A Weekly Note from Mayor Gary L. Graham
“Traditional Values, Progressive Thinking”
I recently received a copy of Imprimis, which is a monthly publication that comes from Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. The August 2006 issue featured an article entitled Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced? The article was adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Palm Beach, Florida on February 22, 2006. I found it to be very enlightening and I hope you do too.
The article begins by defining three terms that are tossed around in debates about our modern day media. The first is objectivity, which means reporting the news with none of your own political views or instincts slanting the story one way or another. The second is fairness. Fairness recognizes that there may be some slant in a news story, but requires a reporter to be honest and not misleading with regard to those with whom he or she disagrees. The third is balance, which means that both sides on an issue get a hearing.
Mainstream media is defined as nationally influential newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today; influential regional papers like the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times; the broadcast networks and cable news stations like CNN; and the wire services, which now are pretty much reduced to the Associated Press.
According to Fred Barnes who authored the article, today’s mainstream media does not do a very good job of reporting in a fair and balanced manner. For example, he penned an article 20 years ago that talked about how the mainstream media was shedding some of its liberal slant and moving more to the center. It was written during the Reagan years when USA Today was only five years old and was a champion of Reagan economic recovery. CNN was also quite young during this time and quite different from the way it is now; Ted Turner owned it, but he wasn’t manipulating it the way he did later. Financial news was suddenly very big in the midst of the 401(k) revolution, and the stock market boom was getting a lot of coverage.
Barnes now contends that the idea that the mainstream media was moving to the center in the 1980’s was a mirage. He says that compared to what he was writing about back then, the mainstream media today is more liberal, more elitist, more secular, more biased, more hostile to conservatives and Republicans, and more self-righteous. While Barnes is talking about the mainstream media, it is important to note that we have a great relationship with our local media outlets. They work in unison with us to report local issues in a fair and unbiased manner. We do not experience the hostility or biased reporting that Barnes refers to.
Liberalism is endemic in the mainstream media today. Every poll of the media shows that they’re liberal, secular and so on. Polls of the Washington press corps, for instance, about who they voted for in 2004 always show that nine-to-one or ten-to-one of them voted Democratic. Peter Brown, a columnist who just recently left the Orlando Sentinel, conducted a poll a few years ago of newspaper staffs all around the country (not just big papers, but midsize papers and even some small papers) and found that this disparity existed everywhere.
This disparity is not likely to change. Hugh Hewitt, the California lawyer, blogger, and talk radio host, spent a few days recently at the Columbia Journalism School. He spoke to a couple of classes and polled them on who they had voted for in the 2004 election. He found that only one student had voted for Bush. This is not to say that there aren’t many fine young conservative journalists. However, they aren’t likely to be hired in the mainstream media.
Barnes says in the article that when he was at The New Republic any young person who joined the staff and wrote stories that were interesting and demonstrated that he or she could write well was grabbed immediately by the New York Times or other big newspapers, Newsweek, Time or the networks. He goes on to say that this practice doesn’t happen at The Weekly Standard where he is now employed. While this conservative magazine also employs some extremely talented young writers, these writers do not receive the calls. Why? They don’t receive them because they are employed by a conservative magazine.
The fact remains that the mainstream media doesn’t want conservatives. It doesn’t matter whether they are good reporters or writers. Mainstream media goes out of its way not to hire them. This was true 20 years ago, and it’s still true today. This roadblock is why conservatives have had to build alternative media such as talk radio, blogs, conservative magazines and FOX News. Together, these form a real infrastructure that’s an alternative to the mainstream media. However, it’s still a lot smaller, it’s not as influential and it’s largely reactive. In other words, it’s not on a level playing field with the mainstream media.
One way to see the unequal power of the mainstream media is in how it is able to shape and create the stories that we talk about in this country. The Cindy Sheehan story last summer is a great example. The Sheehan story was a total creation for the mainstream media. In creating the story, the media shamelessly mischaracterized Sheehan. It portrayed her as simply a poor woman who wanted to see President Bush because her son had been killed in Iraq. The real facts were completely ignored. She had already met with President Bush once and was actually in favor of the Iraqi insurgency (the beheaders, the killers of innocent women and children). She was on their side and said so. She was also filled with a deep hatred of Israel. Yet the media treated her in a completely
sympathetic manner, failing to report the beliefs that she made little attempt to hide. Only the mainstream media still has the power to make stories big.
Along with unequal power, unfair labeling by the media is also a problem for conservatives. How often, if ever, have you heard or read the term “ultraliberal”? I don’t think I have ever heard or read it. You will hear and see the term “ultraconservative”, but not “ultraliberal”. Another widely used labeling term is “activist.” If people are working to block a shopping center from being built or campaigning against Wal-Mart, they are called “activists.” Of course, what the term “activist” means is liberal. While Conservatives are called conservatives by the media, liberals are called “activists.” Conservatives are often labeled in a way to suggest they are mean and hateful.
Liberals criticize, but conservatives hate. Have you noticed that the media never characterizes individuals or groups as Bush haters? There are Bush critics, but there are no Bush haters.
The partisan bias of the mainstream media has been at no time more evident than during the last presidential election. Presidential candidates used to be savaged equally by the media. That’s not true any longer. Robert Lichter at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, measures the broadcast news for all sorts of things, including how they treat candidates. Over the past 20 years, John Kerry has gotten the most favorable treatment from the broadcast media. He received 77 percent favorable coverage despite the fact that Kerry made his Vietnam service the motif of the Democratic National Convention, followed weeks later by 64 Swift Board vets who served with Kerry in Vietnam claiming that he didn’t to the things he said he did. It was a huge story, but the
mainstream media didn’t want to cover it and didn’t cover it, for week after week. The mainstream media finally picked up the story a long time after it originally broke, but its whole effort was aimed at knocking down what the Swift Boat vets were saying. Why did this happen? It happened because the liberals wanted John Kerry to win the election.
Forty years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith said that he knew conservatism was dead because it was bookless. Conservatives didn’t publish book. To some extent, it was true at the time. It’s no longer true today. Conservatives have become such prolific writers and consumers of books that Random House and other publishing companies have started separate conservative imprints. Today, it’s common to see two, three or four conservative books on the bestseller list. If books are an indicator of how well conservatives are doing, I would say they’re doing quite well. They’re not winning, but they’re much better off than they were before; something that can’t be said about how they are faring in the unfair and unbalanced mainstream media.
I hope that you enjoyed this excerpt from the article and that you now have a better understanding of the mainstream media and the way they operate. We are fortunate that our local media is fair and unbiased in their reporting and are willing to work in unison with us to accurately report the issues in our community. The strong working relationship between City Hall and the residents we serve is yet another example of why O’Fallon is such a great community in which to live.
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