The charge they are implicitly (and often explicitly) making is that the mainstream media has a bias in favor of liberals in general and Democrats in particular. Certainly the right-wing media has a strong and consistent conservative/Republican bias. It is common to impute your own behavior to your opponents. But is it true? Is the mainstream media biased in favor of liberals/Democrats in the same way the right-wing media is biased in favor of conservatives/Republicans? Well, let me take a digression. (Regular readers of my posts should be expecting this from me by now.)
Back in the day there was a show called "Dragnet". It started out on the Radio (this was obviously many decades ago) and migrated to TV. Combining its radio run with its TV run, the show was a popular staple for several decades. And it had a format that was bizarre for the time and would be even more bizarre now.
The show was created by Jack Web who also starred as its lead character, Joe Friday. Friday was a cop with the Los Angeles Police Department who investigated crime in the city. Each show would dramatize a case supposedly drawn directly from the files of the LAPD. And we were told every week that "only the names have been changed to protect the innocent". Otherwise, the show was supposedly an accurate representation of what had happened in the actual case.
Cop shows, then and now, are usually filled with colorful characters and dramatic goings on - car chases, shootouts, and other forms of "action". Web took the opposite tack. Everything was calm and low key and little or no "action" was on offer. His delivery and that of everybody else - other cops, witnesses, crooks, etc. - was completely deadpan. This approach was a key to the show's long lived success. It stood out by having a completely different feel from all other "cops and robbers" shows. No one has been able to successfully imitate Web's style so the show remains unique.
Dragnet demonstrated the best in police work. The cops were fair and unbiased. It was always "just the facts mam". Friday and his sidekick (he had several different ones over the years) took no shortcuts. They were uniformly polite to everyone. They carefully collected evidence (always following all the proper procedures), never browbeat anyone, or framed anyone, or were involved in sloppy or erroneous or biased lab work, etc. And, of course, they always apprehended the right person. Over the closing credits we were told what he (or very rarely she) had been convicted of and how long a sentence he received.
It would have been nice if the LAPD had actually operated in the manner portrayed on Dragnet. It didn't. Instead it was notorious throughout the entire long period of Dragnet's run for bad behavior. Egregious examples of the opposite of every proper behavior I listed above surfaced during the run of the show. Many other examples surfaced later. Web ignored all that. The resulting show was great positive PR for the LAPD and the LAPD has always valued good PR very highly. Needless to say, Web got tremendous and continuing support from the LAPD brass.
Now let's translate this "Dragnet" model to the press. There is a "proper behavior" we expect of the press. It can be summarized by the slogan Fox News used for many years, "fair and balanced". Everyone should be treated fairly. And coverage should be balanced so that everyone's position gets a decent chance to be heard. But in my opinion there are areas in which the press should be unfair and unbalanced. They should be strongly biased in favor of truth and against falsehood. They should also be strongly biased in favor of honesty and against dishonesty. Put that way, most people would agree with me. But if we look at actions instead of words we see quite a different picture.
And let me be perfectly clear. There are many situations where the truth is hard to discern or takes a long time to emerge. And there are many situations where the facts are not enough. After all the facts are accounted for there is legitimate room for disagreement. In these latter situations it is even more important that everyone's position gets a chance to be heard.
Let's start with the agreed on stuff. Does the mainstream media unfairly advantage liberals and disadvantage conservatives? Do liberal positions get heard and conservative ones stifled? I am going to answer that question by examining four large stories that were reported out over a period of several decades. Each individual story played out over a relatively long period of time so there was plenty of time for any initial errors to be identified and rectified. All these stories generally found liberals on one side and conservatives on the other. So each represents a clear opportunity for liberal bias to color the behavior of the mainstream press.
I am going to start with an event that took place while Dragnet was still on the air and producing new episodes. That's the "red scare" era of the late '40s and the entirety of the '50s. That's a long time ago but I need to go even further back for that story to make sense to contemporary readers.
Communism was invented by Marx and Engels in the middle of the 1800s. Business immediately saw it as a threat and has strongly opposed it from those early days right up to the present. Little support for Communism ever surfaced in the US. But that didn't stop various factions from championed it or demonized it in spite of the fact that most people paid it little attention. That change somewhat in the early part of the 1900s. I am not going to go into the very interesting details but what was then and now called Russia was taken over by Communism and the country was renamed the USSR. The US actively opposed this but obviously failed. Then World War II came along.
The US and the USSR became allied in one of those "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" things. Nazi Germany declared War on the US making it the enemy of the US. Nazi Germany was also at war with the USSR so for the duration of the War the USSR was a "friend", as in ally, of the US. And this was by any measure the right and smart thing to do. The fighting on the "Eastern Front" between Nazi Germany and the USSR was horrific and resulted in a substantial weakening of Germany. But then the War ended.
The US and USSR initially remained nominal friends but split dramatically very quickly. (Again the story is very interesting but I am going to skip it.) But during the War period many US State Department officials as part of their official duties became apologists for Russian activities and generally said nice things about them. Let me repeat. It was critically important to keep the USSR in the War and on the side of the US. State Department support for the USSR was a small price to pay for the harm to our enemy (Nazi Germany) that resulted. And for the most part the State Department officials involved were doing what they did because it was their job and in spite of personal beliefs that were completely different than those their jobs required them to publicly champion.
The USSR engaged in a lot of bad behavior before and especially during the War. Most notably they stole the designs for the Atomic Bomb. (They also stole vast quantities of industrial data, military data, etc. and did many other bad things.) This spying operation was relatively small in that it did not involve a large number of people. Nor did Russian spying on the US ever enjoy support from a large segment of the US population. There was a small Communist party in the US but its size and effectiveness was wildly exaggerated because doing so was beneficial to several powerful groups.
The most obvious of these powerful groups was the business community. They found it useful to blame "Communist agitation" for various labor activities that were solely involved in raising the standard of living of those employed by the business community. Labor unions and their supporters did this by, for example, agitating for increases in wages and benefits. The business community felt that acceding to these demands was bad for profits and would cut into the wealth and power of business leaders.
Anyhow, at the end of the War the Democratic party was very popular. The Great Depression was finally over and we had won World War II. This left Republicans scrambling to find an angle that would allow them get back in the game. Communists were generally unpopular. The USSR was generally unpopular. The USSR had done (and was continuing to do) a lot of spying. "There are a few spies that we need to root out" wasn't going to shift the balance enough to make much of a difference. So they went with "there are spies everywhere and its the Democrat's fault" instead. The "spies everywhere" part made the problem seem broadly important. And the "Democrats fault" part could result in significant amounts of support moving from Democrats to Republicans. So that's what they went with.
When Republicans first started making noise it was right and proper for the mainstream press to cover the issue. But a little digging would have revealed the facts. There were Russian spies operating in the US. Something needed to be done. But there weren't a lot of them (although a surprising number were very highly placed - another story for another time) and they certainly weren't there because of some sinister plot orchestrated by the Democrats. So the story should have shifted from "widespread spying caused by Democratic perfidy" to one that was more along the lines of "limited Russian spying plus a Republican ploy to exaggerate and distort". It never did.
There is a saying that goes "the press is free and open to anyone with enough money to buy one". The parts of the press that drove the narrative were big operations and many of them were owned by very conservative people. William Randolph Hearst was the poster boy for this sort of thing but he was not alone. These people have no interest in pushing a liberal agenda. And the Washington DC of this period was a small place where everybody knew everybody else. It was not hard to figure out what was going on. But "what was going on" never got any coverage. Why? The story then was the same as it is now. The "controversy" Republicans stirred up was good for selling newspapers.
But wait. It gets worse. The front man for all this was Wisconsin US Senator Joseph McCarthy. You will not be surprised to learn that he was a Republican. And the tiniest bit of digging would have determined that he was a publicity hound with a drinking problem. He did none of his own research. Instead he was fed a little bit of true information by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI and someone who valued PR over results. He saw helping McCarthy as being politically advantageous so he did.
McCarthy was supplementing the small amount of accurate information he was getting from Hoover and others with all kind of wild and completely untrue charges. He famously waved a piece of paper in the well of the Senate (where he was shielded from liable and slander laws) that supposedly contained the names of hundreds of spies and traitors in the State Department. There was no such list. But people were accused who had only been doing their jobs anyway. And other people were accused almost completely at random. Thousands of people's lives were ruined by having baseless charges levied against them.
Where was the "liberal press" in all of this? Missing in action for the most part. There were a few exceptions. Edward R. Murrow, who worked for CBS at the time, was the most notable of these exceptions. There is a great movie called "Good Night and Good Luck" that covers some of the actions Murrow took to expose McCarthy for what he was. But he had to buck CBS management and proceed very carefully to do anything at all. And he was almost completely alone.
In spite of the efforts of Morrow and a few others McCarthy continued on and continued to receive generally favorable coverage from a large majority of the press. What did him in was a struggling TV network. ABC was new at the time and had a weak to non-existent daytime schedule. McCarthy held a series of hearings, supposedly to expose perfidy in the Army. He decided to allow TV cameras into the hearing room. ABC decided it didn't have anything to lose so it broadcast the hearings gavel to gavel.
The public finally saw McCarthy without the protective cover the press had been providing. And they were appalled by what they saw. McCarthy lost support, was discredited, and eventually took the whole "red scare" business down with him. But notice that the "liberal organs of the press" had little to do with his demise. Unfortunately, this will set the pattern.
The next story I want to talk about is the original "gate", Watergate. There are commonalities and differences. Richard M. Nixon is a fascinating person. And again I am going to skip vast amounts of fascinating detail and start with the fact that he won the Presidency in 1968 in a close election. He had acquired the nickname "tricky dick" along the way and there were large groups that strongly opposed him. He was aware of this and figured he was in for a close race when he ran for re-election in '72. It turns out he was wrong. He won easily and never was in serious jeopardy of losing. But he worried anyhow. And as a result he raised vast (for the time) amounts of money to fund the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP to friends, CREEP to others).
As the race finally took shape it because apparent he would win easily so it became a problem trying to find things to spend his vast war chest on. He had always gotten poor press and was fixated on leaks coming from inside the White House. So he diverted some war chest money into a "plumbers" unit. They were supposed to find and fix leaks. Someone got the not so bright idea of breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Building. (That's where the scandal acquired its name.) Anyhow, they broke in multiple times and found not much useful. But that didn't stop them from getting caught. And this "second rate burglary" kicked off the whole "Watergate" saga.
The Nixon team immediately want into "damage control" mode. (The "second rate burglary" quote featured prominently in their approach.) They also went into "coverup" mode. And the coverup almost worked. With lots of money all the arrestees were bought off. An attempt was made to make the whole thing go away quietly but Judge "Hanging John" Sirica would have none of it. The eventual trial opened some cracks. An effort to use the CIA to make things go away also failed. But the story still could have petered out at this point.
We now all know about Woodward and Bernstein but that was not the case at the time. Few if any investigative resources were deployed by the press in the early stages. Woodward and Bernstein were "no name" second stringers who essentially had nothing better to do at the time. They were dogged and eventually connected with "Deep Throat", later identified as a senior FBI official. With little additional help from the rest of the press corps they eventually uncovered enough information to cause the "Watergate Committee" to be formed in congress.
Initially it looked like even this would not break things loose. But John Dean, a senior White House official, decide to break with the White House and spill the beans. That still might not have been enough but then a White House official disclosed that Nixon had routinely taped most of what went on in the Oval Office. Lots of twists and turns later, including a trip to the Supreme Court (it ruled that Nixon had to turn all the tapes over), resulted in Nixon being forced to resign.
But it is important to remember that the press was mostly MIA until the Watergate Hearings had been under way for some time and had turned up some serious dirt. As the "liberal press" and, therefore, chomping at the bit to oppose someone as unpopular as Nixon, you would have expected them to be all over this from the very beginning. But they weren't. The press didn't like Nixon but they were also fearful of his operation. One of the Watergate revelations was the existence of an "enemies list" (that's what the Nixon people called it). The Nixon people were very good at punishing people who they thought were being too hard on him and his administration.
So in the case of the red scare the press was onboard because they were somewhat sympathetic to the players involved and saw the whole story as being good for business. In Watergate there was no love lost between the Nixon Administration but the press but, more importantly, the owners of the press were afraid of Nixon. They stayed away until it was blindingly obvious that Nixon was in serious trouble. Then they piled on. Now let me move on to the other two stories. Call them "Clinton 1" and "Clinton 2".
I have already covered both of them in my "Uranium One" post (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/12/uranium-one.html). In that post I run through the scandals of the Bill Clinton years (Clinton 1) so here let me focus on the behavior of the press during the roughly nine year period all this played out. Things got off on the wrong foot right from the start because of an expectation of the press. They thought they had set the rules of engagement during the Gary Hart scandal. A ladies man was supposed to deny all then get caught then get disgraced then the press gets to pat itself on the back.
Bill Clinton didn't follow the play book. Instead he admitted without actually admitting that he fooled around. That meant the whole "discovery followed by disgrace followed by the press doing high fives" playbook went out the window. And that made the press unhappy. And that meant the press was consistently antagonistic toward the Clinton Administration. That in turn has made both Bill and Hilary expect to be treated badly by the press. This has resulted in a self fulfilling prophecy. The Clintons do not play nice with the press. The press resents this and gives them antagonistic coverage which makes the Clintons dig in even more. Rinse and repeat forever.
The same thing played out with the 2016 election coverage (Clinton 2). The press gave fawning coverage to Bernie Sanders, who worked hard to keep in their good graces. But Bernie had never been subjected to the repeated and prolonged ire of the press that had been Hillary's lot for almost two decades by this point. Nothing Hillary could have done would have put her in their good graces so she didn't even try. Still she remained polite and civil to the press throughout. Trump didn't. A standard feature of his rallies was to accuse the press of the most outrageous behavior. But this behavior did not change the way Trump was covered.
Trump completely changed all the rules for the how the press should be handled. He has been quite successfully manipulating the press since before he published "The Art of the Deal" in '87. (See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-art-of-deal.html for my complete review of the book.) Here's what he said back then about how to deal with the press:
One thing I have learned about the press is that they're always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It's in the nature of the job and I understand that. (Page 56)
I play to people's fantasies. (Page 58)
Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom line perspective, bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, Controversy, in short, sells. (page 176)
I worried about growing opposition, but publicly my posture was to take the offensive and concede nothing to my critics. (page 133)Trump has changed nothing since then because what he was doing then continues to work today. He learned to deal with the press in the New York City market. It consists of mainstream outlets (New York Times, Wall Street Journal) and tabloid outlets (New York Post, New York Daily News). Those are all newspapers but the same applies to TV (both MSNBC and Fox News are headquartered in New York City) and other press organs. He succeeded then and succeeds now by following the tenets set out above.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was generally ignored by the press in 2016. Bernie got more coverage than she did during the primaries. And Trump got vastly more coverage than she did during the general election. Many would argue that Trump got bad press but "bad publicity is better than no publicity at all" and Hillary got no publicity at all.
If you read the New York Times every day from front to back you will generally find that everything is in there somewhere. And based on that you can go on to argue that it is "fair and balanced". But that just proves my thesis. Both sides are represented so it is not biased in favor of liberals. And unfortunately, the "liberal bias" argument goes downhill from there.
What does "everyone gets treated fairly" mean in practice? One alternative way to say that is "everyone gets treated the same". Here things fall down. Because there is a consistent pattern of the press treating different groups of people differently. This can often be justified. Different behavior, for instance, justifies different treatment. In one example much was made of the fact that Hillary used a non-government email server. So that's apparently the standard. Government email server is good and private server is bad. Yet it was recently revealed that James Comey used a private email account for government business without authorization. Trump routinely used private email accounts during the transition period between the election and the inauguration even though that is prohibited. But somehow the Clinton example is a big deal and the others are not.
Well, maybe there were problems with Clinton's email server that didn't show up in the other cases. Yet Clinton's email server was "government approved" and implemented legally mandated archiving policies. And, in spite of what you have repeatedly heard from the conservative press and elsewhere, the Clinton email server was never hacked successfully. The State Department email server that Clinton was faulted for not using has been successfully hacked. And Trump is not following government mandated archiving rules. (It is too soon to say whether Comey is.) So the standards are different. And the differences disadvantage liberals and advantage conservatives (both Trump and Comey are Republicans.)
The "liberal media" also falls far short when it comes to the biases I recommend. All politicians shade the truth. But they are supposed to be embarrassed and publicly remorseful when they are caught out in an outright untruth. Clinton is rarely caught out in outright untruths (except in the conservative press where the facts rarely support the charges). And she falls well within the bounds of normal behavior for politicians when she is legitimately caught out.
On the other hand, Trump's strategy is to "take the offensive and concede nothing to my critics". He has been using this strategy since back in the day when he was dealing with the "liberal media" in New York City. They haven't changed their behavior so it still works. And again the behavior of the "liberal" media disadvantages liberals and advantages conservatives.
Conservatives long since figured out that "working the ref" works when it comes to the media. I keep waiting for the media to catch on to the fact that they are being played but even 500 days into the Trump Administration they still seem oblivious. Another saying has it that "the definition of Insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over and expecting the result to change'". The correct adjective to characterize the mainstream media with isn't "liberal". It's "insane".
No comments:
Post a Comment