PressThink: Has Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate? A Man of the Left Responds to PressThink's Questions

Has Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate? A Man of the Left Responds to PressThink's Questions

"Any leftist who stops to think about the matter would probably agree: the media are too liberal, indeed!" And that means a genuine left perspective is left out. Brian Dominick takes bias apart, from his side of the table.

A reader writes:

My name is Brian Dominick, and I’m an online news editor who has mostly been involved with explicitly Leftist media projects over the years, including ZNet. I am currently working on a progressive news media project called The NewStandard, which releases in December, 2003. I thought I’d take a minute to answer your questions, since it seems so far only Right Wing respondents have provided answers.

PressThink: 1.) If you walk up to a journalist with: “did you know you’re biased?” by far the most likely response from that person will be: actually, you’re saying that because you’re biased. Does that strike you as a sensible conversation, worth continuing?

Brian Dominick: Of course everyone is biased. Everyone has a perspective. We prioritize facts based on something. We put quotes in a certain order and allow for them to be a certain length— based on something. For that matter, we seek out quotes from various parties, instead of other various parties, based on something.

Those “somethings” are in fact bias, even if it isn’t our own, personal bias. It might be our newspaper’s bias, our editor’s bias, or it might be our journalism school’s bias. But there has to be bias, else news would present all the details, no matter how minor, about every story that ever comes across every journalist’s or editor’s desk, no matter how irrelevant or unimportant.

A journalist is first and foremost a filter— the amount of information (the amount of sources) excluded from a story always exceeds, exponentially, the amount of information/sources included in the story. The same goes for choosing what stories to cover in the first place. That determination is based on something, and that something is a bias. Or, you can call it whatever you wish (criteria, standards, etc.), but whatever that is, that’s what is meant by bias, if the term bias is to be useful to us at all.

The debate shouldn’t be about whether news media are biased, but about what the biases are, what drives them, and how they should best be exposed to the public.

PressThink: 2.) If, aware of this response, you decide you need evidence, and so produce the many cases of bias you and cohort have found, then you ought to be aware that people who disagree entirely with your point of view—opponents, let’s call them—are doing the same thing, piling up cases, so that your cases can be piled next to their cases, and both piles can be shoved at news providers. The truth is in there somewhere. Maybe. But does it seem likely to you that it will be found and feared?

Brian Dominick:Whether the media are too liberal or too conservative might make for interesting debate, but I agree it is not going to prove anything, or convince anyone. Stories and specific trends should be thoroughly analyzed and exposed, but I see little value in pointing out who has more influence, and so forth.

PressThink: 3.) Forgetting about all that, suppose you succeed in showing that here, on a key issue we care about, the media was very clearly biased, not once or twice, but in a broad and persistent pattern, which you have documented so well we must grant the claim: yes, there is bias in the media and it’s getting bad. Would you then be able to tell me what kind of bias is good?

Brian Dominick: There is no objective “bad” or “good.” The problem with bias in media is not that it exists, since it is inherent. A bias that can be called “good” to one reader will be “bad” to another. Maybe I want a pro-corporate bias in the news, because I am a stockholder or an executive. Why shouldn’t I have news with that bias? At the same time, a blue collar worker might wish to see another bias in the news. If I am a Christian conservative, I will probably want to see a conservative, Christian bias in the news. Why shouldn’t I? As for those who don’t already have biases, where are these people?

The problem with bias, instead, is that it is not stated. News media should be up front about their bias, but they almost never are. All news media outlets should list their influences, be they ideological or institutional. It is probably the case that both the Leftist and Rightist critics of news media are right — and they are saying almost entirely different things. (Mind you, when I say Left I mean left of liberal. You’ll almost never hear liberals complaining about the news media because, frankly, it’s just about right for them much of the time, with the exceptions of Fox News, The New York post and AM talk radio, which pretty much no one contends are “leftist”or even liberal.)

The Left says there are institutional pressures—mostly having to do with corporate ownership and sponsorship, plus affluent audience bases in order to sell advertisements at higher premiums, etc.—that inexorably push all media in rightward direction. Leftists say the pressure is on corporate media outlets to be pro-capitalism, pro-markets and pro-profits, as well as tailored toward upper middle income brackets and above, or extremely massive popular markets below those brackets. How could they not be?

Reliant as it is on wealthy stockholders, sponsors and underwriters and their markets, how could the media be anything but generally favorable to those interests? Corporations and the government would not sponsor news media hostile to their interests — they would fire any producers or editors who did not toe a pro-corporate line in the newsroom.

Meanwhile, the Right points out that most journalists are liberals, at least socially, and that is almost certainly true. They keep much media coverage to the left of conservatism, but even if they were so inclined, their owners and sponsors keep them from pushing anywhere to the left of liberalism, which has historically proven unsafe territory for the status quo of any society. That’s why on so many stories that have only a modest effect on the corporate bottom line, such as gay rights and abortion, there is often a discernible liberal bias in the mainstream. If these stories aren’t threatening to profits and market share, let the reporters have some leeway. Throw them a bone.

This all generally maintains a liberal bias at many institutions — a bias that can be mislabeled as “leftist” and decried by the far Right — which just so happens to perfectly serve elite interests. While the media are cow-towing to corporations (largely by being corporations themselves, remember!), conservatives are making largely convincing cases to the public (and using extraordinary funding to do this), that the media are something those critics call “leftist.” By proving that the media are in fact largely liberal—as if liberal equals leftist—they convince a great many Americans that the media are too liberal, even fringe. Any leftist who stops to think about the matter would probably agree: the media are too liberal, indeed! Oddly, about half the recognized political spectrum lies to the left of liberal.

What is really strange is how this debate always boils down to the bias of journalists, which puts even decent journalists on the defensive, instead of about the bias of institutions. Corporate conglomerates, unprecedented in their massiveness and social power, are behind the news we consume every day. Yet somehow we manage to get distracted into this debate about whether the journalists themselves are biased?

There’s an 800 pound gorilla in the room with the reporter, but we focus on the reporter. Is it really conceivable that these giant corporations are leaving their public interface—their power to influence the public and write history—in the hands of the reporters at the very bottom of the hierarchy? Are we really so naive as to think corporations wouldn’t in any way take advantage of the opportunity to use such power in their own interests?

PressThink: 4.) Permit me to answer for you. Chances are you won’t tell me what kind of media bias is good for journalists to show— even though there’s nothing to stop you from speculating about it. Instead, you will prefer something like, “give me journalists who will give me the news, tell me the truth, without all that spin.” Which is exactly what most journalists want and claim to be doing, albeit imperfectly. They claim to be reporting objectively, without fear or favor, fighting the spin with facts they can verify. Is it interesting to you, is it at all relevant, that you both want the same thing?

Brian Dominick. Anyone who would answer question (3) that way is indeed a fool, to be sure. The bias toward “truth” is a joke. The bias toward “objectivity” and “neutrality” is laughable. Have a bias, run with it, but for god’s sake be open about it! Say, “We are sponsored by this, this, this and that corporation. If we (1) upset them or hurt their profits or (2) stop providing them a marketable audience with disposable income, our own profits will be affected and our stockholders will let us know in no uncertain terms. Additionally, our parent company owns the following companies. Those companies are affected by public opinion regarding the following stories, most of which we won’t tell you unless they favor our sister company, and thus our collective profit margin.”

PressThink: 5.) “Ha!” you are likely to say. (Or someone you know says it.) “Their objectivity is a myth, no one can be completely objective, least of all these guys.” You have the pile of studies to show it. Or someone does. But wait: now you have just admitted that what you wanted two sentences ago, “the news without all that spin,” is, in fact, impossible. Objectivity is a myth, you recall that. Don’t these attitudes—wanting from journalists what is also impossible for journalists—seem somehow confused or least unfair?

Brian Dominick: That would indeed be confused and unfair. Instead, we should embrace bias and be up front about it. Many of the “out” partisan presses freely admit their biases. The Nation and The Progressive are up front about theirs. The National Review readily calls itself conservative, and Fox News all but comes out and admits its conservatism. It is when these publications pretend that they are “fair and balanced” that it gets kind of bizarre. But it’s far less despicable than the actions of, say, the New York Times, which has a newsroom full of liberals and a host of sponsors that reads like a who’s-who of the Fortune 500, and still insists it is unbiased, fair and balanced. What such institution could manage not to be liberal or conservative, but instead provide a balanced story from all viewpoints (Left, Right and center)?

PressThink: 6.) Liberal spin. Corporate spin. Texas spin. Zionist spin. Republican spin. Hollywood spin. American spin. Anti-American spin. We want it out, out, out. Spin, that’s bad. But critics smart enough to detect spin are smart enough to see—and in fact, they do see—that claiming, “they’re spinning!” has itself become a form of spin, a popular one, which would seem to throw spin detection, never a clear cut thing, into total incoherence. Does that bother you, or is it only my spin?

Brian Dominick: A question back to you: is it your contention that there are media sources that don’t ever spin? Or is it just that spin biases toward all sides variously and eventually, so it all equals out?

If spin is inevitable, why not insist that its motivations be transparent?

If spin is just a by-product of telling news stories, and eventually various spins achieve “balance”… that sounds like a theory based on blind faith. Or have you developed a way to measure it and thus prove and ensure that spin balances out in the end?

A perfect example is the current debate over whether the news media are focusing only on the “negative” aspects of the Iraq story, purposely ignoring the “positive” things, like the “successes” the US occupation forces have achieved in “rebuilding” Iraq. Well, let’s assume for a moment that the “rebuilding” stories are every bit as plentiful as the “terror and chaos” stories, but just aren’t being covered. Let’s say there are 4 “rebuilding” stories for every one “continuing chaos” story, if only reporters will pay attention.

The real question is, are those stories newsworthy? I don’t recall in the pre-war period, the Right complaining that the Western media was only focusing on the bad things Saddam Hussein had done, to the complete exclusion of any mention that the Iraqi government had ever done anything positive at all, like ensuring its citizens were fed, were literate, and so forth. But that’s understandable — we don’t report when a government does do something that happens to be basic, human decency, something that’s entirely expected of it, and legally required of it in the case of an occupying force.

Yet the Right is screaming bloody murder that the media are not reporting every case of the US Army Corps of Engineers rebuilding a school (that the US bombed), or providing medicine to the Iraqi people (quietly prevented for 12 years under sanctions), etc. There of course have been 1000 times as many stories about these kinds of “heartening” events under US occupation as there were about Hussein doing the same things when he was in power. But why, really, should there be any? The Right wants coverage of US troops doing something that is expected of them, but it does not want to see highlighted anything that could resemble failure or inadequacy.

At the same time, the Left wants doesn’t want any “positive” stories like that presented at all, because it doesn’t help the Left’s case that the motivations behind the war were cynical. It doesn’t disprove the case, in the slightest, but it doesn’t help the case.

So there’s the liberal bias. What you will not hear or see in the mainstream media, of course, are many substantial stories speculating about the institutional motivations of the government or military with regard to the situation more generally: the leftist theories. Someone — maybe a reporter, maybe an editor, maybe a publisher or producer — filtered that out. Call it bias, call it criteria, call it standards, but it is liberal, not leftist. It would be nice if they admitted the bias. They are welcome to it, as long as it’s transparent and people still want it.

For the debate so far:

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate, part one (Questions for bias critics)
Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate, part two (My Answers)
No, Media Bias is Not a Dumb Debate, Says Bias Hunter (Tim Graham, Media Research Center, responds from the conservative side.)

And the comments sections at those posts.

Bill Moyers has important things to add on the bias debate.

Posted by Jay Rosen at October 30, 2003 7:14 AM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

Great article! My feedback: the language saying that everyone has a spin on things is misleading. A more accurate language to use perhaps is to distinguish between perspective and propaganda. I I think that 'spin' connotes propaganda more than perspective. Propaganda is far more intentional than perspective. Spin is an intentional thing whereas the usual postmodern language suggests that we all have perspective (because we only have two eyes, limited time, limited experience etc.) and thus no one "has" the truth. Saying we all spin is perhaps being tad more heavy handed than necessary.

Posted by: Ed Taekema at October 30, 2003 11:44 PM | Permalink

Ed, I couldn't agree with you more. I shouldn't have run with Jay's word. I never use the word spin to mean perspective, so I shouldn't have started here. Thanks for the kind words! I guess I left everyone else speechless.

Posted by: Brian Dominick at November 1, 2003 1:39 AM | Permalink

Regarding the point about Iraq coverage, buildings being built in the middle of a war zone IS news.
It's like this: The headline "200 randomly sampled people didn't die yesterday" would be stupid. But,
"Plane with 200 passengers crashes; no fatalities" would be sensible. War is like a plane crash;
things that would usually be mundane are noteworthy in the midst of a guerrilla war.

Furthermore, when the media report a large anti-Bush demonstration in London, but ignore a large anti-Baathist demonstration
in Bhagdad, it's hard to see how this is anything but bias.

Finally, let me say that some kinds of bias are objectively demonstrable: If you put a Republican senator getting 100 parking tickets
in a year on the front page of your paper, but ignore a Democrartic senator doing the smae thing, you're engaging in objectively demonstrable
bias, because you're inconsistently applying your own subjective standards about what constitutes a noteworthy story.

Posted by: TC at December 23, 2003 6:11 PM | Permalink

Oh yeah, another thing: If the press is right not to bother reporting normal events, then why are they reporting US soldiers' deaths in Iraq? After all, soldiers' deaths are normal in war. Doesn't that mean, following your logic, that the press should not report them?

Posted by: TC at December 23, 2003 6:19 PM | Permalink

TC wrote: "buildings being built in the middle of a war zone IS news."

If the far Right wants to downplay and call "decreasing" the number of attacks on American soldiers in Iraq, you cannot simultaneously make a big deal out of how extraordinary it is that under those circumstances someone does something halfway decent -- like reconstructing buildings they demolished. Give me a break...

TC: '"Plane with 200 passengers crashes; no fatalities" would be sensible.'

So the Iraqi insurgency is as deadly as a plane crash? Please, if you want to be taken seriously, use slightly realistic analogies.

Re the Democrat/Republican analogy, I guess you didn't read my comments at all. What I said was that most media has a liberal bias. I'm not a liberal, so it's easier for me to admit that perhaps most journalists are. Nevertheless, I think the Clinton scandals demonstrate that the mainstream media is plenty willing to go after petty stories about "liberal" politicians, just like conservative ones. You're just exemplifying the bizarre home-team blindness exhibited by most partisans in this country. Republicans and Democrats are equally sleazy. And if they ever get enough money, Green politicians will be equally sleazy in no time. It's systemic.

TC: "If the press is right not to bother reporting normal events, then why are they reporting US soldiers' deaths in Iraq?"

Wow, reading comprehension really isn't your strong suit, is it? It's not considered a decent tactic to misrepresent someone's claims and then refute the misrepresentation. Anyway... I didn't say "normal" events shouldn't be reported. I said that warmakers don't deserve to get touted when they exhibit the bear basics of a decent post-war response by rebuilding the country they've demolished. Lots of things that are "normal" in war are newsworthy. But when one country demolishes another, and then participates in some extremely minor, token rebuilding efforts -- it is the gap between what the victor SHOULD be doing and what it actually is doing, not the details of what little it is doing, that should be making the news.

Whatever happened to the reporter's job being to hold government and corporations accountable? We should be equally critical and equally skeptical of ALL in power, regardless of their party or affiliation. Our job isn't to sing their praises or to advocate for them. It is to hold them responsible, and to point out what more they could be doing. We owe that to the public if we ever want to call our society a democracy with a straight face.

Posted by: Brian Dominick at December 25, 2003 5:26 PM | Permalink