I can’t help but notice that, in large part, much of political reporting worryingly resembles an incoherent reality TV show with each network trying to push their own storylines. The political right incessantly complains of the liberal media, while the political left uses Fox News in particular as the go-to joke, intermittently finding individuals on the right side to ridicule (see: Sarah Palin). I found it near impossible to limit myself to one specific sub-topic once I began researching for this project. My main goal is to present the information I’ve found with an attempt to make sense of it in hopes that the audience may become as interested as I have.
First, let’s consider this “liberal media” problem. With so much party bias in the major news organizations, both sides of the aisle seem to be convinced that the other side is some sort of hegemonic beast that must be conquered in the name of justice and all which is good. Take a look at two separate organizations which share a common goal of standing as “watchdogs” of the media: the Media Research Center and Media Matters For America. I find myself rather skeptical of the supposed research carried out by each organization. The MRC tends to focus on networks like NBC, CBS and ABC. At the time of my visits to their site, I found mainly articles about ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who donated a large sum to the Clinton foundation. If the articles don’t make it obvious where the MRC’s bias lies, they spell it out rather plainly in a side-bar touting a “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media” bumper sticker and urging readers to “Stop the Obama/Media War on Faith”. Meanwhile, Media Matters focuses entirely on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and occasionally the NRA et cetera. They spell out their position more plainly in the “About” section of the “Take Action” page with the description: “Every day, Media Matters for America meticulously documents conservative misinformation in the media. Be it right-wing talking points masquerading as news, or slanted and inaccurate coverage of the issues, we’ve been there, and we’ve let you know about it.” Both sites are brimming with articles about biases in different news organizations, though I would recommend taking any information with a grain of salt. As much as both sides are convinced, I see no evidence of an overall bias towards one party.
One organization, the Columbia Journalism Review, refrains from aligning with any particular political view, especially in the case of parties. One particular bias the CJR draws attention to piques my interest much more than the left/right argument: bias towards those in power. Writing for the CJR, two resident fellows with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project analyzed articles about the NSA’s surveillance programs from four of the most-circulated newspapers. Through searching for the 30 most common pro- and anti- surveillance terms with controls, the four newspapers were found to use pro-NSA terms 36, 24, 14.1 and 11.1 percent more often than anti-NSA terms. This is particularly notable because it does not reflect public opinion; according to the authors, in an “Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, 54 percent of respondents disagreed with dragnet collection of internet metadata and 71 percent disagreed with warrantless monitoring of US phone calls.” Further back, in 2009, CJR writer Dean Starkman analyzed financial reporting through the 2000s, concluding that “the business press did everything but take on the institutions that brought down the financial system.” Particularly, he found that news media ran plenty of stories on Wall Street malpractice from 2000 through 2003, after which any warning stories were far spaced and placed away from front pages until 2007 when it was too late. Rather often, journalists would simply relay PR statements rather than taking the time to look further. As Starkman reminds the reader, “it is far easier for news bureaucracies to accept ever-narrowing frames of discourse, frames forcefully pushed by industry, even if those frames marginalize and eventually exclude the business press’s own great investigative traditions.”
In a similar vein, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting performed a three-week study at the beginning of the Iraq War to determine whether cable news sources displayed any bias through their source selection. Sources were only declared pro-war if they had openly stated so or were closely affiliated with an explicitly pro-war group, and likewise for anti-war sources. In one section of their findings, FAIR noted that “nearly two thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1.” Seeing as major news media are largely responsible for both distributing information and shaping how people interpret it, this severely unbalanced representation is certainly not negligible. FAIR elaborates further: “While the percentage of Americans opposing the war was about 10 times higher in the real world as they were on the nightly news (27 percent versus 3 percent), their proportion of the guestlist may still overstate the degree to which they were able to present their views on U.S. television. Guests with anti-war viewpoints were almost universally allowed one-sentence soundbites taken from interviews conducted on the street. Not a single show in the study conducted a sit-down interview with a person identified as being against the war.” The FAIR study speaks for itself, yet in conjunction with the two studies from the CJR, we can see a pretty strong indication of a broader pattern of power bias across media sources. From television to magazines, online publications, and newspapers, there is a demonstrable bias towards those who hold power.
Along with this power bias comes the mystery of why certain issues become incessant national arguments. By placing so much stress on things like abortion, are we entirely missing important issues which play out in the background? When I first visited the MRC site, the entire “culture” section was devoted to articles on abortion. Mike Lofgren, who worked in Congress for 28 years, reports that abortion amendments are routinely inserted into unrelated legislation such as defence bills. Even if we aren’t completely missing something, the usual talking points seem to detract from other conversations we should probably be having more. I would be willing to wager that over-talked issues present a prime opportunity to polarize voters with parties. If voter loyalty can be won by simply making a lot of noise over some specific issue or two, why bother spending time to cover less exciting but impactful legislative decisions?
The talking points may seem to cover pressing issues. Take health care as an example. Health care policy affects millions of Americans and their well being, and it certainly gets a lot of media attention. However, pundits gravitate towards generic claims about the Affordable Care Act. Much of the attitude surrounding the act seems to be in the style of “for it or against it”, and those on the political right seem to be in the business of turning people against it. Thus, pundits and most of the population have taken to calling the Affordable Care Act simply Obamacare. One doesn’t even need to cite an excerpt from the law to polarize opinions about it: support for or against the Affordable Care Act lies upon whether an individual likes Obama or not.
An American Press Institute study on the effectiveness of fact-checking organizations presents worrying data reflective of the state of public political knowledge when it comes to fact-based statements. Results were measured with subjects who had and had not read fact checking articles, tasked with rating the accuracy of different statements. In the best-case scenario, i.e. a person with high political knowledge who read the articles, 31.4% of questions were answered correctly on average. Those with low political knowledge who did not read the articles only answered 12% correctly. To answer correctly, subjects only had to rate whether a statement was closer to truth or falsity, meaning they had a 50% chance of guessing correctly with random answers. The astonishingly low rate of correct answers seems to suggest a solid measurement of widespread misinformation.
Jumping back to the 1970s, we can find the roots of the overly confrontational speaking style of politicians and political commentators. Lofgren credits Newt Gingrich, who along with two other representatives began giving special order speeches over the C-SPAN cameras between hearings. Gingrich essentially used the otherwise dead air as a free political advertisement. When the Speaker of the House ordered the cameras to pan the empty chamber while Newt was speaking, controversy erupted and began sucking up public attention. Lofgren claims that before Gingrich, there was much more cooperation between members of different parties in the House. By the time Gingrich became Speaker, however, the political world had largely adopted his style.
In overview, bias towards one party or another seems rather arbitrary. Sources on both sides carry the most dangerous bias of all: that which is blindly in favor of the already favored. Additionally, mainstream political discourse tends towards the sensational and controversial. I find myself increasingly worried that, in large part, the factors shaping the country I live in fall under the category of what we don’t know we don’t know.
Link Dump:
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/amplifying-officials-squelching-dissent/
http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/news_media_pro_surveillance_bi.php?page=all
http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/power_problem.php?page=all&print=true
Also see: The Party Is Over by Mike Lofgren, Penguin Group 2012
Putney Mediates the Media 