Category: media

Megan McArdle:

In my 20 years of writing right-leaning columns at mainstream publications, I’ve made two arguments over and over. First, I’ve tried to convince my fellow journalists that liberal media bias is real. And second, I’ve tried to convince conservatives that, though it’s real, it’s not the conspiracy they imagine.

This is a hard moment to make that latter point. Frankly, if we had been colluding to cover up the decline of a Democratic president, who then undid all our efforts by going on national television and breaking the story himself … well, how much different would our coverage have looked? And if he hadn’t self-immolated at the debate, wouldn’t our readers still be in the dark?

That said, it really wasn’t a conspiracy. For one thing, mainstream outlets did report on the president’s age, even if too gently. Why were we so gentle? Well, there’s a broad journalistic norm against picking on physical characteristics (which is why even certified Donald Trump-hating columnists have made remarkably few cracks about his comb-over)

Obviously, it was a mistake to treat age, which affects job performance, like hairstyling, which doesn’t. But that error was bipartisan — over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Trump’s senior moments without ever putting those thoughts on the page.

If Trump had slipped as visibly and publicly as President Biden, it’s possible we would have covered that more aggressively. But there was a paradox — the reporters watching him most closely were seeing tiny, incremental changes, without necessarily being struck, as were people who infrequently tuned in, with the cumulative magnitude of the decline. Also, Biden’s White House was simply more skilled at deflecting journalists who did notice: masters of killing stories with kindness and punishing reporters who wrote things they didn’t like.

I’m told that journalists who started asking about Biden’s age would suddenly be given access to normally unavailable senior staffers for denials, then deluged by allies insisting he was at the top of his game in private. It was genuinely hard to know how to balance those testimonials against reports of possibly isolated lapses.

“But the videos!” my conservative readers are sputtering, and fair enough — yet video clips can mislead unless you know the context. (Remember the Covington Catholic fiasco?) The White House made it hard to get that context; staff rarely leaked, and anyway, few people outside Biden’s inner circle saw him enough to form a complete picture of his condition. The inner circle, meanwhile, is dominated by people who have been with the president for years.

A few phenomenally dogged reporters persisted anyway. But they weren’t rewarded for it because there seemed to be no audience for coverage of Biden. Articles languished unread, and Biden books weren’t selling.

Not good enough, I can hear my conservative readers saying. Okay, the White House made it difficult to get the story — but if Trump were president, reporters would have been more skeptical of White House spin, more motivated to crack the wall of silence to meet audience demand. And all I can say to that is: Yeah, you’re right.

The media’s treatment of Biden wasn’t a conspiracy to protect a Democratic president, but it looks like one because that was its practical effect. None of our decisions were entirely driven by partisanship. But if we’re honest, many of them were unduly influenced by it.

Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream newsrooms, journalists tended, with a few noble exceptions, to give a Democratic administration trust it didn’t deserve. The president’s invisibility was a giant red flag; they treated it as a restful break from having to monitor Trump’s ravings 24/7. As Biden’s decline grew more visible, people kept respectfully airing the administration’s insultingly implausible claims: that there was a secretly brilliant president flitting around the back corridors of the White House like Batman, while the videos of that same president acting befuddled on world stages were “cheap fakes.”

And when journalists did cover the issue, many outlets that had been pitilessly clear about Trump’s defects apparently couldn’t bring themselves to be quite so blunt about a president they liked — in part because that would make their friends mad, as well as the White House. A lot of articles about Biden’s age ended up so couched in ethereally vague language about “questions” and “concerns,” so defensively swaddled in equivocal context that the necessary SOS didn’t get through.

As a result, viewers of Fox News understood the president’s condition better than our audiences, which ought to be a huge wake-up call for us. We don’t have the exact problem conservatives imagine, but we do have a problem. And the only way to fix it is to add more viewpoint diversity to our newsrooms.

We should do this not for the benefit of conservative journalists, or politicians, but for the benefit of our readers. When our newsrooms lopsidedly support one party, our readers miss much of the story — in this case, nearly all of it. We need conservatives inside the building, helping us overcome our natural biases, instead of outside, complaining about them. We owe our readers, and our country, nothing less.

Scott Klug, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism graduate ,former Washington TV reporter, Madison TV anchor and (most remarkable of all) Republican Congressman from Madison:

Before I served four terms in Congress, I was an Emmy Award winning reporter in Seattle and Washington, D.C. I am fond of my alma mater and have been honored to serve on the board for more than a decade.

But I am an oddity. I am a Republican and unlike most of my journalism friends deeply skeptical of the role of government. In many ways I always felt more aligned with the students in my M.B.A class than my fellow journalists who never hid their distrust of business.

Given today’s long take-out on the troubles at NPR I will find myself at lunch in a lonely place championing ideological diversity in newsrooms.

If you haven’t been paying any attention to the coverage, Uri Berliner, a long-standing columnist at the paper, recently blasted the organization for its monolithic leftward tilt. Right out of the gate came a confession from him.

“You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing tote bag-carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely define me”, he wrote, “but it’s not far off. I was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother; I drive a Subaru and Spotify says my listening habits are most like people in Berkeley.”

But in his years at the radio network, he argued the organization had changed. Its new CEO quickly became Exhibit One.

Before her arrival earlier this month, new CEO Katherine Maher had blasted President Trump in social media and brandished a Biden for President hat in other postings. Not exactly a good look for the president of a journalism organization, one which still receives significant public funding.

“We’re looking for a leader right now who’s going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about,” Berliner wrote. “And this seems to be the opposite of that.”

The columnist put his journalistic skills to work and discovered that all eighty-seven of its editorial workers at its headquarters were Democrats. Not a single Republican.

Famed pollster Nate Silver would not be surprised. His research shows only seven per cent of journalists identify as Republicans.

And if you were puzzled by the fact that the New York Times and the Washington Post couldn’t see the Trump election coming in 2016, it’s because the national press corps lives in an ideological and demographic bubble. Politico media reporter Jack Shafer made the case in a post-election analysis.

“Nearly 90 percent of all internet publishing employees work in a county where Clinton won, and 75 percent of them work in a county that she won by more than 30 percentage points. When you add in the shrinking number of newspaper jobs, 72 percent of all internet publishing or newspaper employees work in a county that Clinton won.” As Jack concluded, “so when your conservative friends use “media” as a synonym for “coastal” and “liberal,” they’re not far off the mark.”

Bulwark columnist Charlie Sykes is an old friend from his days as a radio host in Milwaukee. His dad was a newspaper reporter during the heyday of big city newspapers.

He applauds the efforts by the news media to pursue diversity in the workplace but is puzzled that they are unable to see these ideological blinders as we recently discussed in my podcast “Lost in the Middle: America’s Political Orphans.”

“There’s a hive mind among journalists and reporters, where they sort of assume that everybody comes from the same cultural, intellectual, ideological background that they do. There are these blind spots,” he told me.

“I wish there would have been a little bit more introspection on the part of journalists about why people think you were biased as opposed to just brushing it off. You know smugness is not a business model, and I think there was a deeply ingrained sense that none of these critics are right, and if you, if you think we’re biased well, you just don’t know us.”

The NPR dust-up was preceded by our discussion months ago.

What was NPR’s reaction to the Berliner criticism? It suspended him for a week for not vetting his column internally. What a great expression of the First Amendment. He told them to shove it and quit. Good for him.

Look I am old school reporter and think that coverage should be balanced. I think that it was most voters still want. In my mind FOX and MSNBC live in parallel Universes I never visit.

Klug then followed up:

Last week’s column on NPR’s aversion to hiring Republican reporters in its newsroom (87 Democrats/no Republicans) struck a nerve with readers.

Most asked a simple question of me. What news sources should I trust? A suggestion for you a little bit later on. First let me give you some context.

If you are looking for old fashioned, balanced reporting today, it’s tough.

Let me explain how we got here. The answer is pretty simple. It’s all about economics. Journalism today is a brutal business.

Let’s talk about print first.

There is no way to tell exactly where it happened, but the death spiral of newspapers started with a used car purchase somewhere in America in 1995. It might have been an ‘84 Oldsmobile for all we know. That’s when the first transaction happened on Craigslist.

For anyone under 30 this is a mystery but for years huge, classified sections in Sunday’s newspapers are where most people shopped for cars, houses and jobs. Classifieds were a $19B business before Craigslist. Then 90% of that advertising disappeared.

And then the business got worse.

At the same time, subscriptions were dropping because readers were scrolling through online sources which were free, and which were more convenient. The arrival of mobile devices accelerated that trend.

Paul Gillen is a former reporter who started a website called ominously “Newspaper Death Watch. “It wasn’t one event”, he told me, “but it was a sequence of events triggered by the Internet, that between about 1995 and 2010 virtually destroyed the industry. 2006 was the best year the industry ever had. The year before, I wrote an opinion piece, predicting that the newspaper industry was about to enter a cataclysmic death spiral. And I sent it to several newspapers. It was rejected by all of them; I thought they’re whistling past the graveyard here.”

Newspapers in recent years have been closing at the astonishing rate of two a week.

Then cable tv suddenly found itself in a streaming world and its revenues plummeted.

“I would say within the last 18 months to two years cord cutting has accelerated so much, and people have dropped their subscriptions so much that the you need to focus on your core viewer who is going to keep paying,”  said Michael Socolow who is a Media professor at the University of Maine, and whose dad was legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite’s producer.

“So, you find MSNBC going further to the left, you find Fox News going further to the right, because those are the demographics that are willing to pay to keep their cable and to buy the advertising.”

Here’s the bottom line. To survive I believe most outlets have taken several steps to the right or left. My guidance is to assume there is media bias and be an informed viewer and reader. So how to make sense of it?

I would point you in the direction of a website called All Sides.

Its founders came out of the early tech world at Microsoft and they were frustrated because rather than the internet bringing people together it was sorting them in to warring camps.

Julie Mastrine runs the All-Sides bias project which has been analyzing stories since 2012. They like to use three person panels to review material: one Republican, one Democrat and one Independent.

It scores coverage based strictly on the language in the reporting. What they’ve established is a media chart you can see on their website.

They use multiple touch points to score bias. Here is one example.

“But we do train our bias reviewers on what to look for that can show bias and word choice is probably one of the biggest indicators of bias. A really obvious example of that would be, is the media outlet, calling immigrants illegal aliens? Or are they calling them unauthorized migrants or asylum seeking migrants, or something like that? So, some of the language that we see from the left on that issue kind of softens the issue and kind of obscures the illegality of the act, and then the word choice we see from the right focus is more on the illegality of what’s going on.”

The research splits the media into five silos: far left (MSNBC is here), left (New York Times), center (Reuters and the BBC), leans right (Wall Steet Journal) far right (Fox and Newsmax).

And she is delighted when both political camps call foul!

“Mostly we get people who are grateful for what we’re doing. I’d say that’s the overwhelming amount of feedback. People know that they’re in a very messy and polarized media environment,” she told me recently. “I think they’re grateful for people who are out there trying to give a meta analysis and help people sort through all the muck and noise. One day we get accused of being left wing, and then the next day right ring. We figure we’re doing a good job if we’re getting accusations from both sides, and kind of angering both sides in different ways.”

Granularly, I still believe reporters stick to the facts but the secret sauce is who assigns the story and what’s the angle? Read Uri Berliner’s column on NPR and look at the three stories he cites: The Biden laptop, the origins of Covid and the Mueller report.

As for me? I start my day by watching the BBC, CNBC and then reading the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the Milwaukee Journal for local flavor (i.e the Packers. I am after all a team owner).

I know political orphans in particular are frustrated with today’s news coverage. Voters who are subscribers to our website http://www.lostmiddle.com continually write about where to find objective news coverage.

My admonition to you and them is to approach any news source with eyes very wide open.

Unfortunately, what Klug counsels requires thought. Even within the parties that seems to be too much to ask now, particularly with the pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions within the Republican Party.