It keeps coming
"Liberal Media" ?...
Fourth in a series
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Cable news is a relative young feature of the national news media. Having its beginnings in the early Eighties, but coming of age within the past decade, it now is the main source of information for many American’s whose schedule don’t allow for the traditional networks new broadcast in the early evening.
The forefather of the cable news format is CNN. Cable News Network or CNN is the original 24-hour news station. Launched in 1980 by Ted Turner, it is a division of the Turner Broadcasting System, owned by Time Warner and currently has a reach of over 88.2 million homes. CNN is traditionally known for its ability to show events quickly, frequently, and at great length. The first major attention garnered by CNN was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, where it featured unprecedented news coverage from the ground. CNN broadcasts primarily from its headquarters at the CNN Center in Atlanta as well as from studios in New York City and Washington, D.C.
Thought not the first, Fox News Channel is now America’s “most watched news channel”. Owned by the Fox Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, it is available to 85 million subscribers in the United States. First launched in October of 1996, the network quickly gained standing in the late 1990’s as it started taking market share away from CNN. Fox News presents a wide variety of programming, with up to 15 hours of live programming per day. Fox primarily broadcasts out of its Rockefeller Center studios in New York City.
Two of the networks trade mark slogans are “Fair and Ballanced" and “We Report, You Decide”. The obvious implication of these two catch phrases is that all the other networks deliver a skewed perspective. However it is most often fox that is accused of having a bias in its reporting.
The last station I will analyze is MSNBC, a 24-hour news channel available in over 76 million households in the U.S. and with most broadcasting coming primarily from its studios in Secaucus, New Jersey. Founded by Microsoft and General Electric, which owns NBC Universal, and launched in July of 1996, MSNBC is currently America's third-most-watched cable news channel, after Fox News and CNN.
According to a study by Tien-Tsung Lee in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, “despite research to the contrary, the general public and a significant number of politicians are convinced the U.S. news media have a liberal and pro-Democratic bias. Findings based on two large national surveys suggest that audiences' ideologies and partisanships affect how they view the media. Strong conservatives and Republicans are more likely to distrust the news media, whereas the best predictor of a media bias perception is political cynicism”.[i]
One of the primary promoters of the accusation of a liberal media is the Media Research Center (MRC) founded by Brent Bozell in October of 1987. This group’s self described mission is to “bring balance and responsibility to the news media” and prove that “liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values”. They aim to not only expose the heinous liberal scoundrel influence on media, but to “neutralize its impact on the American political scene”.
In a special repot released by the MRC in June of 2004 entitled “The Liberal Media Every Poll Shows Journalists Are More Liberal than the American Public — And the Public Knows It” they describe how “surveys over the past twenty-five years have consistently found that journalists are more liberal than rest of America”. This MRC Special Report summarized the relevant data on journalist attitudes, as well as polling showing how the American public’s recognition of the media’s liberal bias has grown over the years: This data was broke down into four sections. The first area outlines how journalists vote for liberals, the next that journalists say they are liberal, thirdly journalists reject conservative positions, and finally that the public recognizes the bias.[ii]
Much of MRC’s argument is centered on journalist personal opinions documented either in studies or on political talk shows where they are asked to express their own opinions. While this provides an interesting insight into how the reporter’s cognitive thought process operates, I feel it is a poor argument for bias since there is no collaborating evidence of biased “hard news” produced. Since the professional journalists community ascribe to an ethos of accuracy, attention which would be called to it if violated. Instead of a liberal bias being scene, many journalists in retrospect are seeing more self censorship the norm, especially in today’s political climate.
This survey, full of old data, was conveniently released five months prior to the 2004 presidential elections, packaged to fit current political models. For example, journalists are reported as voting for Democrats in elections. This is faulty reasoning to equate them with liberalism. While some Democrats are liberal, the most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was seen as centrist by most. Also the data from the 1970’s political voting record of journalist is very dated both because the body of journalist has changed since then and because the nature of the political parties has shifted since then.[iii]
Similarly in his book Weapons Of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media, Bozell, from his clearly conservative bias, unsuccessful attempts to prove that the news-reporting media is more liberally biased than it is conservatively. Kirkus Review is quick to point out that while he maintains that he is talking about liberal bias in hard reporting, not commentary, he repeatedly draws on liberal commentators as exemplars of bias.[iv]
[i] Lee, T. (2005) The liberal media myth revisited: An examination of factors influencing perceptions of media bias. [Abstract] Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 49, No.1, 43-64. Retrieved April 22, 2005, from http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15506878jobem4901_4
[ii] Noyes, R. (2004) The liberal media: Every poll shows journalists are more liberal than
the American public — and the public knows it. Alexandria, VA: Media Research Center. Retrieved April 22, 2005, from http://www.mediaresearch.org/specialreports/2004/sum/sum063004.asp
[iv] Weapons Of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media (Book). (2004, May 1). [Review]. Kirkus Reviews, 72, Issue 9, 427. Retrieved April 23, 2005, from Academic Search Premier database.
