There’s a tired old saw in the news business is that if both sides criticize you for what you’ve reported, you must be doing a good job. Of course, as I like to remind journalism students, if everybody thinks you’re a jerk, you should consider the possibility that you really are a jerk.
When I wrote two weeks ago about assaults on the media from left and right, it was mostly the right that got upset. There is a widely accepted premise on that side of the political spectrum that mainstream media bias skews heavily left.
But there were also several responses from people who identify with the left and who feel that the mainstream media are too conservative.
John Cleveland, for example, feels that while The Denver Post “presents many opinion pieces that are arguably left-wing . . . I see more of a right-wing bias to its news reporting.”
The media’s failure to question the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq is a “very obvious” example to Cleveland of media conservatism. Repeating these “reckless lies” without raising doubts about their veracity has “led to the death of thousands of Americans and many more thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Cleveland said.
Steve Soller of Broomfield approaches the issue from the other side. Mainstream journalists, he writes, “are showing an insidious and pervasive bias towards the left, not just in the proportion and intensity of columns, editorials, and letters in the Op-Ed sections, but actual and easily seen bias in what are ostensibly ‘news’ articles.”
He concedes that the media do report negative stories about a liberal candidate — Barack Obama, to be specific — but they break off the attack much more quickly than they do when the story is about a conservative. It’s one story, then on to something else.
If the media don’t want to become the story, but only report the story, Soller writes, “then they must take a long, clear look at themselves. So long as they continue to dabble in playing politics, they will lose credibility. So long as they try to pull the puppet strings, without appearing to do so, they will engender a backlash.”
Give these folks credit; they’re willing to be quoted by name. One of the credibility problems of modern journalism is its acceptance of essentially anonymous rants from people who give only their Web screen aliases.
Peter Jeans of Evergreen writes that he, too, would like for the media to be held in higher regard, “and to attend to their purpose without fear that their every investigation will be labeled as a partisan hit job that therefore lacks credibility.”
But they’ve brought it on themselves “with unbalanced ‘reporting’ that comes across as obviously partisan,” he writes. “I am a wise news consumer, and I simply know when an article has lost perspective, is hypocritical or shows an egregious double standard. When will [the media] begin to be more critical of themselves for their plummeting standing with the public as regards trustworthiness? That might be a better step toward regaining trust than blaming the consumer.”
It’s only natural “to tend toward news sources with which we agree,” said Ray Schoch of Lakewood, summing it up nicely. “Slavishly following a preference for agreeable prose and opinions, however, isn’t good for either the individual in terms of intellectual growth, nor the society, if we want ‘democracy’ to be anything more than a transparently propagandistic term . . . . If we only hear what we want to hear, or what someone else wants us to hear, we’re not getting the full story, and democracy as a functioning political system is dead.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News. His column appears twice a month.
