Media bias in the United States

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Claims of Media bias in the United States attract constant attention. Partisan activity from every area of the US political spectrum may concentrate on some aspect of real or perceived media bias. The question of bias in the US media is also of great interest to people living outside the US, in the English-speaking world and (increasingly) outside it. This interest may proceed from the extent that global media can be seen to be concentrated in US ownership.

Claims of media bias in the United States include, though are not exhausted by, the issues of liberal or conservative biases. These debates are of contemporary significance in the partisan arena of US cultural and social politics. It is quite possible for a media outlet to be conservative on some subjects and liberal on others: for example to be fiscally conservative, yet still favor liberal social policy. Therefore, organization of the discussion of bias around these two terms is neither exhaustive nor exclusive.

Some accusations of media bias are motivated by a disinterested desire for truth, some are politically motivated.

Liberal bias claims

Liberal bias is a common phrase used in American political discourse to express the view that the American media generally has a liberal bias. The expression is frequently used by critics of the network news stations of CBS, ABC, and NBC, as well as major newspapers and newswires, especially the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post, as well as the Associated Press.

People who use the phrase "liberal bias" believe that liberal biases are evident in both the choice (what stories are favored, or "played," over others) and coverage (how stories are researched, portrayed, and presented). According to their perceptions, there is a "slant" or "spin" in the news that tends to promote a liberal agenda.

Those who believe in a liberal media bias often also believe that as individuals most journalists, and news producers, hold liberal political views. In a survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1997, 61% of reporters claimed to be or lean towards being Democratic or liberal. Only 15% claimed to be or lean towards being Republican or conservative. A survey by the Pew Research Center and Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2004 found 34% of journalists describing themselves as liberal, 54% as moderate, and only 7% as conservative.

Some have argued that the media tends to portray Republican leaders as less intelligent, compared to their Democratic counterparts.

Some argue that even asking politicians about their plans to solve social issues is a form of liberal bias, on the grounds that such a question must be based on the liberal assumption that government has a role in solving social or economic problems.

Those who believe in a liberal media bias have said that the media has a tendency to inflame stories which suggest that guns in the hands of private citizens are responsible for crimes (and ignore those when a gun has been used for positive purposes in law enforcement or self-protection — this would be classified as spiking).

Many of the positions in the preceding paragraph are supported by a 2002 study by Jim A. Kuypers of Dartmouth College: Press Bias and Politics. In this study of 116 mainstream US papers (including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kuypers found that the mainstream press in America operate within a narrow range of liberal beliefs. Those who expressed points of view further to the left were generally ignored, whereas those who expressed moderate or conservative points of view were often actively denigrated or labeled as holding a minority point of view. In short, if a political leader, regardless of party, spoke within the press-supported range of acceptable discourse, he or she would receive positive press coverage. If a politician, again regardless of party, were to speak outside of this range, he or she would receive negative press or be ignored. Kuypers also found that the liberal points of view expressed in editorial and opinion pages were found in hard news coverage of the same issues. Although focusing primarily on the issues of race and homosexuality, Kuypers found that the press injected opinion into its news coverage of other issues such as welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control; in all cases favoring a liberal point of view.

The editorial pages of many large U.S. newspapers such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, have a more-or-less explicitly liberal point of view. They claim, however, that a wall exists between editorial and reporting. Some critics see this wall as crumbling in the heat of partisan politics. Newer media, such as television and some web news sources, do not distinguish as clearly between the editorial department and the news department. Conservatives frequently accuse the big three networks of liberal bias in their news reporting. This view is reflected in the slogan of Fox News, "Fair and balanced", which suggests that the competition is not fair and balanced. This slogan has been effective in helping Fox News to become the most watched cable news channel.

Some people claim that bias is present not just in news programs but in the networks' other programs as well. Some entertainment programs have been accused of having a subtle political bias.

In addition to accusations of intentional bias, some accuse reporters of being lazy, and claim that this creates a tendency towards liberal bias, since it takes less effort to challenge politicians and government officials with questions than it does to investigate the actual causes of social problems. Reporters (even conservative reporters) may have a tendency to take the easy path and confront officials with emotion laden social problems and ask "What are you going to do about it?".

It has been observed that bias that seems to be politically motivated may be motivated by sensationalism rather than politics.

Liberal bias examples

The breaking of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal by Matt Drudge, instead of Newsweek, who originally had the story and held onto it, is often cited as an example of liberal media bias.

Another allegation of liberal bias is a tendency to inflame stories which suggest that guns in the hands of private citizens are responsible for crimes (and ignore stories where a gun in the hand of a private citizen apprehended a criminal. http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2003/bessette.html

A news story by CBS, presented in 2004, claimed the existence of documents supposedly written by George W. Bush's commanding officer during a period of military service that reflected poorly on him. The documents used in constructing the story were later revealed by independent analysis to be total fabrications, a fact which CBS later confirmed. Those who believe in a liberal bias see this as an example of the media purposely misleading the public.

A common criticism of the media is that it has covered the bad news in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American lead coalition forces are currently engaged in controversial military action, while ignoring the good news. Critics point to a perceived obsession with coalition and civilian body counts, with threats of a draft, and with allegations of war crimes, abuse and mismanagement. Progress, such as economic development, political reform, and increasing numbers of local police and defense forces, is rarely covered. Soldiers have often been quoted as saying the Iraq where they serve is not the Iraq shown on TV, and that Afghanistan isn't shown at all. Some outspoken critics of the media have gone so far as to claim that this is a sign of an Anti-American bias, and a deliberate attempt to diminish public support, with the ultimate goal of forcing a total withdrawal of American forces.

The Doonesbury comic strip has often been accused of liberal bias, and in 2004 a conservative letter writing campaign was successful in convincing Continental Features, a company which prints many Sunday comics sections, to refuse to print the strip, causing Doonesbury to disappear from the Sunday comics in 38 newspapers. Of the 38, only one editor, Troy Turner, executive editor of the Anniston Star in Alabama, continued to run the Sunday Doonesbury, albiet necessarily in black and white.

Conservative bias claims

Claims of conservative bias came largely in response to the widespread claims of liberal bias, and to the growth of mainstream conservative media, most notably Fox News. While critics of conservative bias in media often point, explicitly or by example, to right wing pundits' such as Rush Limbaugh, it is important to distinguish between news media, which in a free society generally acknowledge a commitment to objectivity, and commentary, which has no such obligation.

Claims of conservative bias can be found in Media Matters for America, Fair, Pipa and other media watchdog groups; in blogs, such as Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshal and reports from Air America Radio, and in the writing of journalists such as Salon.com's Joe Conason.

Conservative media bias is said to exist for two reasons. First, the owners of media corporations are alleged to be conservative, like many business owners. As owners, they may be in a position to dictate editorial and hiring policies. The second reason traces media concentration. The mass media are owned by a small number of very large diversified media corporations. Such a uniformity of ownership means that stories which might not be to the benefit these large corporations may not be run. Examples of conservative media bias might include the media's failure to cover, for example, many of the early anti-globalization demonstrations or to depict the protesters as troublemakers and prone to violence. Among the media sources accused of conservative bias are Fox News, the Washington Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Sun-Times.

Finally, it has been claimed that liberal journalists often try so hard to avoid any hint of liberal bias in their work that they end up showing conservative bias. A study from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) claims that journalists are actually not particularly liberal on most issues anyway. FAIR (and others) have also argued that accusations of liberal media bias are part of a conservative strategy, noting an article in the 20 August 1992 Washington Post in which Republican party chair Rich Bond compared journalists to referees in a sporting match: "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time."

Conservative bia examples

In some cases the ownership of the media outlets is called into question, such as Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network. Claims have been made that Rupert Murdoch sent a memo to Fox News ordering newscasters to downplay American casualties in Iraq.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Judith Miller of the New York Times made extensive use of unnamed sources when reporting on President Bush's arguments in favor of military action against Iraq, in his assertions that Iraq possessed Weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the U.S. and Europe.

Some observers of conservative bias cite examples of the constrast of press coverage from the terms of president Bill Clinton with that of, for example, Ronald Reagan, who as known as the Teflon president.

Opposing views

Mainstream media organizations accused of slanted reporting often go to great lengths to defend their objectivity.

In addition, some individuals maintain that there exists in the media a conservative bias, precise opposite to constant claims. Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News is one of those who argues against any significant liberal bias. Reviewer John Moe sums up Alterman's views:

"The conservatives in the newspapers, television, talk radio, and the Republican party are lying about liberal bias and repeating the same lies long enough that they've taken on a patina of truth. Further, the perception of such a bias has cowed many media outlets into presenting more conservative opinions to counterbalance a bias, which does not, in fact, exist."

Critics of the concept of 'liberal bias' argue that it is largely an invention of the conservative right. The acronym SCLM is sometimes used to refer to the "so-called liberal media" to reflect this division in how the media is perceived.

Many of these critics also say that most media outlets are owned by wealthy individuals, many if not most of whom are on the right (for example, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of FOX News; FOX is often a target of those who charge conservative bias). Moreover, they say, both the print and broadcast media survive from advertising revenues, which makes the media rely to an extent on corporations; they thus claim that these media are less likely to present information that could harm potential advertisers.

Critics also point to the worldwide perception that US media is more right-wing than in most other democracies, and less likely to challenge an official position than most other countries' media. Certain neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol, have said that the charge of "liberal bias" has been exaggerated for rhetorical purposes. Foreign news agencies sometimes break stories before the domestic press when the contents might be unfavorable to an American right-wing point of view. For example, when the BBC ran revelations that the state of Florida had been over-aggressive about removing alleged criminals from the voter register, no US news agency ran the story.

On the other hand, those who claim there exists widespread liberal bias argue that a number of these wealthy business owners are liberals, so great wealth does not necessarily entail conservatism. They point to Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, as well as other liberal figures who are multimillionaires such as George Soros, John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, John Edwards and many Hollywood stars.

The article 'spiking' contains an account by film critic Roger Ebert in which a reporter from NBC approached a story with preconceived conservative bias.

The propaganda model by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky deems possible bias of the journalists themselves to be an insignificant matter, but claims that structural and economic causes filter the type of news published. It has been argued that any political slant is overwhelmed by the media organization's drive to report the stories that will sell newspapers and draw viewers, and to report them in the most eye-catching way they can. This is often called sensationalist bias.

History

Examples of bias in America are almost as old as newspapers, and predate the United States. In 1728 Benjamin Franklin, writing under the pseudonym "Busy-Body", wrote an article for the American Weekly Mercury advocating the printing of more paper money. He did not mention that his own printing company hoped to get the job of printing the money. It is an indication of the complexity of the issue of bias when we note that, even though he stood to profit by printing the money, Franklin also seems to have genuinely believed that printing more money would stimulate trade. As his biographer Walter Isaacson points out, Franklin was never averse to "doing well by doing good".

In 1798, the Congress of the United States passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which prohibited the publication of "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government, and made it a crime to voice any public opposition to any law or presidential act. This act was in effect until 1801.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln accused newspapers in the border states of bias in favor of the Southern cause, and ordered many newspapers closed.

In the Nineteenth Century, many American newspapers made no pretense of unbiased reporting, openly advocating one or another political party. This continues today, with newspapers such as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Waterberry Republican-American. Big cities would often have competing newspapers supporting various political parties.

During the labor union movement and the civil rights movement, newspapers supporting liberal social reform were accused of communist bias.

In the years leading up to World War II, politicians who favored the United States entering the war on the German side accused the international media of pro-Jewish bias, and often asserted that newspapers opposing entry of the United States on the German side were controlled by Jews. They claimed that reports of German mistreatment of Jews were biased and without foundation.

Hollywood was said to be a hotbed of Jewish bias, and pro-German politicians in the United States called for Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator to be banned, as an insult to a respected leader.

During the civil rights movement in the 1960's, television was accused by many Southerners of bias against White Southerners, and bias in favor of mixing of the races. Many Southern television stations refused to air programs such as I Spy and Star Trek, because of their racially mixed casts.

In modern politics, an early claim that liberal bias dominates the media dates back to November 1969, when Spiro Agnew, then Vice President under Richard Nixon made a landmark speech denouncing media influence on politics.. In 1970, in San Diego, Agnew called those opposed to the war in Vietnam the "nattering nabobs of negativism".

From the 1990s onwards, some American conservatives have increasingly voiced their perception that liberals dominate the American mass media and present a liberal point of view.

Several authors have written books on liberal bias in the media. Some examples include:

Bernard Goldberg wrote Bias in 2001, in which he claimed CBS, his former employer, had a liberal bias.
Bob Kohn wrote Journalistic Fraud, a criticism of the New York Times.
Ann Coulter wrote Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right in 2002, in which she claimed the American television and print news had a widespread liberal bias.
Bernard Goldberg wrote One Hundred People Who Are Screwing Up America in 2005, claiming that liberal bias is fundamentally anti-American.

Conclusion

A majority of Americans get their news from commercial media. No commercial medium long survives that is not profitable. All commercial media are biased in favor of attracting readers, listeners, and advertisers. Thus, they tend to publicize mainstream views and avoid fringe views.

The media in the United States, for all its faults, is less biased than the media in many parts of the world, because of constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press. A free press is generally less biased that a press controlled by government or religious censors. Major U.S. news media spin the news in ways they think will make it appealing to their customers and advertisers, but outright lies are rare, and mistakes are usually acknowledged. The major news media do not report the extreme stories of un-confirmable origin found in tabloid news, of which "Elvis kidnapped by Space Aliens" can serve as a typical example.

If the study of media bias is really to develop the rigor of an academic discipline instead of being a tool of bias itself, it will have to adopt better defined categories for classifying the implicit assumptions of news stories. Accusations of liberal or conservative bias alike ignore the dictionary meanings of those words. In fact, in the current political discourse, the words seem to have no well-defined meaning at all. The Oxford American Dictionary defines "liberal" in the political sense as "favoring democratic reform and individual liberty". All major American media are biased in favor of that. The Oxford American Dictionary defines "conservative" in the political sense as "favoring private enterprise and freedom from government control". All major American media are biased in favor of that. Many if not most accusations of "bias" are attempts to sway voters, not objective analysis of facts.

Examples/Sources

Extracts from Agnew's talk here
Lichter, S.R., Lichter, L.S. and Rothman, S., 1992. Watching America: What Television Tells Us About Our Lives.

Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News is one of those who argues against any significant liberal bias. Reviewer John Moe sums up Alterman's views:

Media Imperialism is a critical theory regarding the perceived effects of globalization on the world's media. It is closely tied to the similar theory of cultural imperialism.

"As multinational media conglomerates grow larger and more powerful many believe that it will become increasingly difficult for small, local media outlets to survive. A new type of imperialism will thus occur, making many nations subsidiary to the media products of some of the most powerful countries or companies. Significant writers and thinkers in this area include Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman and Robert McChesney."

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.

..."the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This occurs not as a result of conscious design but simply as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized."

Bibliography

:Alphabetical order by author last name.

What Liberal Media? by reporter Eric Alterman
Manufacturing Consent - The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman ISBN
Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg ISBN 0-06052-084-1
Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite by former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg ISBN 0-44653-191-X
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues by professor Jim Kuypers ISBN

External links

What's Wrong With the News? - Analysis of what is wrong with the media today.
Content Analysis
The Memory Hole (site for the preservation of FOIAed documents and material removed from government websites)
The Media Awareness Project (site about drug reform)
Honest Reporting (site about purported anti-Israeli media bias)
"Those Aren't Stones, They're Rocks" -Seth Ackerman Article concerning pro-Israel bias
Blinded By Science: How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality by reporter Chris Mooney
MediaLens

Non-partisan

Pew Research Center For the People and the Press (non-partisan organization studying attitudes towards the press)
COA News (A Portal To Independent News)
"A Measure of Media Bias" - a paper-in-progress attempting to analyze media bias by looking at sources statistically

Claims of bias from a Progressive point of view.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (media watchdog group with more progressive point of view, analysis of claimed conservative media bias.)
The Myth of the Liberal Media - A lengthy Bartcop article about individuals involved in anti-liberal media efforts.
Media Matters (Research and analysis of claimed conservative misinformation and bias)
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (liberal site which claims to expose conservative bias)
Media Matters for America (liberal site which claims to expose conservative bias)
Media Matters - Website updated daily that provides examples of claimed Conservative bias and misinformation in the news.

Claims of bias from a Conservative point of view.

Media Research Center (conservative site dealing with claimed liberal bias)
Fairpress.org - Citizens Coalition for Responsible Media (conservative site dealing with claimed liberal bias)
Media Research Center (conservative site which claims to expose liberal bias)
Fairpress.org - Citizens Coalition for Responsible Media (conservative site which claims to expose liberal bias)
Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues (book claiming to document liberal bias in mainstream news)

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