Media Bias

Your Minister of Propaganda doesn't really feel like going into this in depth (and he's not really back, just visiting), but felt some sort of response was demanded by the Foreign Minister's casual accusations of leftist bias in the media. First of all, newspaper endorsements go both ways in a given election and always have. Will 2004 be different? Perhaps. When 60% of the citizens think the country is on the wrong track, probably a greater number of papers are going to endorse the challenger. Either way, legitimate new organizations struggle -- sometimes successfully, and sometimes not -- to keep what happens on the editorial pages away from what gets reported as 'news' on page one. This is the real issue of 'bias.' With the exception of Fox News (more on that at the end), the moments of intentional overlap tend to be few and are severely dealt with by the organizations themselves. But again, endorsements are nothing new -- certainly no 'smoking gun' (or 'weapons of mass destruction,' in Bushspeak) there.

Certainly a gentle reader might ask, but isn't there an unconscious bias in favor of a certain candidate, and might not that unconscious bias in turn affect the news coverage? In fact, study after study has shown that their is indeed an bias, whether unconscious or not. However, the bias actually favors the right. In the 2000 election, negative coverage of Gore far outpaced negative coverage of Bush. Knowing both men, who do you think actually made more stumbles -- and I'll generously call Bush's mistakes 'stumbles' instead of 'lies' -- on the campaign trail in 2000? Based on the total news coverage, you would think it was Gore. Now if you were trying to prove a leftist bias in the media, you would expect -- actually, you would demand -- that the opposite be true. Coverage of the 2004 election is following the same pattern.

As a general rule, in 2000, the mainsteam media tended to allow for Bush's missteps while pouncing on Gore's errors. Gore was consistently held to a higher -- indeed, a biased -- standard for both consistency and fact-checking: for example, whereas Bush was allowed to claim blatant falsehood concerning Texas's educational reforms, Gore got a huge cycle of negative media coverage over the manner in which he phrased his contributions to the Internet. Part of it is the 'echo chamber effect' from the right-wing underground media: an incident gets passed back and forth long enough between the Drudge report and Rush Limbaugh, and eventually it gets reported as 'news' upstairs. There is no equivalent on the left: articles in alternative newspapers very rarely make it to the cover of the The New York Times. Another possible explanation is that the mainstream media unconsciously over-compensates for a perceived leftist bias that doesn't actually exist, thereby shifting itself off the center. A more insidious explanation is that while editors and other media professionals may express personal sympathies towards the left, they are in fact a part of large news conglomerates that depend on the loosening of media restrictions for their continued growth and therefore quite consciously favor the right. However you choose to explain it, the bias exists.

The same right-leaning bias was true of the coverage leading up to the Iraq invasion, when the mainstream media echoed the administration's reasoning for war with barely a spellcheck on the assertions. It's easy to say now that 'everybody' thought there were WMD's in Iraq, but in fact there were lots of voices cautioning the opposite; in an unbiased media, you would expect at least some investigation of opposing, democratic views.

Getting back to Fox News, most of the discussion surrounding the movie 'OutFoxed' is how everyone on both sides of the aisle already knows that Fox News has an obvious bias, and therefore it's okay -- the Minister of Propaganda remembers the Foreign Minister making an argument in this vein. However, the Minister of Propaganda recently saw the movie (he was planning on skipping it, since he thought he was familiar with the argument, but was with a group of insistent liberals), and found Fox New's systemmatic and ongoing effort to undermine the basic fundamentals of the fourth estate to be very disturbing. He strongly encourages everyone to see the film. He is, in fact, most interested in hearing the viewpoints of the Foreign Minister and our esteemed Maximum Leader after seeing the argument layed out on screen.

Point: whether your personal politics favor the left or the right, the anti-democratic efforts of Fox News is bad for the republic. Your counterpoints are welcome (THAT'S how democracy is supposed to work).

Believe.