A friend just emailed me the following video.  It’s yet another allegation that the media is liberal and that the conservative world view can’t get a fair shake.  Frankly, don’t watch it.  It’s a guaranteed waste of time but if you’re entirely unfamiliar with this assertion and need some context for this post, be my guest.

In the Political Economy of the Media, Robert W. McChesney makes a convincing case for why the conservative critique of the media being liberal is drivel.  According to McChesney, this claim rests on four propositions:

1. The decisive power over the news lies with the journalists, and owners and advertisers are irrelevant or relatively powerless;
2. Journalist are political liberals;
3. Journalist use their power to advance liberal politics;
4. Objective journalism would almost certainly present the world exactly as seen by contemporary US conservatives.

Basically, in order to claim that the media is liberal the first three conditions must be met.  In order for this claim to hold, and for one to maintain a commitment to professional journalism as it is presently understood, the fourth condition must also be met.  Let’s take a closer look at each proposition:

1.  The first point is intellectually indefensible and should be enough to call the entire conservative critique of the liberal news media into question.  As McChesney puts it, “no credible scholarly analysis of journalism posits that journalists have the decisive power to determine what is and is not news and how it should be covered.”  The fact is, in commercial media (like all things commercial), the owners hire and fire and they determine the budgets and the overarching aims of the enterprise.   As Robert Parry put it, “in reality, most journalist have about as much say over what is presented by newspapers and TV news programs as factory workers and foremen have over what a factory produces.”  Plus, if commercial media was so liberal, then why would conservatives be so obsessed with pushing public broadcasting to operate by commercial principles?  They know that the market will very effectively push the content to more politically convenient outcomes without any need for direct censorship

2.  The second proposition has the most evidence to support it.  Surveys show that journalist tend to vote Democratic in a greater proportion than the general population.  In one famous survey of how Washington correspondents voted in the 1992 presidential election, something like 90 percent voted for Bill Clinton.  To some conservatives, that settles the matter.  But, the first point undermines the importance of how journalists vote.  Again, what if owners and managers have the most power?  Surveys show that media owners and editorial executives vote overwhelmingly republican.  A 2000 Editor & Publisher survey found that newspaper publishers favored George W. Bush over Al Gore by a 3 to 1 margin.

3.  As for the third proposition, the evidence is far from convincing.  One of the core points of the professional code of journalism is to prevent journalist from pushing their own politics into the news, and many journalist, republicans and liberals alike, are proud to note that in spite of their political beliefs, their coverage tends to bend the stick the other way in order to prevent the charge that they are unprofessional.

4.  And finally, the proposition that truly objective journalism would invariably see the world exactly the way Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity see it, points to the ideological nature of the exercise.  Name an instance, or better yet, identify a pattern, where conservatives criticize journalist for being too soft on right-wing politicians or unfair to liberals on the left.  It’s a one way street.

As for the overarching theme of this post, is media bias liberal or conservative, I take the 5^th for the time being.  McChesney’s logic makes sense to me and offers a fairly convincing argument against the contention that media bias is liberal.  But, that doesn’t necessarily mean media bias is conservative.  I will investigate that issue and get back to you all in, wait for it, Part 2 of Media Bias: Liberal or Conservative.