thedrifter
07-15-04, 07:32 AM
High Bias
"Mainstream" reporters aren't just liberal--they're fanatical.
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Monday, July 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.
Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing?
Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer.
It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage).
I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News.
So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.
But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.
So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?
One recent morning--the Sunday before Memorial Day--I picked up the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and started looking through national news coverage. You know, the stuff that is filtered through the lens of liberal bias long before it even reaches local papers, which rarely revise what they get off the wire services.
In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror."
Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right?
Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point.
The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it.
This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically.
Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs."
Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media.
The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt.
Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why?
First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids.
Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness.
In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it.
But let me go on. A story about terrorists murdering civilians and taking hostages in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, never actually uses the word terrorist. Instead, the killers are "gunmen" (in the headline), "suspected Islamic militants wearing military-style uniforms" and "attackers" (in the body of the story).
Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America.
That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on?
This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us.
Let's go on to the coverage of Bill Cosby's remarks on the self-defeating actions of some segments of the American black community. In the Asheville Citizen-Times, it's hard to find what is newsworthy about the article at all. Mr. Cosby's remarks are reported as taking place "earlier this month," and there is no event since then to justify considering this new article as "news."
In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him.
After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"?
continued.......
"Mainstream" reporters aren't just liberal--they're fanatical.
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Monday, July 12, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
When Fox News Channel was founded by Rupert Murdoch, the consensus was that no startup all-news cable channel could possibly compete with CNN, and if any startup had a chance, it was MSNBC, which had the combined clout of NBC's esteemed news division and Microsoft, which in those days was believed to own the future.
Now, almost a decade later, Fox News Channel has left both CNN and MSNBC in the dust. There's no guarantee that this is permanent, of course. But it certainly has the left in a panic. They hated it that American conservatism had any voice at all, back when it was confined to a few radio talk shows--remember how everybody wanted to blame Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk-radio hosts for the Oklahoma City bombing?
Now, though, to have Fox News Channel be the source for the largest portion of America's TV news junkies just sticks in their craw. How could such a thing happen? Scott Collins, author of "Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN," thinks he has the answer.
It's not what Fox claims--that the American news media have a pronounced and painful liberal bias, so that huge numbers of Americans had given up on TV news, only to return in droves when Fox News offered them a balanced, trustworthy source of information. No, it's that a large number of Americans believed that the news was biased. How they got this idea is that they were . . . hmmm . . . idiots? But no matter. Mr. Collins repeatedly states that the perception is what mattered, and by homing in on the audience dumb enough to think the media was biased, Fox News won the ratings race (but not, of course, the race for quality news coverage).
I'm painting Mr. Collins's book far too negatively, and I'm doing it deliberately. In fact, you can finish "Crazy Like a Fox" and think you have received a balanced story. Nowhere does Mr. Collins actually say that Fox News viewers are idiots. But Mr. Collins is a product of the liberal American news media, which are deeply offended at any accusation of bias. They don't twist the news--they inform their readers of the truth. And when they see Fox News trumpeting slogans like "we report, you decide" and "fair and balanced," they see red. They take it for granted that those slogans are true of every news outlet except Fox News.
So when Mr. Collins sets out to write a fair and balanced account of Fox News's triumph, he does not realize that his own reporting is biased, too. He scrupulously avoids demonizing the folks at Fox News.
But the bias is there. It is simply taken for granted that Fox distorts the news, that Fox is unusual for taking sides, while all of the allegations about liberal bias are refuted so that one could close this book believing that liberal bias in the vast majority of the American news media is a delusion shared only by dimwitted conservatives who don't like it that the world has passed them by--and blame the messenger.
So let's put it to the test. Is there a real leftist bias in the mainstream news?
One recent morning--the Sunday before Memorial Day--I picked up the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times and started looking through national news coverage. You know, the stuff that is filtered through the lens of liberal bias long before it even reaches local papers, which rarely revise what they get off the wire services.
In a story on Donald Rumsfeld's remarks to the graduating class at West Point, here is the lead paragraph: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, making no mention of the prisoner abuse scandal that has led to calls for his ouster, told a cheering crowd of graduating cadets Saturday that they will help win the global fight against terror."
Let's see, how could there be any bias in that? Every word is true, right?
Except for this: The first thing mentioned, the lens through which we are forced to view the rest of the story, is something that did not happen and that only an idiot would expect might happen: Mr. Rumsfeld mentioning the prisoner-abuse scandal at a commencement address at West Point.
The lead, in other words, is not the graduation that is supposedly being reported, but rather Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to resign in the face of events that happened weeks ago. How is Mr. Rumsfeld's not resigning news? It's mentioned in this story only because the reporter does not want to let go of it.
This is bulldog journalism: Once you get hold of a story, you never loosen your grip until your victim dies--at least politically.
Does it happen to everybody? Or just Republicans? Well, try this fictitious opening paragraph: "Senator Hillary Clinton, making no mention of the $100,000 she once made by trading cattle futures with astonishing perfection, told a cheering crowd of activists that President Bush's globalist economic policy is hurting poor people in other countries and costing American jobs."
Nope. You've never seen it, and you never will. Because bulldog journalism only goes one way in our "unbiased" mainstream media.
The only differences between Fox News and all the other news media are (1) they admit that on some issues they take sides, and (2) they allow the conservative side to be heard--without contempt.
Fox News, for instance, made the decision after 9/11 that they would display the American flag. This has caused (and still causes) seething resentment from the rest of the news media. Why?
First, it implies that the rest of the news media aren't patriotic. Well, duh. Come on, prior to 9/11--and even after it--they prided themselves on not being patriotic and spoke of people who were self-consciously patriotic with contempt. They thought of themselves as being above national borders. You can't have it both ways, kids.
Second, it's pandering to the ignorant unwashed masses of Americans who want their news from people who are "on our side." Again, duh. When a nation is at war--which on 9/11 we finally realized that we are--we don't want to hear the news from neutral parties. We want the news to be accurate, yes--and Fox has had its share of painfully accurate scoops that nobody wanted to hear, but which we needed to know. But when a negative story comes out, we want the people telling us the news to say it with regret. And when America wins, we want our news media to tell us with excitement and happiness.
In other words, we want to hear the truth from a friend. From someone who is one of us. And if it took an Australian-born mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to give us an American national news source, so be it.
But let me go on. A story about terrorists murdering civilians and taking hostages in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, never actually uses the word terrorist. Instead, the killers are "gunmen" (in the headline), "suspected Islamic militants wearing military-style uniforms" and "attackers" (in the body of the story).
Suspected Islamic militant--this pussyfooting appellation even though later in the story we learn that an Islamic group called "Al-Quds" and signing itself "al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula" is claiming credit for the attack. But presumably they are only "suspected" of being Islamic militants because, after all, they might turn out to be long-hidden Nazis or perhaps holdouts from the Irish Republican Army or--who knows?--maybe Timothy McVeigh's buddies from the "red states" in America.
That's what makes some Americans turn away from mainstream sources in disgust. Why in the world is there any need for the news writers to wrap themselves in impartiality when the story makes Islamic militants look bad, but when the story is about our own secretary of defense, he gets slapped around from the first paragraph on?
This "neutral" approach to a terrorist attack on Americans and other westerners working for American companies in Saudi Arabia is one reason why Fox News is triumphing. Fox makes it clear that they're on America's side, that what happens to Americans abroad is happening to "us"--in short, they feel our pain because they are part of us.
Let's go on to the coverage of Bill Cosby's remarks on the self-defeating actions of some segments of the American black community. In the Asheville Citizen-Times, it's hard to find what is newsworthy about the article at all. Mr. Cosby's remarks are reported as taking place "earlier this month," and there is no event since then to justify considering this new article as "news."
In fact, the "story" is a thinly disguised editorial, in which Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela seems to be trying to draw the controversy to a "balanced" conclusion. Mr. Cosby's most heated remarks are quoted, but fairly, and in context, and his credentials are respected. Ms. Hajela is not out to "get" him.
After summarizing Mr. Cosby's weeks-ago remarks, Ms. Hajela then gives one paragraph to Jimi Izrael's criticism of Cosby's remarks, who merely objected to Cosby's tone and privileged position. Then Ms. Hajela quotes the Rev. Conrad Tillard of Roxbury, Mass., at some length. Obviously, it was Mr. Tillard's statement that provided the trigger for this article. It's the reason that Mr. Cosby was "news" again--though Mr. Cosby gets the headline to himself because who would read an article headlined "Rev. Tillard answers Cosby"?
continued.......