nicole Hemmer. It's actually a decent history of press coverage of presidential nominees since the election of 1800, and a must-read for anyone, especially if you live among wingnuts.
Her contention is that
The funny thing is that this role reversal is the end product of a process that was set in motion by the conservative media. Having spent decades promoting the charge of bias, they have helped strip it of meaning. These days, bias translates roughly to “reporting something I don’t like,” a reflexive defense against stories that cut against conservative interests.
More below:
Indeed. If you visit sites like mediamatters com, you know all about this. It seems that this has been going on since the 1950s when people like William F. Buckley decided the soft liberal bias of the media had to be counteracted by a more "conservative" take on the events of the day. Hemmer deftly shows that "how left" doesn't quite work here:
. . . to say the press reflected liberalism is not to say it did so consciously or conspiratorially, as many conservatives claimed, nor to say it stifled only one type of opinion. Try being a socialist or anywhere to the left of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and 1960s and you would quickly find the limits of media’s leftward lean.
Nixon naturally exacerbated this (you might say he brought whining about the press to its highest point), and if you read the piece, you'll see that Buckley developed a proto-think-tank to "expose" the leftist lean of the media. There was of course pushback, but it's refreshing to see a case where both sides do it that isn't exactly a false equivalency:
The words “liberal bias,” “establishment” and now “lamestream media” have become a sloppy shorthand for an entire system of beliefs. This has its parallels on the left, where reflexive cries of “rigged elections” and “Faux News” create the same divisions. For both sides, the world can be easily split into us and them, conservatives on one side, liberals on the other, locked in a pitched ideological battle for political power. When it’s us, it’s truth; when it’s them, it’s bias.
What's new now is the accusation by people like Gingrich and Santorum that vehicles like Fox News and National Review Online (or "National Romney Online") that the right wing media are biased against
them. This, according to Hemmer, has pretty much defanged the accusations and showed them to be of the "bias-because-I-don't-like-it" variety:
By deploying the media-bias charge against an institution developed to combat it, Gingrich demonstrated just how meaningless the indictment has become.
Now that I've been through this, the piece, still worth reading, is too clever by not quite half, but too clever nonetheless. Through the nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines were creatures of political parties. As an example,
The Nation, which runs ads touting the "liberal bias" you can't find anywhere else, started life in the 1860s as the intellectual mouthpiece of the William Seward-Thurlow Weed Republican party. This hasn't ever really ended -- Hemmer points out that the Chicago Tribune was conservative into the 1960s, and the "bias" is easy to find as long as you know you have to look for it. As anyone who has read Hayden White and other practitioners of modern historiography knows, every writer brings his or her own baggage to every writing project, and whether it shows is more an authorial decision than anything else.
Consider this an open thread on media bias, because I'm about to take a Metrolink train out to Claremont to present the paper in If Marriage is in Trouble, Don't Blame Marriage Equality, and then I'm off to the airport, and I'm not going to be online to review stuff until probably 9:30 or 10 PM PDT.
11:09 AM PT: I changed the title to add a question mark (it bothered me that it wasn't there all the way out here on the train). I know that media bias exists, and I know that some of it is pernicious. It goes beyond the authorial baggage we all bring to the exercise of writing, especially when its political.
Also, I posted this diary in feeling of schadenfreude over Santorum and Gingrich complaining that their own media vehicles (Faux and NRO) were turning against them. I hope this helps explain the diary better.