EDITOR’S NOTE: The following lecture was presented at Grove City College on November 12, 2002.
Whenever I am invited to give a talk, I like to remind my audience of Lord Northcliffe’s classic definition of a newspaperman.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following lecture was presented at Grove City College on November 12, 2002.
Whenever I am invited to give a talk, I like to remind my audience of Lord Northcliffe’s classic definition of a newspaperman. “It is the task of the journalist,” he said, “to explain to others things that he himself doesn’t understand.” So I can’t promise any hard and fast answers to the question of “how the media got that way.” There are days when I think that the thing I least understand is my own profession. The framers of our Constitution, of course, clearly believed that a free press was indispensable to republican government. They didn’t write the First Amendment to the Constitution because they viewed the press as incapable of error. They understood quite well the limitations of the ink-stained wretches who regularly distorted the news or served as paid shills for one faction or another. But they still thought it worthwhile to make sure that government would keep its hands off the press. Over time, they were confident, truth would win out.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to a friend in 1787, explained it this way: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Well, if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, I suspect he would have some second thoughts about that – especially after watching the shouting matches on Capitol Gang or the McLaughlin Report. And I’m sure he would have some doubts about whether the First Amendment ought to apply to Hustler Magazine.
Not that the press in Jefferson’s day was very genteel itself. Indeed, it could be viciously partisan and highly biased, even salacious. Jefferson himself apparently hired an English hack journalist named James Callender to dig up dirt on his arch-rival, the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. And when Callender didn’t receive the compensation he felt was his due, he turned on Jefferson. He was the first to bring light to the rumors of Jefferson’s alleged affair with one of his slave girls, Sally Hemmings – allegations that are still the stuff of vigorous debate today. But Jefferson’s point about the value of a free press was sound enough: not only should government have internal checks and balances, but the people should also have the tools they needed for casting informed votes and otherwise holding government accountable. A free press is one such tool – and arguably the most important.
Bias in the Media
But having worked in three different newsrooms over the course of nearly 40 years, I have grown increasingly concerned about our ability to deliver on this promise. More important, perhaps, the public appears to doubt it, too. It’s not just that we regularly get things wrong. The public is adult enough to know that the first rough draft of history, as journalism is sometimes called, will be full of errors. Most often, though, these amount to venial sins. What really concerns people, I suspect, is the self-evident bias that so plainly shines through much of what the mainstream media – the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, CBS, NBC, even the news sections of the Wall Street Journal – prints and says.
Survey after survey has shown that the leanings of the media are well to the left of the rest of American society. To cite just a few:
* In the mid-1990s, the Los Angeles Times published a study that compared the attitudes of the press with those of the public. Among the public, 40 percent called themselves “conservative.” Among the press it was 5 percent.
* A 1996 study by the Roper Poll of 139 national reporters and bureau chiefs in Washington found that 50 percent described themselves as Democrats. Four percent described themselves as Republicans.
* And then there was the famous poll of the national press corps after the 1992 elections. It found that 89 percent of the Washington reporters had voted for Bill Clinton, while 5 percent voted for the first George Bush.
Now, I know a lot of fine reporters and editors who strive to filter their biases out of their work and tell it straight. Nevertheless, an American Society of Newspaper Editors survey several years ago found that 78 percent of American adults agree there is bias in the media. And a poll by Editor and Publisher magazine during the 2000 election found that two-thirds of those who describe the media as biased believe it was biased in the direction of Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president.
The bias shows up in many ways. With a limited amount of space and airtime available to them, journalists and editors must select what they wa