Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, has written an incisive, penetrating essay called Is the Mainstream Media Fair and Balanced? in the August, 2006 issue of Imprimis, a monthly digest of Hillsdale College. His thesis:
My topic today is how the mainstream media—meaning 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—stacks up in terms of the latter two journalistic standards, fairness and balance. In my opinion, they don’t stack up very well.
Barnes observes that “Polls of the Washington press corps….about who they voted for in 2004 always show that nine-to-one or ten-to-one of them voted Democratic.”
Though there are many fine conservative journalists, they are almost never hired by the mainstream media (MSM). There are many more liberal commentators on FOX than conservatives on other stations, Barnes notes. The result is that “only the mainstream media still has the power to make stories big.” Barnes recounts the Cindy Sheehan story last summer as an example. The story was huge in the MSM, even though Sheehan assigned credibility to the Iraqi insurgency by naming those maiming, beheading, and killing innocent civilians as “freedom fighters.”
A more recent example is the coverage of the NSA surveillance leak story. Rather than expressing concern over the breach of confidentiality and the potential impact on national security (which is all they say about the Valerie Plame issue), the media mischaracterizes the story as a “domestic spying scandal.” Nevermind that those being spied on are Al-Qaeda members overseas using the telephone to speak to people in the U.S.
When liberals express outrage, they are “criticizing.” However, in the Clinton era, his critics were demonized as “Clinton haters.” Though there were certainly Clinton haters on the fringe right, the point remains that nobody today is ever labelled a “Bush hater,” even though that is clearly what some folks are.
Barnes goes on to examine religious and partisan bias. Bush is considered “extremely religious” because he reads his Bible daily and prays. Nevermind the fact that millions of Americans also do that. Meanwhile Paul Kengor found that President Clinton quoted the Bible and mentioned God and Jesus Christ more than President Bush, who (in public discourse) says relatively little about his faith. Kengor discusses this and more in his book God and George W. Bush: A Spiritual Life.
With regard to partisan bias, Barnes notes that Robert Lichter (President of the Center for Media and Public Affairs) found that no presidential candidate has received more favorable treatment from the broadcast media than John Kerry (over the course of Lichter’s 20 years of experience in accessing broadcast news for bias). Kerry received 77 percent favorable coverage in the stories regarding him on the three broadcast news shows. For Bush, it was 34 percent. Two noteworthy examples are the lack of coverage of the Swift Boat vets (uncovering faulty claims to Vietnam war heroism on Kerry’s part) and Dan Rather’s flawed report on President Bush’s (supposed) preferential treatment in the Texas National Guard.
Barnes’s essay, in its entirity, is well worth the read.